The importance of bonding as a family is very vital, my mum would usually say a family that eats together lives together. This statement might sound really simple, but she said it so much that it stuck. I thought about it one day and wondered to myself, obviously a family that can eat together would be already living together, but then when I thought deeper I saw that many times a family can be staying together but not living together. You see them in one house but it turns out they are roommates who would be better off living somewhere else. Some might even see their family house as just a place to sleep and find a home somewhere else. This is mainly because a home is not the house, but the people in it. Everyone always wants to return home after a hectic day, but not everyone would wish to go to the place they sleep after a stressful day.
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I remember a friend of mine, although I haven't seen him in a while, he would sometimes come to my place to sleep even when his family house is less than 10 minutes walk from mine. Mind you this is a guy whose father owns an entire street in the community we live in with lots of houses around more like a mini estate. He wouldn't still want to sleep in his father's house except when his father would summon him. According to him, he was just looking for his peace of mind and nothing more. One day we were eating together (a rule in my house is if you stay with me, we must eat from the same plate) and he was super excited eating saying that it was the first time he was eating with someone from the same plate and it felt good (paraphrasing in my words).
Back home, although we never eat from the same plate, we always ate at the same time except one person isn't around and it's dinner time. When I left home I discovered an even better culture of eating together from a very close friend. He would normally say “let us break Bread, That's why we're called Bread-thern (if you get the joke 😂) We were together for over two years and not once did we eat separately. If we had people coming over to visit, we would all eat from the same plate. The only person I never forced that law over is my younger sister because I understand that from the home we came from, although we eat together we don't eat from the same plate and she's not someone to easily change her mind on something she's been doing nearly all her life.
I personally think eating together creates a bond, a bond so strong that the day we don't eat together we don't feel full and no matter how small the food is, we're always satisfied. I also believe that one of the attributes of a home is love and that love is shared when we eat not just together, but from the same plate. I would even say I like the Indian culture of sitting round on the floor to eat together. This for me doesn't signify poverty, but the love of a family home. Some are so priceless that you can't buy them anywhere. This is a practice I would like to cultivate in my own home, and raise my kids to do the same because I feel it's part of those little things that makes family feel like a home.
