Having Lunch With Your Parents

Erin:
This is the 6th chapter of the book we are reading, but the first one for me since I am a late addition to this convo. It brings to mind the lunches or linners, as I call them since my lunch is really my breakfast and my lunch/breakfast is usually my fathers dinner. I wake up around 3-5 pm from working a graveyard shift. My father has been taking his kids out to lunch/dinner on a semi regular basis for a while now that he is retired. It is a good idea because without the formal invitations I rarely see my parents or family in general, it is sad but true. So I am grateful that my father has offered his time and money to bring us together.

I have really enjoyed the times that we have spent together. I often don't want them to end. I have always been able to sit and talk with my dad about anything and everything. We are similar in a lot of ways and I have always felt a kindred spirit in him. I also love that he is someone I can talk to and learn from at the same time. If I think back to dinner with my family as a child, it is quite a different picture. I don't remember conversations, but I do remember questions asked about our day etc. I would tend to answer in monosyllabic words to get him off my back so I could resume inhaling my food in order to get seconds before Soren ate them before me. Dinner was usually a contest between myself and my brother Soren to see who could eat their first helping of food the fastest in order to get the scant amount of leftovers that lay on the table getting cold. And, of course, if we were still hungry after dinner we knew what we would hear from Mom, "If you are still hungry then have some toast." It was a cheap way to fill up if we were still hungry after any meal. Needless to say I became a carb addict quite early in life. I am happy to say that I no longer depend on bread at my meals in order to feel "satisfied".

As the author states in this chapter, "Because life depends on food, you've got to feed the lives that depend on you. If it's by virtue of having children together, of jointly forging new life, that parents become parents, they remain so by keeping that life alive and kicking". As a child I tended to focus on what I was lacking and not being grateful for what I had, which was at the least food and shelter which are the basic building blocks according to Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. Without these a person can not reach to the highest levels of self acutalization. So then people in Africa who are starving are not even attaining the most basic of human needs and don't get anywhere close to our human experience and understanding of the world around us. In a developed country we tend to take these basic things for granted. It makes you put things into perspective and realize how much we have to be grateful for.

 I remember hearing somewhere that when you overeat you are compensating for the love you didn't receive as a child. So it probably comes as no surprise that I am the fat one of the family, since I complained the most of not having my emotional needs met as a child and not getting the love I needed from my parents. Even with all my criticizing of my parents I do think that both my parents put their needs ahead of their children which brings up the first paradox in this chapter, "the otherwise impregnable triangle that yokes together parents, children, and food. Without their parents creating them, children can't exist, and once existing, they depend on those parents to keep them in existence with food and water. In this respect, the life of the parent is indispensable to the life of the child". Now instead of depending on my parents to feed me and keep me alive we eat together to sustain and enhance our relationships and enjoy one anothers company. How opulent and incomprehensible this might seem to someone who will never have enough food to eat. If I keep going in this vein I am going to get depressed about the world and all the deprivations therein. But if nothing else, at least it makes me realize how much we have and how much we take for granted. It is a lot better for the soul to be grateful for what we have rather than complain about what we don't have, and it really isn't hard to change perspective if you choose to.

The practice of Constellations that is brought up is very interesting and makes me think of how that would play out in our family. It makes me realize that no matter what our familial relationships are like in the family we are all connected in very profound ways whether we realize it or not, and that we may be affected more by each other than we know. This includes those that are dead in the family but still affecting those still alive. "For in the emotional algebra of the family, the dead count as much as the living". I feel that I have a stronger connection to Grandma Green now that she is dead than when she was living. I feel her comforting me when I am sad. I hear her telling me, in my mind, not to do something that she wouldn't approve of. I know that Dad and Annie are both very affected by dad's parents and always will be. It is the influence they had on us when they were here, and also the memory of them that we choose to keep alive in our minds that affect us now and probably always will until we meet them on the other side.