The Fortress of Family Dinners

When Greg and I were newly married, we really wanted to travel, but travelling was just not a possibility when two adults and a tiny but expensive baby split Greg's two-tears-out-of-college salary three ways. Oh, did I mention that I was also in graduate school? Well, needless to say, travelling was put on the back-burner for a while while we were learning to live family life on a tight budget. Instead of traveling, I decided to take us on a world tour of foods via my new, wedding-present cookbooks. Much to Greg's dismay, I also made up "recipes" when the urge to be creative struck.

Our food journey took Greg and I through the cuisine of the USA, Mexico, Italy, and Asia with many successes, and many different types of failures. Did you know that if you don't take your Cuisinart blender completely apart to clean it after making homemade guacamole, it will stink like rotten avocados for weeks? Did you know that 8 cloves of garlic in Thai Chicken Sate will keep vampires AND friends at a distance? Did you know you can burn green beans and peas? Did you know that chicken cooked in soy sauce and mango puree (one of my invented recipes) tastes worse than anything else I have ever tasted? All in all, the food tour was a great experience for me in learning to cook good food at a time when we didn't have extra money for going out to eat. Over time, the sampling of interesting homemade foods evolved into the habit of eating together as a family, although many nights were pretty crazy and loud and wordless in the early days of our family life, when Jordan and Meryl were small, screamy infants.

We have done family dinners most nights for the past 9 years, and by now, I am a fantastic home "chef," even if I do say so myself. Our dinners were a wonderful part of our day when we lived in Austin, but I think with all the changes we have experienced in moving to Australia, our family dinners are more important here than they ever were in Texas. There is a comfort to coming home and regaining your balance by repeating the same routine every evening. There is great hope in share your dreams with those who will cheer you on. There is a peace in processing the day out loud before an audience that loves you unconditionally and wants the best for you.

Our conversations vary from night to night, but some themes run continuously through our time together at this stage of life. Jordan talks about "beating the boys" in anything that can be made into a competition. Last month, we had to suppress laughter after hearing that she had defended her friends by literally whacking the boys with her lunchbox. Meryl is always planning her next birthday party, what she and her friends will do and wear, and who can be invited. The big girls dream out loud about true love and marriage and wedding dresses (which is surreal and unbelievable because they are nearly 6 and 7 and a half). Micah Jade, who is two, contributes most of the comedy, since she has a little trouble keeping up with the conversation. In the middle of serious conversation, she is very likely to bring up dolphins and dugongs (the Aussie version of the manatee). She also gives reports on the number of trucks she has seen in a day. (These reports are particularly colorful because she substitutes "f" for the "tr" sound.) We hear about Daddy's projects and his "work friends," and his bike rides, basketball games and bike wrecks. I tell them about all the new and interesting people I am meeting and what animals we saw in the bike way. We eat good home-cooked meals and bravely try new recipes together. I look forward to sharing the comfort of companionship every evening.

The way that my life turns never ceases to surprise me. Until last year, I had always thought that Greg and I had missed our chance to travel and find new adventures abroad when we had Jordan a year and a month after we were married. I never dreamed that the creativity developed in and guided by architecture school could be best spent on cooking family meals and finding ways to draw each member of the family into meaningful conversation. I never thought that our dinners as a family would be transported across the Pacific, worlds away from where it started. When I was 23 and burning broccoli in the early stages of my cooking experiments, I never imagined that those very experiments would evolve into treasured time together each night.

Now, in a place where so many things are still foreign to us, and where we sometimes feel alien or lonely, every evening, Greg, Jordan, Meryl, MJ and I return to the same table, to the same comfort of life together. We may talk about birthdays and dugongs and far-off weddings, but what we are building is far larger than than those things. Every night we build more of the strong fortress of our own family, so that when hard times come to each of us, as they will, we will have a place of strong refuge in being together.