A Writing Journey

(I wrote this slice in the company of other slicers last night and inspired by Writing to Learn, Learning to Write, who is writing about a different object each day. Today, I take you back to the kitchen table of my childhood.)

The kitchen table in my home growing up was the place where my family would gather each night for dinner. So much more than eating happened there. We would talk — or, more accurately — we would raise our voices at each other in talking about the issues that mattered most in that moment. There was a lot of yelling around that table. Sometimes, in my quiet moments now — in the life that I live with my partner sitting around a small table for two — I have a hard time remembering those voices and those heated conversations. 

How I would long to hear them again. To go back in time and view that spectacle like it was a TV reality show. But it was my reality not that long ago. When I remember my father, his angry voice is not what first comes to mind. But when I remember the kitchen table, the deafening volume is so audible. What was the argument about? Hard to recall. Was it insignificant? Not getting to the table when we were first called? Or, forgetting to turn off a light in another room? Were the frustrations and the burdens my father carried like dry straw just waiting for a tiny spark to light the whole evening on fire? It felt like that sometimes.

As we got older, the arguments stemmed from issues that mattered in that moment — the politics of the day, something that happened at school, clashes with friends or neighbours. The strange thing is that the explosive nature of the argument never seemed proportional to what happened — it always seemed like my father was blowing things up. When I was young, I would explain it all away. “That’s just the way he is. That’s my dad!” The table around which we gathered as kids was a table rooted in my family’s but, more specifically, my father’s, trauma. Trauma that we never really talked about but that took shape in very real ways every night when we would sit down to eat our dinner together.