Set the Table

Our family ins’t like any other family. Probably just like every other family out there we don’t fit into a poster book of what a family is supposed to look like.

Coming back to Canada I had this idea of what I thought a family is supposed to be like from the movies. Everyone has dinner together every night. We go to the beach on the weekends and spend time together. Cam and I are used to having dinner together in San Francisco. It was a time we came together to recap on our days, vent and talk about whatever’s on our minds.

I thought that it would be the same now that we lived with my mom. For two years now we’ve struggled as a family to have any meaningful conversation over dinner.

My mom doesn’t speak English very well and Cam well he doesn’t speak Chinese. So, during dinner all I do is translate, try to talk about things that we can all talk about and eat as fast as possible. It wasn’t exactly my idea of a time to decompress. Usually I would leave dinner feeling drained, not really full and just waiting for it to be over.

We had a family talk the other day and learned that my mother’s been eating mostly alone the past seven years while I was away. She was also at work and having to eat quickly. This idea of sitting down, talking and discussing how something tastes is so foreign to her. She doesn’t know how to talk and eat at the same time. Flustered my mother would repeat, “why do we have to talk? Why can’t we just eat?” I too, was eating a lot alone in San Francisco but never really had this challenge. I think she’s been doing it for far longer than I have.

So recently we decided to just do something different. Cam and I would go and make dinner first and eat, and then my mother would go and make dinner and eat. It wouldn’t exactly be how a picture book looks like, but it is what makes us all feel the most comfortable, safe and connected. Connected that we are giving each other what we need right now. Space and time to eat comfortably in the way that makes us feel the most comfortable.