Wednesday Dinner

On a miserable and drizzly November evening nine years ago, I sat down to a bowl of pasta with my ex-husband. The streetlights had stayed on most of the dark Seattle afternoon as I sliced bread with detached precision.

It was no fluke that I chose to prepare spaghetti that evening, comforting in its ordinariness. Steaming noodles in a heavy ceramic bowl called forth countless evenings around the worn oak dining table of my childhood. My mom worked long days as a secretary in our family auto shop, and she would drag herself home to prepare a sit-down meal every night. Money was perennially scarce and meals were spiced up with whatever flair was recommended by 1970's cookbooks.

A singularly wretched divorce many years earlier had left me a solo parent with custody of two tiny children and, for a time, their father Eric was a distant figure as he struggled to stabilize himself in the wake of the separation. For several years I parented alone, until I re-married a new partner, Mark, who sat at the table with my ex-husband and I that November night, quiet and wary.

Our family adjusted to my new marriage and a new home. We all held our breath a little as Mark inched along the precipitous edge of learning how to parent. Eric resurfaced and wanted to see the children, so we decided to do our very best to support re-connection.

An unspoken but binding agreement was crafted between three cautious adults as we settled on a weekly Wednesday dinner as our family North star. The plan was to begin visitation with one meal each week and three parents present — no excuses and absolutely no rescheduling. We do not mention divorce or remarriage. We do not speak of money, or custody. We focus only on the children, and each be fully present as we eat a simple meal together.

Sometimes Eric would arrive to dinner and I would stand in the kitchen with him and our kids feeling the perverse imprint of a family that used to be, tender like phantom pain in an amputated limb. I would lie awake, worrying that Eric’s recurring presence at our table would make it harder for Mark to progress in the diligent and laborious work of step-parenting.

Stingy with my labor, I selected the easiest food possible in those early months. We ate dozens of pans of macaroni and cheese, and endless platters of spaghetti during that first year. I refused to craft meatballs from scratch — feeling that was more effort than I was willing to make. I conjured instead a bland but soothing version of that old 1970’s mainstay “Spanish rice” from my childhood.

Resentfully wheeling a cart through the grocery store, I forced myself to imagine our oldest child when she was grown, perhaps upon her wedding day, wiping a tear as she described how three parents loved her enough to take a meal together each week. In a perverse parody of this vision she would call me from her life sentence in women’s prison, asking: Mom, couldn’t you all have tried just a little harder to sit down and eat a nice meal together?

For me, each single Wednesday dinner that first winter was an ordeal like crawling bare-kneed on jagged clam-shells. After the table was cleared and the stiff, awkward adult goodbyes were uttered, I would sometimes quietly sob to myself in a steaming shower, and drag myself to bed early, while my new husband moved gently through tidying up dishes and helping our children with homework and evening bedtime. I felt skinned raw sometimes by the simple expectation that I would be kind, and take food together.

But my children were visibly lighter as they looked forward each week to Wednesdays, bursting in the door asking, “What’s for dinner!? Is Dad coming tonight? When is Mark getting home?” While eating, they would laugh and share a “good thing” and “bad thing” from their day, here pausing to chase the dog from under the dinner table and back into his bed, and there asking one of us to assist with slicing bread.

In the second year of the Wednesday dinner tradition, our son was in first grade and had prepared a school project on waterways. While reaching across the table to cut child-size bites, Eric shared memories of his family’s roots on the Mississippi River. He recalled the foods shared by his African American family, and the vivid memory of being frightened by a water snake in the mud. Mark, in turn, laughed and talked about his lifelong distaste for lobster, despite countless summers spent with his family on the Maine coast.

I began to exhale.

The loosening in my heart over the following years of Wednesday dinners translated slowly into generosity with my labor. I began to consider each weekly meal with thoughtful intention to make space for our togetherness. Effortless pasta and rice dishes gave way to meals that required more preparation. It began to seem appropriate to share carefully preserved jars of my summer garden bounty. Standing at the butcher counter one afternoon it occurred to me that I might just leave work early, and take the time to roast a beautiful chicken, rubbed with herbs.

A couple years ago I took my son to New York City to enjoy the miracle of Hamilton tickets we scored thanks to a benevolent relative. We ate Monte Cristo sandwiches in steamy diners and grabbed the best fried chicken slider of my life in a tiny café in Harlem. We clomped through the West Village on a freezing, snowy afternoon to find the place where Alexander Hamilton took his last breath, and ducked into a wonderful English treat shop for toffee.

That evening back at the hotel, we phoned Mark at home and I suddenly realized it was a Wednesday evening. Our high-school-aged daughter answered the phone and chirped, “Mom, Mark had to work late! But it’s OK because Dad stopped by and he made dinner for all three of us. I have to go Mom, Dad just drove to pick up Mark from the train and we are going to eat now. I Love you!”

The preparing and consuming of food together is a ritual which informs human intimacy in every culture on our planet. All animals eat food, but human beings are the only animals who carefully prepare and cook meals to take together.

Our lives are buoyed through the ritual of gathering for meals. In my bones I knew that sitting together for one meal each week would serve as a living validation for my children. What I did not anticipate is how the hundreds of meals I prepared would in turn heal and nourish me.

Wednesday dinners are where I learned to forgive.

Somewhere along, I realized that we were not irreparably cracked as a family — we were simply scrambled into in a different form. Over early plates of deliberately mediocre spaghetti and through the more loving and thoughtful dishes that followed, we together crafted a bold and expansive new recipe for family.