Tag: family dynamics

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

All the Ingredients, Yet No Meal – Day 21

Leave a comment

Prompt – What dinner time taught you about belonging.

Dinner was never about the table in my house. We rarely gathered around a full place setting of dishes spread around the table. By the time my siblings were gone and I had reached my formative years, the chairs stayed pushed in and unused, as if they were props from a different version of life. The table was not for meals, conversations, homework, or family meetings in my house. The table, like the house itself, was quiet, and quiet was something my family wore well.

The kitchen, however, told a different story.

Cooking was where my mother spoke, at least with me. She talked while her hands worked, as if movement unlocked language that stillness could not. She told stories while we rolled egg rolls together, her fingers moving with confidence and memory. While her chili simmered, she explained things that were never addressed directly, lessons tucked into technique and timing. She talked while I grated potatoes for breakfast, the raw metallic sound of the grater filling the room with a steady, unforgiving rhythm. That sound still lives in my memory, carrying both comfort and sadness in equal measure.

Those moments were where belonging happened because those moments were where actual communication briefly lived. I heard history while standing at the counter. She talked about Papa, her father, owning a restaurant and a bakery, and about growing up inside that world of work, responsibility, and food. She talked about my siblings when they were younger, sharing stories from before I arrived, memories I inherited without ever living. I learned who they were through her voice and through the rhythm of her hands as she cooked from memory. I learned where I might fit by listening carefully to places where I had not been.

I was allowed and encouraged to help. I added ingredients. I stirred pots. I rolled wrappers. I watched closely. Participation was welcomed in pieces, but the whole recipe of family was never quite assembled. We could gather parts and play our roles, but the finished pie never made it to the table.

That became the pattern.

Belonging, for me, was never about sitting down together. It was about proximity and presence. It was about standing nearby, being useful without being central, and being present without being required. Love arrived in fragments, measured in shared tasks and quiet moments in the kitchen. I learned that connection did not always look like unity. Sometimes it looked like parallel movement within the same small space.

Dinner taught me that families can function without ceremony and that care can exist without coordination. It taught me how to listen while working, how to receive stories instead of affection, and how to recognize that some people only know how to give when their hands are busy.

Even now, kitchens feel safer than tables. I trust the hum of preparation more than the stillness of unspoken expectation. And maybe that is not a flaw, but a beginning. Maybe belonging does not always ask us to sit down and face one another. Sometimes it simply asks us to stay close enough to hear the stories while something nourishing is still being made.

February 2026
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
232425262728  
365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Asshole or Not – Day 18

Leave a comment

Prompt – The first time you realized your parents were human.

When I was twelve years old, I went with my father to his office in the evening, housed in the old hospital on the far side of Plattsburgh Air Force Base. The building had been retrofitted for administrative use, but it had not been emptied of its past. During World War II, wounded soldiers had been flown in from Europe and treated there, and whatever could not be healed had stayed behind. The hallways still held that weight, and the air carried its residue in ways that were difficult to ignore. I already knew some places remembered.

My father asked me to go along with him, so I grabbed my radio controlled car and ran it down the long corridor while he gathered paperwork. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, steady and indifferent, and the sound of my car rolling along the floor occasionally drowned them out before fading again. By then, I had lived with my way of feeling space for four years. I had learned not to talk about it after Alaska taught me that honesty could make adults uncomfortable and cruel. I stayed quiet, observant, and turned inward, practicing a kind of silence about my gift that felt safer than any explanation of it.

I did not see ghosts. What I felt was closer to a shift in temperature and color, like the cool rush that slips through an open door on a hot day and changes the room without asking. It was the aftermath of pain rather than the pain itself. I could feel sorrow pressed into the walls and sense fear lingering where it had once been experienced. Adults liked to say I had an imagination or that I was overly sensitive, but none of those explanations accounted for how a place could hold what happened there long after the people were gone. At twelve, I already understood that some spaces spoke and that not everyone was taught how to listen.

That night, the building responded. Lights turned on after being switched off, sounds traveled from empty rooms, and doors settled without hands. My father stopped moving, and I watched him listen as his shoulders tightened, as if his body understood before his mind caught up. It was the first time I had ever seen fear arrive without permission.

Until then, he had existed as certainty, military strong and commanding, the final word in every room he entered. Standing in that hallway, surrounded by something neither of us could control, he was no longer shielded by rank or routine. His fear did not make him weak. It made him ordinary and placed him back among other people, subject to the same unease that finds everyone eventually.

I did not feel triumphant or vindicated as I witnessed my father’s fear. I grew quiet as something inside me recalibrated, subtle but permanent. That night, I understood that my father was not immune or protected by authority or belief, and that military strength did not mean exemption from being afraid or human. Watching him stand there, facing something he could not explain and something I had already learned to live with, showed me who he was. In that recognition, I understood myself, and something I had trusted and known about him loosened. Asshole or not, he was human.

February 2026
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
232425262728