Sunday is by far my favorite day of the week for many reasons: I don’t have to go to work, I get to go to Mass and we have family dinner. I come from a big family (#CatholicProbs) with lots of nieces and nephews, which means there are a lot conflicting schedules. The one night I’m free, my nephew has a soccer game or my dad has a meeting, and the list goes on and on. But, in my family, Sunday nights are reserved for family dinner. It’s the one day of the week when we all set aside time from our often hectic lives and spend time together as a family.
I may love family dinners now, but as a kid, family dinner was worse than going to the dentist. It meant I couldn’t make plans with my friends, leave the house, or hide in my room with a good book. I’ve always loved my family, but I felt like I saw them all the time, so why should I make even more time for them? It didn’t add up, until much later when my siblings began to move out and technology moved in.
Spending time with family, at least for me, is very different than spending time with friends. For starters, you can definitely be weirder with your family (and I have the photographic evidence to prove it). I’ve also found I’m more intentional with my friends than I am with my family. I see my family all the time, but I can go weeks without seeing some friends, so when I do see them, I feel like I need to make it count. I ask them questions about what’s going on and find out how they’re really doing; in short, I make an effort. But sometimes with family, I fall into the trap of breezily asking one of my siblings how they’re doing and leave it at that. I live with them, so how much could really be going in their lives that I don’t know about?
We live side by side with our family, yet have no idea what’s going on in their lives. Yes, I know my sister went to work this week, but I don’t know how she’s handling her recent break up. It’s not that she doesn’t want to tell me; it’s that I don’t put down my phone long enough to truly encounter her. There’s been a million and one articles about technology’s impact on our relationships, but they all say the same thing: technology isn’t, bad but the way we use it is. Cell phones connect us to people across the world but distance us from the person sitting right next to us, like our families.
That’s why family dinner is so important. Family dinner is more than just a meal; it’s a time to talk about our happies and crappies with people we love most. It’s a time to reminisce about that one time your sister pooped in the garage when she was five (you know who you are) or talk about that one time your brothers played dress up with your grandma's clothes. Family dinner is a time to take a break from the hustle and bustle of life and enjoy those weirdos that share your DNA. Mother Teresa put it a little more eloquently:
“Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world."
If things aren’t going well at home, then that’s likely to spill over into other areas of your life. So take the time to sort out the messy stuff, celebrate the exciting stuff and enjoy the everyday stuff with the people you most care for. Besides, food makes everything better.
