Family Daze

Another tradition bites the dust

By Debbie Farmer

Lately I've been wondering what happened to all the meaningful family traditions I had planned on passing on to my children. After all, I am a good parent.

My 8-year-old daughter is enrolled in Girl Scouts and ballet lessons and my 5-year-old son belongs to several sports teams. But sometimes it seems as though our only family activity is waving to each other as we pass in the hallway.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think extracurricular actives are wonderful for nurturing confidence and creating self-esteem. But since the birth of my children, I have yearned to recapture the traditions I had when I was a child. I imagined leisurely family dinners together, camping vacations every June, and cutting down our own Christmas tree.

When I tried pointing this out to my family, they didn't seem to understand.

"What's a tradition?" asked my daughter.

"Well," I paused. "It's something a family does together."

She thought about this for a moment.

"Like when we hold the tools for daddy when he fixes the garage door?"

I should have seen this coming. But it's not as if I haven't tried. I used to reserve time between soccer practice and evening swim meets to have a nice family dinner as all of the parenting experts recommend. However, instead of promoting mutual interaction, our dinner conversations usually went something like this:

"How come babies don't have hair?"

"What if a big spaceship landed in the backyard and took us to Mars?"

"What if cats could sing?"

"How come pizza doesn't yell when you bite it?"

"What if frogs were as big as airplanes?"

"Do flies sneeze?"

"Is this mystery meat?"

I spent the entire meal trying not to choke on my food, while my husband sat oblivious at the end of the table. During dessert, I was interrupted by phone calls from my childless friends who already had eaten their dinner.

This distracted my children enough so that they forgot what they were doing and actually took a few bites of food. Then they launched into a song about pizza and improvised fingerplay starring a potato wedge and a carrot. When the meal was over they scattered to catch various carpools.

Oh, of course this didn't happen every time. One time my 5-year-old son caught me off guard by asking me a question I actually knew the answer to.

"Where do kittens come from?" he asked as we started the main course.

"They come from their mommies," I explained. Then one thing led to another and I somehow ended up muddling through the life cycle, the concept of giving birth, and the entire reproductive process of the animal kingdom. When I finally finished 45 minutes later, my dinner was cold, but I was satisfied that I had been open and honest and had left nothing out.

"Gross," he said. Then he tossed his plate in the sink and headed out the door to soccer practice.

I don't know about you, but it was obvious to me that, if I was ever to get through a whole family dinner without having to be pharmaceutically revived, I needed to set some guidelines.

"OK," I said, "starting tonight there will be no tap dancing vegetables on the table, or any sentences beginning with 'what if,' 'where do' or 'why.' Only stimulating, introspective conversation."

I didn't think that was too much to ask. At first, my family gave me odd looks as if I had suggested they eat their meal with the baboons in the primate exhibit at the local zoo. But they eventually accepted it. And, unlikely as it seems, they didn't once mention talking pizzas or animal babies.

However, just as I was thinking that maybe, just maybe, family dinners created a lasting bond of mutual love and respect, after all, my daughter broke the silence.

"Mom," she said. "What does it feel like to know that you only have a few good years left and you haven't achieved all of your goals?"

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You can e-mail Debbie at ParadigmTSA@familydaze.com.

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Photo: Practice makes perfect for young soccer players