Mommy, Daddy, please come home

Who has time to spend an afternoon at home, standing aside and watching the ordinary lives of our children?

Anat Lev-Adler|Published: 03.14.06 , 12:51

"You wouldn't believe what I’ve been doing for the last few weeks," said my friend Shirley as we both eyed the sophisticated basket of baked goods at the trendiest food shop in the city, and pick at a bowl of freshly-cut vegetables gleaming with just the right amount of spiced virgin olive oil.

"Every evening I try to recreate the taste of the omelet and the salad my mother used to make, and I can’t do it. I use different vegetables, I refresh the oil, I mix it up with emotion—but nothing happens. It all comes out with today’s taste. I want that good old-fashioned taste."

"It's obvious," I explained, "you need to use regular oil instead of olive oil. You can’t use canola, either. Go to the supermarket, buy a bottle of corn or soy oil, and you’ll find your childhood memories in that bottle," I assured her.

That evening I tried it at home: cucumber, tomato, and onion in a shower of regular oil with a lot of salt. It came out so perfectly that I imagined the tune of an old children’s television program and I fantasized that my mother would come out of the kitchen in a moment in a checkered apron, stand in the living room, and scold me for faking my scales on the piano again.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time the kitchen was not merely an unwelcome intruder in the living room. Once upon a time the pile of dishes did not reach the ceiling. Once upon a time, every room in the house had a door you could close. Try setting limits today.

Once upon a time, mothers were at home at 5:30, busily preparing the evening’s dinner. It wasn’t that they worked less than we do today. They worked, studied, cooked, and cleaned. Few had hired cooks or housekeepers; they simply managed things differently. But mostly it was the norm for parents to be with their children.

Even the most demanding job started to quiet down towards 5 or 6 p.m., and fathers came home while it was still light out, which gave rise to a custom of "being at home."

Those were the days

Once upon a time it was perfectly okay to work until 2 or 3 p.m., and anyone whose workday included a long mid-day break went home for lunch and a quick afternoon nap, which meant that parents were at home. They were present. They hovered in our lives and our consciousness. We saw them, we smelled them, we felt them.

They were not our mobile entertainment, they did not sit all day playing with us or creating activities for us, but they were there: they sent us on missions like folding laundry, had us stand beside them to peel potatoes or check for stones in the rice, listened with full attention to our conversations about ourselves, corrected us where necessary, and got involved, and there was a sense that we were not alone, so we didn’t feel lonely. We didn’t need to be the center of anyone’s universe because we were part of the world.

Who has the time for all that today?

Today, I don’t know how much we are really at home, really present, as our parents were in our lives. How many times a week do we spend the afternoon at home, standing off to the side and watching the simple daily activities of our children: the struggles over the temptation to play games instead of doing homework, the small tricks over the lunch plate?

Busy lives

Most of our children, after all, eat lunch in daycare centers and come home at 4 p.m. Some are brought home by babysitters, others by a parent who rushes out from a job he is forced to cut cruelly short, and immediately they run to various after-school activities, to meet friends, or to run errands.

And who has time anyway just to sit around the house and notice the smell of the house, the special sounds of 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the slow transition from full light to dusk?

Everyone’s in the same space.

Today the workday for parents is long and intolerable, and very few parents manage to get home while it is still light out to be with their children. Only those who are really lucky have a job that allows them, if not to work from home, then at least to do some of the tasks in the afternoon from home, within the most important four walls of their lives.

What kids want

Because that is what our children really want. For us to be home. Not to play with them all day long, not to read to them endlessly, and not to turn them into the sun that shines in the center of our universe.

All they want is for their lives and ours to be conducted, at least some of the time, in the same space for there to be enough overlap to hold onto. They want to feel we are truly there with them. Not just on the phone, giving out instructions, but really at home, in the same protected, complete physical space, busy with our affairs, working or cooking or cleaning or having a rest in the afternoon, but there. Accessible. Flesh and blood.

Perhaps if we internalize this, we will succeed in educating ourselves to work fewer hours and to run less quickly to nowhere.

This doesn’t just depend on the individual, of course; it demands awareness and consideration from employers and bosses as well. But don’t they want to connect to themselves from the most basic and simplest place? Don’t they want to use the gift of life to the fullest instead of passing through it without any idea where they came from and where they are going?

And perhaps, if we were more tranquil and moved slower, we would even manage to recreate the taste of the omelets from the good old days.

Mystery solved

By the way, one phone call to my busy mother solved the riddle: the omelets of my childhood were cooked using Blueband margarine, the miraculous rectangle that added a gleam to every dough, that moistened every cake, and that was licked with gusto when covered with a goodly layer of white sugar on a piece of regular white bread.

I called Shirley right away: "Go buy Blueband margarine. It will bring the taste back to your omelet." But she was already standing next to the counter, stirring an organic millet pancake mix with her oldest daughter, which she intended to eat with honey and dates.

Anat Lev-Adler is the author of the bestselling "Secrets of Working Mothers", published by Yedioth Ahronoth