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table.
    “Dinner is ready.”
    I always have to say it three times before my husband gets up from his computer and comes to the table. My daughter and I are already sitting at the table. Nobody can start before all of us are seated. Everything is strictly regimented at our place. Manners, manners, manners. Perhaps they’ll come in handy one day.
    “Guten Appetit.”
    Liza goes first. Lately she also wants to serve us. That means that a lot of food gets dropped on the table. But it also means she learns a new skill, which is one of my goals as a good mother.
    My husband and I discuss the plans for tomorrow, and my daughter complains that nobody is talking to her. That’s her latest thing, complaining that nobody is talking to her. I’ve learned over the last few years that everything comes and goes in phases. Whenever children start to do something incredibly annoying or terribly worrisome, they grow out of it—and it’s replaced with the next annoying or worrisome thing. Nothing lasts. Something new always comes along and displaces the old.
    “Okay, how was your day at school?” my husband asks his stepdaughter.
    “Great. Today we voted to decide what new clubs will be funded at school.”
    “Oh yeah? What did you vote for—nose-picking and farting clubs?”
    My daughter cracks up.
    Anytime he makes her laugh, I feel happier than I was at my own wedding. I think it’s because he’s not even her father. I don’t laugh with them, though. It’s childish humor, and onlychildren get it. I telegraph my feelings with a put-on frown. It makes it even funnier for the child when the mother distances herself from that type of humor.
    All three of us eat very quickly. Too quickly. I’ve read that you should chew your food thirty times before swallowing. But when I’ve tried it, I find it disgusting. The food turns into a thin mush that no longer bears any relationship to whatever it was I originally shoveled into my mouth. So far nobody in our family has had any stomach trouble, despite us all wolfing our food down. I’ve tried a few times to teach the kids to chew their food thoroughly, but when I don’t do it myself there’s really no point. So I don’t bother anymore. I can’t do everything perfectly. Just nearly everything.
    We hop up immediately after dinner and put everything in the dishwasher. I think it’s bad for the environment that we use it daily. But my husband and others have told me that even though the dishwasher uses electricity and water and pumps out soap, it’s actually better for the environment than washing dishes by hand. I just can’t get that through my head. But I go along with it anyway, even though I don’t believe it for a second.
    Protecting the environment drives me insane. A lot of the things you’re supposed to do seem illogical. I’d really like to have everything explained in detail sometime, so I’d know how I—and how we—should act at home going forward. I definitely don’t want to be one of those people who does nothing just because nobody else is doing anything. And I don’t want to fool myself, either. There’s a tendency to convince yourself of all the things you’re doing for the environment when in reality—with the things that count—you’re making things worse. This thought is unbearable. For the most part, ways to help the environment areabout limiting yourself, sacrificing—you just stop doing things that other people don’t think for a minute about doing. The point is not to take yourself or your luxurious lifestyle so seriously; instead you live more simply in some areas. But making these sacrifices takes an iron will, because nobody checks up on you. Unfortunately there’s no such thing as an environmental inspector who can come into your apartment and take the dryer away because it’s both pointless and terrible for the environment. Nope. Our dryer is sitting right there. We just can’t use it. Laundry has to be hung to dry or else we are