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Rethinking Dinner

I've never wanted to be one of those people that write "momblogs." So much of my day is spent being a mom, that I'd rather write about something else in my spare time. Does that make me selfish?

So tonight for dinner, I was a bad wife. I am embarrassed to admit that I had a 4:00 snack that squelched my desire to eat anything else. It was a very substantial snack--4 molasses cookies from Costco - 4. After I finished the fourth one, I managed to hide the rest of the box from myself, but I didn't want to think about food anymore

So husband comes home and asks what I want for dinner. I say "Didn't you hear me say that I just ate 4 ginormous Costco cookies?" "Well," he says "what do you want for dinner that's light?" As little as possible. I was trying to skip dinner because of the guilt over eating four HUGE cookies.

So he made turken (turkey bacon) BLTs with frozen peas on the side. (The peas compensate for at least one of those cookies.) It was a  very small meal and nothing fancy like the traditional "dinner" I had imagined up in my head of preparing for dinner. You know what I'm talking about, the traditional main dish casserole, with rolls on the side, along with a dish of peas, and a Jell-o salad. My husband compensated for his lack of snacking on four Costco cookies by eating four BLTs to the one that I ate to make him feel good.

Next time I hope that I'll be able to put aside my guilt at overindulging and just make something. I think  that somewhere along the line, just by virtue of being a woman, I came up with this idea that the perfect family dinner has to fit this perfect little mold. And if I can't prepare this ideal dinner, because I don't have enough time, or ingredients, or energy or whatever to prepare the perfect dish, I worry that whatever else I do make won't be good enough for my husband and for my family. So what usually ends up happening? My husband, whom I've been worrying about providing this perfect meal for, comes home to no dinner and cooks dinner himself. And the strangest part about this whole circle, is that he actually enjoys cooking dinner--but I still feel guilty.

The funny thing is that it doesn't even matter. Does it really matter what we ate for dinner? The important thing is that we ate dinner and our kids ate dinner and we all sat down at the table together to eat it.

Comments

MandaMommy said…
At least you hid the bag! I totally know how that feels... Bleccchhhhh.

Do you like menu planning? You could check out my friend's blog, thisweekfordinner.com.
August 25, 2010 at 12:03 AM
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