Bowl-ing

Don't get me wrong--I love my children to pieces, more than words can describe, to the moon and back. But if there was anything I was looking forward to about empty nesting, it was liberation from the obligation to figure out dinner, every single goddamn day, for the previous 20 years.

September 19, 2024--the day my husband and I returned from dropping our younger daughter off at college--was to be my salvation.

I imagined returning home from work, scavenging, eating leftovers at the counter, making cheese and crackers and calling it "charcuterie board." I dreamt of salad and popcorn; I practically swooned over an infinite loop of carrots dipped in hummus or Bitchin' Sauce. A hearty snack was to be the new dinner.

The hubby saw something different. He saw leisurely evenings consisting of dinners prepared, then eaten, together. He saw dinners transformed from something shoehorned between sports practice and homework into the evening's main event. Where I wanted a sabbatical from the whole shebang of dinner--from conception to shopping to preparation to consumption to clean up--he wanted to reclaim it. In my world, dinner would quietly usher in the beginning of the evening. In his world, dinner would toot a horn signifying the end of the day.

Nearly eight months in, we've reached an unspoken compromise in the form of a bowl. When it's my turn to cook (a task loosely assigned to whoever gets home from work first), I've learned that if I pile various ingredients in a bowl, it counts (for those who are counting) as dinner, whereas those same ingredients eaten haphazardly from a cutting board would not.

In his book "Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community," Robert Putnam addresses the decline of Americans' social capital--our connections with other people--using the bowling leagues of yore as one example of how Americans used to engage with each other regularly, but no longer do. Jon and I have formed our own little bowl-ing league over here in our empty nest--not quite a strike, but at least staying in the right lane.