family dinner – Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

Baby Mary sat in her stroller in the backyard

Watching her siblings play.

Watching the neighbour kids play, too.

I kept peeking out from the kitchen to make sure she was all right,

Smiling at how happy she was just to sit and watch.

The sun was shining and birds were singing.

Then, as if in an instant,

I’m juggling my now-fussy baby and trying to finish dinner on the stove.

The kids are inside now,

Fighting and whining and everywhere.

Ed’s caught in a transit delay.

Everybody’s hungry and I can’t keep up with the laundry or the dishes or the gardening or the cleaning.

There are bills to pay and papers to fill out and calenders to keep up and school bags to empty and fill.

Groceries to buy and breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, omg, the never-ending snacks to make.

And work is slow this week, this month, and I can’t afford the babysitter, but how do I get more work without a sitter?

And breathe.

(Or cry in the bathroom. Just a little bit.)

And everybody sit and eat your damned dinner or you won’t get any chocolate.

And breathe.

It’s just between 5 and 7pm.

Again.

When Colum was just a couple months old, we were at my in-laws’ enjoying a big meal around a couple tables in the backyard. I think Colum was asleep in his stroller. When he woke up I told Ed that I was going to bring him inside to change and feed him and asked him to please, please make sure my plate wasn’t cleared because I wasn’t finished eating yet. Do you see where this is going?

I returned outside to find Ed kibitzing with his siblings in the driveway and all the plates cleared from the table. I was livid. I was probably too livid and Ed’s aunt felt very badly about clearing the table. Of course it wasn’t her fault. Of course I wasn’t upset with her. I was upset with the person, the co-parent of my breastfed infant, who’s primary parenting duty (or so it seemed to me at the time) was simply to make sure my fucking plate wasn’t cleared from the table.

There really was hardly anything left on my plate, people tried to reassure me. I knew there was hardly anything left on my plate — that’s why I was afraid it might get cleared away. That’s why I specifically asked someone to make sure it didn’t get cleared away. Because it would not be obvious to an outside observer how important it was for me to eat those last few bites of the only proper sit-down meal I’d had in weeks.

Fast forward about five years and I am still being interrupted at meal times. Spilled drinks and refills of milk and requests for specific types of cutlery and trips to the bathroom to wipe various people’s bums and, hey, let’s spill another glass of milk! I don’t bother getting annoyed by all of that. I’d be miserable if I let it get to me. I expect to have to do my best impression of a human yo-yo getting up and down from the dinner table every night. (I don’t even bother trying to sit down for breakfast and lunch.) But it does mean that it takes me a while to get through a meal.

So when twice this past week well-meaning people have cleared my plate assuming I was finished, I couldn’t blame them. It looked like I was mostly done, after all. There were probably only a few bites left. Of course, if anyone really paid attention they’d see that I was still mid-bite when I was called from the table yet again to tend to some pressing matter or other. There wasn’t much left, yes, but I still wanted to eat it all.

Is it too much to ask, not that I eat a meal uninterrupted, but that I get a chance to finish it at all? It probably is. And come the end of September when baby number three arrives on the scene, I probably shouldn’t even bother trying.