Sunday dinner with the family is a relatively newly revived tradition in our family. When we were kids, and my grandparents (“Nanny” and “Max”) were still alive, we would eat supper at their place every Sunday night. Come to think of it, I think my sister and I slept over there every Saturday night and my parents would come at supper on Sunday. Hmmmm….I like that idea. Family traditions are good. As the years went by and my grandparents aged and eventually passed away, the Sunday dinner tradition died with them.
When my son, Mark, was born, I was working fulltime, and had every intention of returning to work, at least part time. Plans change, though, and the thought of going back to work when he was six months old just wasn’t going to work for us. We decided that as long as we could pay the mortgage, the bills, and put food on the table, the rest of it really didn’t matter. I spent six years home with Mark, and I wouldn’t change that time for anything.
We’ve always lived relatively near to where my parents live, first about 40 minutes away, and now about 25 minutes away. Because of the freedom I had when Mark was little and the close proximity of my parents, Mark and I spent a lot of time at my parent’s place over those six years. Bill worked away a lot and I needed to get out of the house.
I had a very, very close relationship with Nanny and Max while I was growing up. Of course, at the time, a child takes that type of relationship for granted. It was just “normal” to be with them all the time and to spend summers at the lake with them. As I grew older and began to realise everyone didn’t have this opportunity, I cherished the memories in a different way. I’m lucky to have had that bond with them and am equally lucky that Mark is experiencing the same type of relationship with my parents. I appreciate that my sister lives two provinces away with her boys, thereby giving Mark the monopoly on the grandparent time.
When Mark started school, and I got over the exciting feelings of “yay! I’m home alone!!”, I started wondering what I was going to do with my time. Fate intervened and I somehow ended up back at the same office I left when I had Mark: same office, same job, same desk. The only thing that had changed was the size of the office and the age of the staff—not sure when they started hiring such young people!!
One of the casualties of my returning to work was the time we would spend with my parents. I think it must have been around this time that I was reminiscing to my mom about Sunday dinner at Nanny and Max’s. She confided in me that she, too, missed this tradition, but she didn’t want to put pressure on us. Apparently, if she ever had to cancel Sunday dinner at her mother’s, she would feel a lot of guilt and remorse about it, and didn’t want us to feel there was any obligation. We agreed then and there that we would promise to tell each other if either side needed to cancel, for any reason, and there would never be bad feelings about it.
This was the resurrection of the Sunday dinner tradition for our family. Since then, it has morphed into a mixed bag of people at my parent’s place on any given Sunday. Bill, Mark and I are pretty regular attendees, but we’ve picked up a few “spares” over the years and have some combination of them most weeks. They happen to be four, single women, who each add something very different and interesting each week they come.
Over the last few months I’ve missed quite a few Sunday dinners, which apparently lead to some discussion about what I was actually doing with my time. We used to tease my dad that since he was never home, he must have another family somewhere. If he missed a family event, we’d say, “oh, it must have been someone’s birthday in his other family.” I remember one time when he bought a new PDA of some sort, and it already had names and birthdays in it when he turned it on. Someone must have used and returned it without wiping out the information on it, but this fuelled the fire for our “other family” theory. The tables have now turned, as they so often do, and my family is started to suspect I have another family out there as well. Who knows? Maybe I’m taking the time to get to know my dad’s other kids.
Referring to my dad as, well, “my dad”, is a strange thing for me. I have never, ever called him Dad. Or Daddy. Or Pop, Pa, or Father, for that matter. He’s just always been “Jim”. People often assume that he must not be my “real dad” since I call him Jim, but that’s just the way it’s always been in our house. You may have noticed I referred to my grandfather as “Max” at the beginning of my blog. He was never Grandpa, Grandfather, or Papa. Just Max. I’m assuming one of my older cousins started that one. Must have seemed logical to my sister that if you called him Max, you’d call the other Jim, and it just stuck.
I look forward every week to our Sunday night dinners. The conversation is never dull and we always share a lot of laughs. Family traditions are important to me and I’m glad we started this one again. I’m also glad that we expanded our definition of family to include such great friends. These are the memories I’ll hold close, as I get older, as these Sunday family dinners are made of the things that really matter in life.
When my son, Mark, was born, I was working fulltime, and had every intention of returning to work, at least part time. Plans change, though, and the thought of going back to work when he was six months old just wasn’t going to work for us. We decided that as long as we could pay the mortgage, the bills, and put food on the table, the rest of it really didn’t matter. I spent six years home with Mark, and I wouldn’t change that time for anything.
We’ve always lived relatively near to where my parents live, first about 40 minutes away, and now about 25 minutes away. Because of the freedom I had when Mark was little and the close proximity of my parents, Mark and I spent a lot of time at my parent’s place over those six years. Bill worked away a lot and I needed to get out of the house.
I had a very, very close relationship with Nanny and Max while I was growing up. Of course, at the time, a child takes that type of relationship for granted. It was just “normal” to be with them all the time and to spend summers at the lake with them. As I grew older and began to realise everyone didn’t have this opportunity, I cherished the memories in a different way. I’m lucky to have had that bond with them and am equally lucky that Mark is experiencing the same type of relationship with my parents. I appreciate that my sister lives two provinces away with her boys, thereby giving Mark the monopoly on the grandparent time.
When Mark started school, and I got over the exciting feelings of “yay! I’m home alone!!”, I started wondering what I was going to do with my time. Fate intervened and I somehow ended up back at the same office I left when I had Mark: same office, same job, same desk. The only thing that had changed was the size of the office and the age of the staff—not sure when they started hiring such young people!!
One of the casualties of my returning to work was the time we would spend with my parents. I think it must have been around this time that I was reminiscing to my mom about Sunday dinner at Nanny and Max’s. She confided in me that she, too, missed this tradition, but she didn’t want to put pressure on us. Apparently, if she ever had to cancel Sunday dinner at her mother’s, she would feel a lot of guilt and remorse about it, and didn’t want us to feel there was any obligation. We agreed then and there that we would promise to tell each other if either side needed to cancel, for any reason, and there would never be bad feelings about it.
This was the resurrection of the Sunday dinner tradition for our family. Since then, it has morphed into a mixed bag of people at my parent’s place on any given Sunday. Bill, Mark and I are pretty regular attendees, but we’ve picked up a few “spares” over the years and have some combination of them most weeks. They happen to be four, single women, who each add something very different and interesting each week they come.
Over the last few months I’ve missed quite a few Sunday dinners, which apparently lead to some discussion about what I was actually doing with my time. We used to tease my dad that since he was never home, he must have another family somewhere. If he missed a family event, we’d say, “oh, it must have been someone’s birthday in his other family.” I remember one time when he bought a new PDA of some sort, and it already had names and birthdays in it when he turned it on. Someone must have used and returned it without wiping out the information on it, but this fuelled the fire for our “other family” theory. The tables have now turned, as they so often do, and my family is started to suspect I have another family out there as well. Who knows? Maybe I’m taking the time to get to know my dad’s other kids.
Referring to my dad as, well, “my dad”, is a strange thing for me. I have never, ever called him Dad. Or Daddy. Or Pop, Pa, or Father, for that matter. He’s just always been “Jim”. People often assume that he must not be my “real dad” since I call him Jim, but that’s just the way it’s always been in our house. You may have noticed I referred to my grandfather as “Max” at the beginning of my blog. He was never Grandpa, Grandfather, or Papa. Just Max. I’m assuming one of my older cousins started that one. Must have seemed logical to my sister that if you called him Max, you’d call the other Jim, and it just stuck.
I look forward every week to our Sunday night dinners. The conversation is never dull and we always share a lot of laughs. Family traditions are important to me and I’m glad we started this one again. I’m also glad that we expanded our definition of family to include such great friends. These are the memories I’ll hold close, as I get older, as these Sunday family dinners are made of the things that really matter in life.
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