Bridging the Close-Quarters Gap

In our house, we do everything as a family.

Or, at least, we try to.

You know, sometimes.

Most of the time?

Often enough, but if I’m being really honest, it’s something we should probably work on.

There’s always something getting in the way. My husband and I work odd hours, with me on a split schedule and him working every afternoon to late evening. My daughter, on the other hand, gets up at 6AM, well before either of us, and is usually ready for dinner by 6PM. As the person who typically cooks dinner in this house, I can say with absolute certainty that having a meal prepared by 6PM every night is an admirable yet often unobtainable goal. Add to that the sad reality of schedules, which require us adults to wait until 8 or 9 for dinner, and you’ve got one lonely teenager sitting in the dining room all by herself most nights.

However, I’ve come to realize that this situation is quite similar to the way I was raised, and I don’t exactly feel rosy about it. I, like many of my fellow 80’s peers, was a latchkey kid. My mother would work during school hours, which often meant I had to fend for myself in the afternoon. She also often had work in the evening, especially after she began running an independent bookshop, which led to many nights either eating alone or walking into town to bring her some takeout. My father, on the other hand, was almost always absent; he lived with us, but he worked so much that seeing him home between the hours of 7AM and midnight on a weekday was rarer than spotting Bigfoot in San Fernando Valley. I have very few memories of the whole family eating together, or even of us all just being in the same building at the same time.

I’m sure my father is laughing at me from the Other Side.

He always said this would happen.

I refuse to allow it, though.

With lockdown, I assumed the pattern would naturally even itself out for us. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case; if anything, our family time has become even more sporadic. We were supposed to have in-home movie nights every Friday, but in the last ten months we’ve probably only watched twelve or so films. We intended to start taking walks with my daughter in the evenings, but with the unbearable heat we endured over the summer now turned to bone-chilling winds of winter, that hasn’t really materialized. And I promised myself that I would be more proactive about my “necessary work” vs. “side hustle” time, but there always seems to be something that interrupts me and puts me behind schedule, like when I had to do the plumbing last Saturday. Or when I was sick for three days a week ago.

Or...

But. But. But.

This is the sound of someone who isn’t trying.

Towards the end of 2020, my husband and I sat down and outlined the things we’d like to see happen in the coming years. Some of our suggestions were obvious, such as finishing key home renovation projects so we can get started on new ones. (Our house was built in 1929, so this is genuinely a “must do” entry on our list.) We also debated the state of our garden, which is lovely and very dear to us, but has been suffering from the wildly changing weather patterns as of late. But at the heart of our conversation, we began talking about my daughter, drawing up a list of all the ways we have inadvertently affected her wellbeing with our work hours and personal tasks and, ultimately, our inability to stick to a plan. An unforgiving eye was turned towards the areas where we’ve been falling short of the “awesome parent” goal. This led to some serious (and not so serious) brainstorming over how we could make life more consistent and supportive for her.

Now, I should probably mention that she’s actually doing quite fine, all things considered. This past year has been difficult for everyone, as we all know, but our kids suffer in very different ways. My daughter has excelled in distance learning and has even made some strong acquaintances over the computer screen, which is a major accomplishment for someone who has just started high school under these socially-distanced conditions. She has become a voracious reader and has taken up, albeit sporadically, some new hobbies, and on the whole it’s safe to say that she’s happy.

She misses human interaction, though.

It should come from us.

And it should be a long-term investment.

Number one on this list is making a more concerted effort to dine with her. Since Sunday is our most easygoing day, we’ve committed to making sure every single Sunday includes a family dinner. Saturday and Friday are both equal in terms of availability, so each Monday we will be committing our presence at the dinner table to one or the other day, if not both. I will make sure that each dinner on the menu has sous chef possibilities for my daughter, so even if I absolutely must hurry back to work, I can at least spend an hour cooking with her each night. Monday through Thursday are more difficult for my husband, as he often has students between five and seven o’clock. However, he’s agreed not to fill any breaks with personal time. Instead, he’ll come down for dinner, or at least help with the cooking.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

It isn’t enough for us to just sit down and eat together, though. We’ve both worked with children and teens, my husband having done so on a near-daily basis for the past couple decades, and we both have a fairly decent idea of what works to build rapport with these kids. They need conversations, especially open dialogues held as equals. And they need both consistency and respect -- they need to know that you’re not just another dumb adult who doesn’t really have enough time for them.

Why, then, weren’t we giving this to my daughter? And, perhaps of more immediate importance, what could we do to fix this? Just asking about mundane happenings all the time wasn’t going to suffice. Giving lectures on how she could do better at this or that task wouldn’t do any good, either. We needed a way to have long conversations with her, ones that couldn’t easily be cut short. After a few hours of ruminating, we finally figured it out: We could talk about facts. That might not sound interesting to most kids, but my daughter is somewhat unusual in that she really, really likes school. Not only that -- she genuinely enjoys learning, be it hands-on or straight out of a book. Having a facts-based gabfest would be an easy way for us to both satisfy her desire to acquire new bits of information and help strengthen our family bond.

Have to make a game of it, though.

Just talking is boring and confusing.

Last year, my husband and I came to the startling conclusion that my daughter’s knowledge is shockingly barren when it comes to certain topics. She could talk to you all day about a great number of scientific matters, but the part of her brain that should know the names and faces of famous historical figures is instead full of cobwebs. Facts concerning famous events and places, from WWI to the agricultural revolution to the pyramids of Egypt, are at best a jumble for her. The things she does remember, for one reason or another, generally have to be coaxed out of her with hints. And while we have no intention of turning her into a Jeopardy-ready history buff, we do have some strong concerns over how little she knows about the past.

During the summer of 2020, we made a list of some of the things we believed everyone should know. Her summer assignment was to take that list, read about everything on it, and write little one-page “reports” about what she had learned. Had we been performing more like awesome parents, this probably would have worked.

We didn’t.

It didn’t.

So what’s the solution?

Our answer was ridiculously simple, but it seems to be working. In an effort to make it entertaining for everyone involved, the three of us have begun taking turns testing each other’s knowledge. Where once there lived only an occasional comment between bites of food, a spirited question-and-answer session now thrives. There are no winners, no prizes, nothing but the next set of questions and the satisfaction of being able to answer correctly. Or, failing that, a bit of hinting or a discussion about what the correct answer should have been.

“Do you know who Ashurbanipal was?”

“Um...”

“Okay, I’m going to give you three names.

Ashurbanipal,

Sargon,

and Hammurabi.

What do they have in common?”

“Is this an Ancient Mesopotamia thing?"

“It is.

Now here’s three items for you to match to the names.

First recorded ruler of an empire,

first organized library,

and a very influential system of law.”

“Ashurbanipal was the library!

...But it was a cuneiform tablet library, not books.

What were the other two?”

And so on, and so forth.

So far, it has been one of the best things about 2021. We’re spending more time together, but it’s quality time that we all enjoy instead of time spent wishing we could each get back to our own individual projects. It’s also well within our ability to manage and commit to, which in turn makes it easier to cement into habit. If we’re lucky, all three of us will come out of 2021 a little bit smarter, too.

As I said, in our house, we do everything as a family.

Or, at least, we try to.