What a Family Dinner Party Made Me Realize
Most nights it’s just the five of us eating around the dinner table. But a few times a month, the table expands to include other members of our family as well.
Such was the case last night, when my sister and her wife came over, and my mom did too. I put a fire on in the front room. The kitchen was warm and inviting, and the house was humming with kids orbiting in and out like small, hungry moons.
My sister-in-law stood at the stove stirring a pot of beef stew that smelled like it had been simmering all week. I bought the wine, because if I can’t braise, I can at least decant. The cork popped. Glasses clinked. My heart was full.
The kids kept sneaking into the kitchen, grabbing crackers and cheese and disappearing again. A trail of crumbs marking their joy, much to my dismay. The pre-dinner hour stretched on. We had nowhere to be but where we were, which was home with the people we love most.
And somewhere between ladling stew into bowls and refilling a glass of red, I had the thought I always have on nights like this:
This is why.
People ask us sometimes why we don’t move to a bigger, more progressive city. They ask why we stay in our conservative, small town and don’t chase city life, a different zip code, a new adventure. And I understand the question, I really do. There’s a certain glamour to leaving. A reinvention, of sorts. Of becoming someone slightly shinier in a place with better coffee and cooler people.
But here’s what I know.
When your sister-in-law can text, “Stew tonight?” and be at your house in fifteen minutes, and when your mom can pop over and sit at your table on a Wednesday evening, and when your kids grow up knowing their aunt’s laugh by heart, and when they ask if they can go to their grandma’s house half a mile down the road and be back before bed time, then you are right where you’re supposed to be.
Family nights like these fill my stomach AND my heart. They remind me who I am in the middle of everything else I’m working towards. The lesson, if there is one, is about living in proximity to what nourishes you, whatever that may be (family, friends, a job, the culture, etc.)
For us, that nourishment looks like stew steam rising from bowls and it sounds like overlapping conversations and a child yelling from the living room and it tastes like a good bottle of red shared slowly enough to matter.
And I started to wonder:
In a world that tells us to keep upgrading our lives, what if the real luxury is repetition?
What if success looks less like a skyline and more like a dining table you return to again and again? And maybe the takeaway isn’t that everyone should live five minutes from their mother, but maybe it’s to build your life close to what feeds your soul.
For some people, that’s family. For others, it’s friends who feel like it. For someone else, it might be a neighborhood, a church, a weekly dinner club, a Sunday ritual that anchors the week. Whatever it is, find it. Protect it. Schedule it if you have to. Because one day the kids won’t be darting in for crackers and the stew pot will feel lighter. The chairs around the table might shift. And you’ll be grateful you chose a life where Wednesday night dinner was never “just dinner.” It was the whole point.
So in the end, maybe the real question isn’t, Why don’t you move?
Maybe it’s, What would you be willing to move away from?