Dinner time with kids a primitive experience

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

March 19, 2009

When I was an adolescent, my mother would look at me eating across the table and hope aloud that I would never order spaghetti on a date. At the time, I probably rolled my eyes and dismissed her concern as that of a square, or whatever we called our elders in the early 1980s.

At the time, too, I was fascinated by this impossible notion that I might actually one day have a date. The mere thought probably knocked the buttered bread from my hand to the floor, which I probably then retrieved and ate.

I know now just what horrors my mother saw back then as I sit down for dinner with a table full of my own children. What I witness there is nothing short of primitive … (read more)