We really know how to live it up on a Friday night, I thought as I looked at our dining table, one end covered with jigsaw puzzle pieces and the other with crackers, cheese, and spreadables. Neither of us wanted to cook so we treated ourselves to Snack Supper: a bunch of little things to nibble on while working on a puzzle.
It's a relaxing way to spend a Friday evening but I realized, even as I sat there chomping on crab dip and crackers, that if my father had come home at the end of the work week to find anything other than a meat, a starch, a vegetable, and a salad on the table, there would have been yelling. Mom worked nights as an RN but she was expected to make a full hot meal every day of the week. I remember once when she was too exhausted to cook and so decided, without conferring with Dad first, that just this once we could go out to eat at a local low-cost family restaurant; we were all dressed up and ready to go when Dad walked in the door and declared the plan unacceptable, and then he yelled and stormed until Mom produced a home-cooked meal that met his expectations.
And those expectations were firm and specific: it wasn't a meal unless Dad was sitting at a table and being served a plate heaped with meat and several side dishes. Self-serve buffets were completely unacceptable. One time Dad ordered from the menu at a restaurant with a buffet and then complained about how long he had to wait for his order to arrive. "Don't they know I'm starving to death?" he asked, even though we were sitting so close to the buffet that he could have reached out and grabbed a yeast roll at any time.
Once we were on a short road trip together, me and my husband and our small children and my parents for four hours in our van, and we practiced normal road-trip behavior--passing around yogurt and granola bars at lunchtime so we wouldn't have to make an extra stop. But this was not a table at a restaurant with someone serving hot food, so Dad never stopped complaining about being starved, even though he took full advantage of the available food. It clearly wasn't about the calories; he had some deep need to experience the performative aspects of a meal and if the experience lacked a table, a server, and a plate of hot food, then he didn't feel fed.
We felt fully fed last night even though the puzzle took up more space than the food. Our meal wasn't particularly elegant or well balanced or even hot, but the experience was more than satisfying. I've spent a lot of time over the years trying to piece together the details of my father's peculiar upbringing, to understand what led him to develop such specific and limiting rules about food and so many other aspects of human behavior, and I'll never put together the full picture now that he's gone.
And I honestly don't know how my mother put up with Dad's demands for so long. Of course it was a different time with different expectations about gender roles and division of labor in the household. Today my husband and I share the cooking duties and if we don't feel like cooking, we raid the pantry and make do with what we find there, even if it doesn't look like Dad's idea of a meal. If he were here he would look at our table with its unfinished puzzle and scattered snacks and let us know very clearly what's wrong with this picture, but to us, it looks just right.
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