When my husband left for a yearlong deployment overseas, the one thing I could not bear was the sight of his empty seat at the dinner table. My three young sons felt it, too. During the day, we were busy at school and work, but when we came together at the end of the day, and that one seat was vacant, everyone seemed to notice my husband’s absence even more.
The empty seat loomed large.
So we decided to fill it.
For each week that my husband was gone, we invited a new stranger to sit in his seat and share a meal with us. We dined with politicians, policemen, artists, musicians, athletes, and even a zookeeper. The goal was to fill up our time and ease the loneliness, but the outcome was something else entirely: we were building connections and relationships.
We were also bridging the gap between civilian and military worlds. One dinner at a time, week-by-week, we showed our guests, who had already seen highly publicized military departures and homecomings on the media, what happens on an ordinary Sunday when a family sits down to dinner and their loved one is half a world away.
It’s such a simple idea—so old-fashioned and often overlooked in today’s society—but dinner-table conversation is a powerful connector in our increasingly compartmentalized lives. Our year of dinners with strangers (who became like family) lead to the book Dinner with the Smileys. And Dinner with the Smileys became a springboard for conversations across the country: What does it mean to be alone? How do different people feel loneliness? What is family? How can a community of people help one another and fill each other’s empty chairs?
Ironically, however, although my book was about a military family (us), it wasn’t necessarily for military families. “Filling in” for one another is not a new concept for military spouses. Our military community regularly becomes a stand-in family while our loved ones are away. Over shared Thanksgiving tables, birthday tables and Christmas tables, we have come together in each other’s stories, support and encouragement.
That’s why I was delighted to contribute to Stories Around the Table, a collection of essays from more than 40 military-spouse contributors, sharing everything from their wisdom to their pain and joy. We might be scattered across the country, but through our stories, we come together at the same table.
My family’s year of dinners came full circle when Stories Around the Table was released this year. The launch event—a dinner held at the National Press Club—was during a time when I could not be in Washington, D.C. But my husband, who works at the Pentagon, was in the city, so he went in my place. After a year of me filling my husband’s seat at the table, now he was filling mine. He shared a table and a meal with fellow contributors and listened to their stories. He was, if you will, the “civilian” stepping into the military-spouse world.
My husband has never been the one “left behind.” He’s never had to put together a family of friends and neighbors to help him through the lonely holidays months. But that night at the Press Club, my husband heard from other spouses who had done these things. He shared their table, and they, in turn, shared with him their—no, our—story.
One of his takeaways from the dinner was this: military families may have different circumstances, but our experiences are more or less the same. And in each other’s stories, we find comfort—the nod that says, “Yes, I’ve been there, too.”
Dinner tables and books: they’ve both been around forever. They’ve connected people through stories and experiences. They’ve built relationships and offered bridges from one lifestyle to another. And that’s something for which military and civilian families alike can always use a reminder.