When I was growing up, my mom used to tell me that her mother — my grandmother — would wake her up every morning with the same question: “What do you want for dinner?”
As a teenager, this thought was incredulous. Thinking about dinner? At 7 a.m.? Was she okay?
(Spoiler alert: she wasn’t. She was a Holocaust survivor, and dinner planning was probably her way of creating some sense in a senseless world. Cooking as a remedy to deep trauma, perhaps?)
At the time, I figured it was just a weird 1950s thing. They had one car; she probably needed to know what to buy before her ride left for the day. It didn’t mean much to me back then.
Now, as a mother of three, dinner thoughts consume my mind way more than I would care to admit.
It’s not just a meal — it’s a relentless daily decision that returns each night like some kind of culinary Groundhog Day.
“What’s for dinner?”
“What’s for dinner?”
“What’s for dinner?”
I hear it in my sleep.
Some days, I’m an all-star. I’ve shopped at no less than three different grocery stores and bought ingredients to follow an actual recipe. I feel prepared and empowered. I know what’s for dinner, and it feels like a small miracle.
Other days? I open the fridge at 4:37 p.m. and fumble through the freezer, begging for something the kids might actually consume. The twins are running laps in the living room. Someone’s squeezing the cat too tight again. I hear a tussle, then crying.
My (loving, well-meaning) husband calls and asks, “Hey, what’s for dinner?”
It is then a tiny piece of me dies.
And yet, somehow, we always eat.
It might be a fully planned and prepped meal that would make Martha Stewart proud. Or it might be butter noodles. But we eat, we connect. At the end of the day we are safe, together.
And when I think back to my grandmother, I understand her question in a whole new way.
She wasn’t just planning meals. She was offering something much deeper: a promise that her family would be fed, that there would be a table to gather around, that life could be a little predictable — even when the world had once been anything but.
Dinner isn’t just about food. It’s about presence. It’s about rhythm. It’s about the thousands of small, invisible ways we say, “I’m here. I’ve got you.”
In Jewish homes, we center so much around the table — holidays, milestones, rituals. But the weekday dinners, the Tuesday nights with mac and cheese for the second night in a row, someone refusing to eat, only to ask for a snack hours later — those matter too.
So when I hear, “What’s for dinner?” for the fourth time this week, when I feel that little eye twitch start to form, I will try (really, try) to remember what it means. That somehow, in answering this question, we are holding together the tiniest piece of order in a loud and often messy world. That, at the end of the day, our family is fed and safe. My grandmother would be proud.
And if not? There’s always cereal for dinner.
