Hi, loves. 🌿

An ode to TV dinners

The dinners of my youth were eaten, every night, without fail, on Laura Ashley placemats with matching cloth napkins; there was wine for my parents and tall glasses of milk or water for me and my older sister. Salad was dressed and served after the main course, and often followed by dessert in the form of cookies my mother had baked or a bowl of seasonal fruit.

The phone was off limits. If someone called between, say, 6pm and 7pm — which my parents were generally appalled by because wasn’t everyone else also eating? — we were not allowed to skip out on dinner and gossip. Instead, we were instructed to say, “We are eating dinner, can so-and-so call you back?” The only exception was when my father, a neurologist, was on call at the hospital. Then he’d pull the long phone cord into the kitchen and consult for as many minutes as the poor intern needed, even if dinner got cold. When we were done eating, we always asked, “May I please be excused?” I did not know one could leave the table without uttering these words.

This all sounds terribly formal but it wasn’t, I swear. It was just a regular weeknight dinner. Our parents were not big on rules or discipline (my husband was far more tortured at dinner, with instructions about elbows on the table and number of bites taken before swallowing), but dinner at our house was sacred and untouchable. My mother had learned to cook when my parents and sister lived briefly in Paris and the food reflected the skills she’d picked up, with many meals culled from Julia Child or The Joy of Cooking or Marcella Hazan. Friends often begged for invitations for the food alone, and were always welcome.

We were not a sports-watching family, so the one exception to this rule was when the Oscars were on in the dead of winter. My mother, who’d grown up in Hollywood and ended up in frigid Montreal, would cook chili or lasagna and we’d decamp to the living room for hours on end, eating and watching from the first moments of the red carpet to the bitter end.

Family dinners were more like this

I, too, learned to cook when living abroad in Europe with my husband and toddler, and we also ate with cloth napkins and placemats and wine. We did this for years and years and I was sure we always would, but this winter, something shifted.

We have a preteen now and while every single book will tell you that Family Dinner is Sacred and Important and The Answer to Every Problem, it has, of late, started to feel tense and difficult. Perhaps curt is the right word? I have to admit that I often dread it. We can’t discuss the horrors of the world without upsetting or terrifying her. And like most teens, she is far from eager to answer the simplest questions about school or dance class or friends, which lead me and my husband to snap at each other, and —predictably! — things devolve from there. Often they end with someone storming off. And it’s not always a kid.

As the family cook, I often clear my plate filled with anger that I devoted any time at all to the beautiful meals I am putting together for us. I didn’t have to make this! I want to scream. Do you know not everyone eats like this every night!?

Family Dinner, in other words, is not working.

I’m not sure how it happened, but some night over the Christmas break, even before the city we live in was ravaged by fires and school was evacuated and the new president was sworn in and things started to feel scarily unhinged, our daughter asked, “Can we eat in front of the TV?” and my husband shrugged and said, “sure.”

Months of Gilmore Girls watching led us to the WB lot where we saw Lorelei’s house!

Look, it’s not as though we’ve never done it before or I had some major moral objection to it. When my husband is away, I’ve often adopted my sister’s approach when her husband, the exceptional family cook, is out of town. She and her teenage daughter do what they’ve dubbed, “The Full Trashbag”: they eat takeout junk food in front of a reality TV show, and love every second of it. My daughter and I have done this many times and, I will admit, it is the absolute best. (The husbands do not love this, hence their exclusion.)

But a TV Dinner with the whole family? Over a home cooked meal? And more than once in a while? That felt…sacrilegious, like a rebuke of all my parents had taught me. Even family dinner wasn’t sacred, walled off from all other stimuli?

I did not have the energy to argue that night, though, or any of the many, many nights that followed. “Should we eat in front of Gilmore Girls?” someone will ask, and the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”

So, no. We don’t talk. Or, I try not to, though of course I do, and get repeatedly shh’d for it. But it still, amazingly, feels like family time, a new kind of family time, one that is low stress and low stakes. Perhaps it’s not the kind that involves debriefing our days or filling our kid in on this or that insane executive order, but we are still together and enjoying our meal.

It also has the bonus surprise of actually giving us things to talk about: we spent a recent dinner out debating whether we thought Rory and Dean would stay together and whether Jess is really a bad guy or just misunderstood. The conversation went on and on without a hitch, and it was a total delight to hear our daughter analyze these characters we’ve gotten to know together.

It makes me think of something the poet, Donald Hall, said about every marriage needing a third thing: a child, poetry, nature. Something else to turn your attention to together.

Perhaps families need this, too. It can be something more demanding: hiking, puzzles, political debate. But sometimes it can be something soothing, easy. Something everyone is guaranteed to enjoy. And anyone with a family knows: this is the biggest, more elusive win of all, and worth every single bite.

Sending love,

Abs xox