My daughter burst through the door, coming home late after a high school musical rehearsal, and made straight for the fridge.
“Is there ...?” She poked around, looking behind the ketchup and moving the orange juice. “Was there ...?” Her voice trailed off, her expression that of a shipwrecked person who just saw another rescue plane fly by without noticing her.
“Dinner?” I cast my mind back, trying to remember what I had come up with in my own foraging expedition through the fridge a few hours earlier. “There might be some leftover soup. Maybe lettuce? Definitely a leg from that rotisserie chicken we had on Thursday.”
She sighed and cobbled a meal together. I told her, only half joking, that I was teaching her to be resourceful.
Sadly, she’s used to it.
Many changes have occurred in our house in recent years, with college kids moving in and out, a baby suddenly grown up and in high school, and so on.
But none are so dramatic as what we’re eating.
Back in the days when I was a Professional Mom – i.e. one who researched car seats, limited screen time and read Eric Carle books out loud – I fed them well. If being a good mom was measured by the amount of effort spent pushing whole grains on unwilling children, I was a winner.
We did the nightly meal thing. No matter how busy the day, or how frazzled I was juggling work and kids, I made a superhuman effort to gather everyone around the table each evening, even on those nights when my husband was working. I can’t swear we had a homemade meal every night (we didn’t), but at least I made an effort to include carrot sticks with the pizza or apple slices with the grilled cheese sandwiches.
Honestly, I would have been horrified by what passes for a meal in my house these days. I don’t think I could have envisioned exactly how far my standards would slip, when most nights it’s just me, the cat and the last remaining teenager.
Because she has dance class in the evenings, we eat at Bad Mom times, like 9 p.m. Instead of gathering around our cozy kitchen table to break bread, we carry bowls (or more likely, Chipotle or Chinese food containers) into the living room, slouching across the sofa and watching old musicals.
In recent years, I’ve revised my definition of “meal.”
“Is your book club coming over?” said my kid the other night when she came in and saw me arranging crackers and cheese on a plate, sipping on a glass of wine.
No, they were not. But that’s no excuse not to have “book club dinner,” my euphemism for a few grapes, a handful of stale, bottom-of-the-bag pita chips and the last little bit of hummus, scraped from the crevices of the container.
“I like to think of it as tapas,” I said. “Small bites. It’s elegant.”
My child, bless her, frowned. And made herself some eggs.
Charlotte tweets @ChLatvala.