280. Family Dinner

A listener sent in a voice memo talking about how she was introduced to the idea of family dinner when she was a teen (something that wasn’t present in her own family growing up) and how she’s carried that tradition into her own family as an adult. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Nora: I’m Nora  McInerny, and this is It’s Going To Be Okay.

This is a daily podcast, and it’s also a group project. Every day, we try to put a little bit of okay in your day. We want you to start or end your day with the opposite of a doom scroll, so we bring you one okay thing  every day.  Here we go.  

Caller: Hello it’s going to be okay team.  When I was in seventh grade, I met my best friend when starring in a musical called Down in the Dumps, or something similar to that. We quickly started spending time together, playing video games, eating cookie dough and rotisserie chicken as our after school snack, making up songs, and practicing our Spanish.

But the reason I’m sharing this is because it was the first friend I had that regularly invited me to have dinner with her family. I grew up in a family of chaos. We never sat down for a meal together, but more so grazed in the kitchen or ate in shifts.  There are seven kids, four chairs, and you can imagine how that worked out. 

It was so new to me to experience time at the table together with her family.  Their family tradition is to share at the beginning of the meal their high, the highlight, low, the hardest or saddest part and surprise, something expected of the day. The rules were. That none of those could be related to the meal, as it was assumed that the family dinner would be an easy answer. 

At the time I found this fascinating and scary to share, but eventually it was just another meal with the Menards. Of course, eventually college happened, those meals were no longer in my life, and the tradition fell to the wayside.  Fast forward to adult life. I’ve intermittently heard of others having various versions of this tradition.

It never really came back into my life until I had children.  Instagram is teaching me how to raise them to be emotionally aware and name feelings.  One of the suggestions was to talk at bedtime about something that made the child happy that day and something that made them sad.  We brought this idea to the dinner table and now start dinner asking, what made you happy today?

Each of us answer and it brings some insight to one another’s day.  It’s taken on a whole new level of joy now that my second child is talking more. At every meal, he asks to every person at the table what made them happy today.  We’re able to reflect on the few minutes we’ve been awake at breakfast and on a whole day at dinner.

This tradition has trickled into the lives of those around us. My aunt and uncle are currently cruising the world, and they’re starting each dinner with the same question, bringing, per their report, a new intentionality to their trip.  When he is asked, his answer is nearly always, you mama, or ya ya. what he calls his big brother, or you, daddy.

He loves how these answers make us smile and exclaim joy.  He is what makes us feel that it’s going to be okay. So I ask everyone to ask themselves and those around them, what made you happy today?