My Children Almost Grew Up Without Family Dinners
Every Tuesday evening, I came home from work to my middle son sitting alone at the kitchen island enjoying a box of store-bought sushi. My other sons had also eaten their weekly sushi in solitary at the kitchen island in the past hour. With disgust at the thought of consuming raw fish, I would grab a small meal from the fridge and quickly consume the bare minimum amount of food needed to sustain me through the evening. Tuesday nights were not an anomaly. Every night my children consumed dinner individually when they arrived from school or activities. My husband also ate alone, often standing up for efficiency. My disordered eating was controlling my life and tearing my family apart. While other working moms I knew made an effort to bring the family together a few times a week for family meals, I was grateful for an easy excuse to avoid questions about my unhealthy eating habits. MI did everything that I could to avoid being around food, even to the detriment of spending time with my family. As I got sicker and more distant, my husband took the children on vacations while I traveled for work.
Disordered eating had plagued me consistently since my early teen years in the 1990s. I enjoyed a temporary reprieve from 2007 to 2014 as I allowed my body to nurture three pregnancies, each followed by at least a year of lactating. My involvement in nourishing my sons stopped at weaning.
I had a high-power corporate job, extensive community volunteering commitments, and an exercise regimen that kept me isolated and disconnected from my family. I outsourced mothering to a loving nanny who cared for the children, including doing all the grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning.
When I was not traveling internationally, I left the house before the family woke up and often came home after dinner. Most evenings, as I collapsed in exhaustion or took night calls with colleagues in Asia, my husband was solely responsible for bedtime. In addition to missing meals with my family, I was also missing precious moments of cuddling with my sons and sharing good books.
People often asked me, “How do you do it all?”
I was not doing it all. I was slowly starving myself to death while being completely absent from my children’s lives. Since adolescence, my personal obsession with perfection had led to extremely unhealthy behaviors. I was infatuated with depriving my body of food until my stomach was completely flat. I wasted countless hours planning complex schemes for how I could get out of meals. I missed several day trips to the beach with the family because I could not stand the way that I looked in a bathing suit. Although I seemed very impressive to the outside world, inside I was miserable.
At a routine annual check-up at the doctor, I learned that my heart rate was dangerously low, a condition called bradycardia. Within a matter of days, I was on medical leave from work and on an airplane to check myself into an out-of-state, acute-care, residential eating disorder program. It happened so fast, and my family was so used to my frequent absences, they were not disturbed by this different absence. I would stay in the hospital for nearly two months under intense psychiatric, medical, and nutritional treatment. Entering the hospital meant leaving a life of freely traveling the world as a powerful business woman and consenting to giving up nearly all personal freedoms. The facility was locked for the safety of the patients. I was not allowed to shower or use the toilet unattended. I was only allowed access to my cell phone for a few hours in the evening. To earn the right for a single cup of coffee in the morning I had to eat 100% of meals and snacks assigned by my dietician. After two weeks of following the prescribed regime, my health began to stabilize. I am forever grateful for the outstanding care that I received that saved my life.
Following discharge from the hospital, I returned home and went back to my rigorous job. My focus was on the bare minimum for recovery, just making sure that I ate enough food to satisfy my dietician. The kitchen was a forbidden zone for me. The thought of enjoying cooking, eating, or anything associated with food seemed to be an impossibility.
Then my health collapsed again. It had been six months since my discharge from the hospital. Despite following the instructions from my outpatient medical team, I had developed severe iron deficiency anemia. After several weeks of rest and recovery at home, I regained my strength. On top of this, our nanny of more than fifteen years made the decision that it was time for her to move to a new job with younger children.
So there I was, nearly one year from my hospital discharge and suddenly responsible for the nourishment of my family. The critical moment had arrived, and I took the leap.
To ease my transition into the kitchen, I began ordering meal kits with recipes and all ingredients included. With trepidation, I opened my first meal kit. To my great surprise and delight, my twelve-year-old son asked if he could help cook. My relationship with each of my sons was weak, but especially my relationship with my middle son, who is very introverted.
The arrival of our weekly meal kit became a special time for my pre-teen and I to spend time in the kitchen together. The first meal that we prepared together was cheesy baked chicken with squash. Just before we put the chicken into the oven, my son was concerned that there was not enough cheese included in the kit. We found some extra cheese in the refrigerator to add at the last minute. My son was fully aware of my struggles with atypical anorexia, and I marveled with joy as his trepidation transformed into a subtle smile when we sat down to eat the food that we had cooked together. The decision to add the extra cheese was the right decision. The chicken was perfectly moist and the cheese added a luscious flavor.
I spent more time in the kitchen and began venturing to the grocery store for the first time in more than a decade. I started connecting with my sons in the kitchen in a way that I never could have believed possible. Our culinary adventures together have been fun and delicious. Together, we have optimized poached chicken, explored the wonders of bone broth, figured out how to make a tasty version of pad thai without shellfish, and learned that gochujang is wonderful mixed with sugar in cookies. I enjoy every moment of time in the kitchen with my family, both cooking and (more importantly) eating.
Our favorite meal is mushroom miso noodle soup, a delicious and complex recipe from the celebrity chef Sohla El-Waylly. Preparing this dish requires first making dashi broth with shiitake mushrooms, seaweed, and bonito flakes. Then eggs must be hard boiled for exactly seven minutes and separately soba noodles need to be cooked at exactly the right temperature for exactly the right amount of time. In a blog post, Sohla described her feelings around making dashi from scratch as terrified and traumatized. Sohla’s cookbook, Start Here, begins with a chapter giving aspiring cooks the permission to experiment and fail. We feel empowered to try (and sometimes fail) at cooking fun and complex dishes. If we fail in the kitchen, we can always order pizza at the last minute.
A few weeks ago, my middle son became a bar mitzvah in a beautiful ceremony. To celebrate his accomplishment, he wanted a sushi party with our immediate family. I knew that I had finally started nourishing my family when my son asked me to sit next him for the meal.
About the Author
Allie Falender Rubinstein is the General Manager for Biotechnology at Shell. Allie earned her BA from Oberlin College with a double major in Biology and Sociology. She earned her PhD from Baylor College of Medicine in Molecular and Cellular Biology. Allie is a United States Patent and Trademark Office Patent Agent.
Allie served on the Board of Directors of Collaborative for Children, a Houston area non- profit organization that is the leading resource for early childhood education in the region from 2015-2023 serving as the Board Chair and Vice Chair from 2020-2023. She is an American Leadership Forum Senior Fellow, a graduate of the Center for Houston’s Future Leadership Forum and the IMD High Performance Leadership Program. She and her husband have three sons aged 16, 13 and 9. Allie has recently begun taking writing classes and is working on a memoir on her experiences as a senior leader in the Oil & Gas industry.
Related Posts
Like a Mommy →
On Cravings: Foods I Used to Love →
Book Excerpt: Crybaby →
One Response to My Children Almost Grew Up Without Family Dinners