The other night at the dinner table, my 6-year-old daughter, Mariah, looked up at me and asked, "How does the baby get out of the mother's tummy?" So I told her.
"That's disgusting!" she shrieked.
"I told you so," my 8-year-old son, R. J., said smugly. "It won't happen to me."
Psychologists and sociologists like to wax on about the importance of the evening meal as a means of bringing the family together. Well, all five in our family are definitely present at the evening table--two parents and three children--and let me tell you, it's a doozie. Forget the fact that we all arrive home simultaneously, famished. Forget the fact that all three of my children want different kinds of pasta sauce. Dinner, even when I am well-prepared, is a challenge.
R.J. eats dinner with one quarter of one buttock resting on his chair and his feet poised, starting block-style, for a swift exit. He crams food in with the heel of his hand. "You look like a foundling," I say to him. "Did I ever deprive you of food?"
He looks at me blankly, while forking up (yes, on good days he uses a fork) twelve pieces of ziti, which he crams into his mouth like so many little Martian legs. One or two pop out. "Moo booger," he demands, meaning, I think, "more burger." He licks the finger he has swiped across the pool of ketchup on his plate. "You will never date," I tell him. "Good," he says.
Mariah, on the other hand, sits at the other end of the table asking a series of questions. Each of these requires tablemate participation in the form of raising one hand for a vote. "How many people like basketball best? Raise your hand! How many people like green sauce? Raise your hand!" She is so chatty and so informative that she, too, can barely stay seated; she jumps up often to demonstrate, say, a pas de deux, or a Cheryl Swoops move to the basket.
Before she knows it, dinner is over--crumbs everywhere, crumpled napkins, an overturned milk glass. "I am so sad," she says, surveying the damage. "No one ever eats with me." But when I do sit down with her, she is maddeningly slow. She picks out every little raisin dot or parsley fleck, every offensive shred or blemish, before actually consuming anything. I silently pray the phone will ring and one of those irksome credit-card telemarketers will save me.
My other daughter, Sara, who is 3 years old, usually arrives with a menagerie of stuffed animals or, even worse, with her invisible friend, Sally, who is petty and demanding. Sara only eats noodles, absolutely plain, and the occasional pear or apple slice. I honestly think it was 1995 when meat last passed her lips. Sara is perfectly delightful on most noodle nights, but if it happens to be a rice night or a potato night, things can get ugly. Sometimes Sara harangues me with invisible Sally's little complaints. "Sally said you were late today. Sally thinks there might be some butter on her noodles. Sally doesn't like this place mat," and so on. I tried to lock Sally out one night, but she slipped back in through the cat door.
And then of course we have the father of all troubles, Phil. Phil is the worst kind of husband when it comes to dinner. He claims to be easy to please, but the truth is, there are all sorts of inviolable rules: no vegetables, no leftovers, no Chinese. I really and truly ignore him, for the most part, except when he gets up during the meal to stand at the counter and eat dessert. This move drives me nuts. It's enough to make me want to swing from the chandelier and throw leftover Chinese vegetables at him.
I am thinking of inviting the psychologists and sociologists over to my house some night for dinner. I would like to confront them with the very palpable evidence of family togetherness. Yes, their theories may be right, but the reality of an interacting, communicating and vital family is exhausting.
Maybe we could get them to explain to Mariah why it is that women have the strength to deliver babies while men can't even stomach leftovers.
Maurine Shores Halperin, '84, lives in San Francisco.
