True love eats

 Our dinnertable.

That's it—a simple oak table and chairs we bought unfinished two decades or more ago, when the girls were preschoolers. Many of the best times of my life happened around that table.

Like all parents, Joanna and I made our share of mistakes while Lindsay and Molly were growing up.  If you want to know about all my "warts" and failures, just ask our daughters. They've seen ’em all. But one thing we did right: We set aside time to eat dinner together around that table almost every night.

Some parents talk about "quality time," and that's a good thing. Children love big events—vacations, birthday parties, special trips and over-the-top occasions. But quality time never can take the place of quantity time. And as our girls were growing up, we experienced most of our high-quality moments amidst the ordinariness of the quantity of time.

Refining time—quantity to quality

For our little family, the dinnertable provided the place where the abundance of quantity refined down to quality. Ironically, church commitments on Sundays and Wednesdays broke our every-night dinnertime more than anything else. As the girls got to high school and their schedules filled up, we occasionally missed some other nights, too. But even then, we generally gathered at the same time in the same place on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights, plus at least one weekend evening and lunch on Sunday. 

Several years ago, I marveled at the fact Lindsay and Molly did so well in school when they always learned "nothin'" on any given day. At dinner, I'd ask, "What did you learn at school today?" The almost-automatic answer consistently came back: "Nothin'."

But then we'd start talking, and I'd learn fascinating things about science and history and social studies. (It's hard to learn fascinating things about math over dinner, but if you look carefully at the top of that old table, you'll see numbers where, after dinner, they did their math homework.) Jo and I also learned about the girls' friends, their highs and lows, their anticipations and disappointments. Their mama and I also talked about our lives,  and the girls know us much better because they heard us discuss our days, our highs and lows, our anticipations and disappointments. All around the dinnertable.

A place of joy

We could talk about other child-raising rituals that have meant—and still mean—much to our family. Things like toddler bathtime, reading books at the end of the day, bedtime prayers, Advent wreaths at Christmas, long road trips to see family. Like sayin, "I love you" and showering little girls with hugs and kisses. Like telling them how proud I am of them and how grateful I am to be their daddy.

But the strongest symbol and most enduring artifact of the joy of raising our two daughters is that dinnertable. It's no longer very pretty. And it's certainly not in style. But it's my favorite piece of furniture, because it has been sanctified by the multitude of words, the gales of laughter, the river of tears and the cloud of prayers that have engulfed it.