The Dining Room Table

It has been two long months since I have last had the time to sit down and purge my feelings out on the keyboard of my computer. Life planted its feet in my path and would not get out of the way long enough for me to find one moment of peace for myself...and when I say "life", you should know by now that that actually means school. But I am happy to say that my semester is finally complete and here I am, still standing. My children have said to me more than once in the past week that they are happy that I am done with school now so that I can get off the computer and play with them. It makes me sad the way my children miss me, even though I am right here. It is bad enough that I watch them miss their father every day, but to miss me when I am in the same room... I just keep telling myself, "this too shall pass". So I have waited for an opportunity to write when it would not take away from my time with the kids because even though I have been feeling a desperate need to write, my children's need for time with their mother was more important.

This lack of time, this busyness, and sometimes chaos, now seem to be what symbolize my life. It is what my life has become. Always running around, putting out fires, and trying to find the time to get everything done that needs to be done while, at the same time, trying to continue to do the things that I want to do as a mother. I will be glad when this part of my life is over and I can start to move forward again. Right now, I feel like I have just come to another dead end and I am waiting for...well, I am not sure what I am waiting for. I guess I am just trying to figure out what road I should take next. Hopefully I can find a road that will bring me some peace, because more and more I am feeling a need for it.

Something else that symbolizes my life...my dining room table. You know, you can tell a lot about a person by their dining room or kitchen table. Is it big? Is it small? Is it piled to the ceiling with papers and other things? Is it trimmed beautifully with an elegant centerpiece, place settings, and fine china? Is it simple, decorated only by a small centerpiece? And then at dinnertime, is it empty or full? My dining room table is one of the very few quality pieces of furniture that my husband and I chose to spend what little money we had on. I love it...or I did once. It is a large table that can be made even larger with the built-in leaf. We bought it with our family and friends in mind. We thought of the Thanksgivings and Christmases in the years to come that would be spent at this table and knew that it was perfect for us. At dinnertime, we would shut off the TV and gather our family around the table. The room was filled with laughter and conversation, me sitting at one end of the table and him at the other with our three small children in between. Every day I felt like I was giving a gift to my family. I looked forward to planning and preparing our meals so that we could spend that time together.

A few weeks ago, as the kids and I were eating our dinner around the coffee table in the living room in front of the TV, one of them asked me why we don't ever eat at the table anymore. This was followed by the other two chiming in with the same question and all three of them telling me how they miss eating at the dining room table. After dinner I got the kids tucked into bed, came back downstairs to my dining room table, and cried. I sat there, reflecting on the dinners that I have shared with the kids since their father left. After he left, I gradually lost that joy that I got from planning and preparing meals. This mostly had to do with the fact that my kids wouldn't eat half of the stuff I prepared and now there was no one there to eat it with me. Dinnertime became more of a frustration for me, trying to get the kids to eat was a battle every night. And then there was the empty chair. Every night a reminder; a slap in the face. It quickly became less painful for me to throw together something that I knew the kids would eat and drop it down on the coffee table. But the saddest part is that there are some days that I don't even eat with them. I use it as my break or my chance to get a few things done before I have to put them to bed. I am embarrassed to admit this and can't tell you how sad it makes me. But still, I cannot seem to bring myself to sit at the dining room table.

My dining room table is beautiful, but it is empty and lonely. It is simply set, with nothing more than a small centerpiece in the middle, just as it was when my husband left. My family is broken now and I can't change that, but I think I owe it to my children to sit back down in my chair. Consider this my first New Year's resolution.