Daughters of the Dirt / Sarah Higdon

The Table Dance 
by Bernadette Noll  

In the beginning, it was just us, at our little table in our little shack of a rental house.  Side by side we would make our feasts: chopping, slicing, sautéing. The two of us at the table sipping wine, eating our curries or fiery salsas and fantasizing about what the rest of our lives together would be.  We’d linger for hours over more red wine and a few cigarettes and maybe a coffee at the end.  We would eat late and long and imagine living in a big building with a big room and a big table  - where we would eat late and long all the days of our lives.  

In this same house with our first baby and still we ate late into the evening and not much changed in our ritual.  Not much changed while we cooked and she snoozed in her sling.  While we ate, she’d nurse, then collapse on my chest, neither of us always noticing or ever minding the salsa in her hair.  In those early days of babe many things remained the same and we thought that’s how it would always be, with our little carry-on-bag of a smiling, contented, only baby.  

As she started to crawl, we wriggled away from that hovel of a house that held such sweet emotion.  We left that house of first meeting, first marrying, first baby and were off into our own first home.  Our first own home that was not the enormity of our fantasies but rather the smallness of our bankbook - that made us choose between a living room and our dreamed of big table, and of course we chose the latter.  At this big table our meals were a little earlier and our menu a bit altered and our sentences unfinished as we split chores in different rooms and we split kids, as now there were two.  You change the baby and I’ll cook the dinner, you read a story and I’ll set the table, you run after them and I’ll run into the bathroom and take a deep breath.  And then we’ll all sit down together at our big table, not late or long, as the attention spans are shorter and the bedtimes never early enough.  

There are no more cigarettes but still there is red wine or a cold beer.  Still we fantasize about the future, even more so now, as we imagine not only our own lives but our children’s too.  These fantasies though are often interrupted by spills and crying and questions and directives:  Eat your supper, get back on your chair, keep your hands to yourself, don’t forget to chew, and with this last command they are requesting (for the 100th time) the retelling of the caveat of the time as a kid I forgot to chew and I threw up whole orange slices all over the floor.  

Three kids now and we fully surrender to the meals at 5:30 instead of 9:00 and they are in bed an hour or more before we ever would have even entertained the notion of cooking.  Detailed conversations are rarely attempted, as no thought is too great to be left uninterrupted and only a rare sentence sees completion.  We have ritual in the setting and the lighting of the candle and I have my own private, mindful, sanity-retaining moment of deep breathing, in through my nose and out the mouth, like childbirth and then salud, and I gulp my beer.   

Dinnertime is chaotic and messy and we must remember not to sweep until the rice dries.   The commands are many and seemingly more all the time, and the reminders to behave and to be nice and to listen, but so too increases the conversations and the sharing and the stories of our youth or theirs - those one or two or thirty long years ago.  We exhale when all is said and done, or not (next time can we have macaroni and cheese?).   With that exhale or with a lengthy discussion as to whose turn it is to blow out the flame, our dinner candle is extinguished.   

Though we sometimes question our sanity at the concept of dining regularly with such ritual and with three small sometimes frantic and frenetic children, and though we sometimes start at their getting too close to the candle or their knocking over of their cup or their falling nonsensically from their chair or their singing during our moment of silence (read: moment not minute), it is our hope that what they will take away is the desire to one day sit and linger long and late and enjoy a meal shared with each other, with us, with friends or with mates.
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Bernadette Noll is a lady of leisure who spends her time lounging poolside while her three small children frolic joyfully. She knows these luxurious days won't last forever and is really trying to enjoy them for what they are. She makes nutritious meals and snacks and makes sure everyone has plenty of clean underwear in their drawer. She is grateful for her night owl genes passed down from her own mother and stays up into the wee hours of the night just for the solitude it grants her.

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