By Esther Baird
First Published in the Tri Town Transcript, March 9, 2018
Our two daughters are tween and teenagers. They no longer need help with basic household tasks. And yet, these talented, relatively self-sufficient, smart, socially savvy girls see a lunch box and turn into exhausted balls of existential angst.
And, I’m a million times worse.
This is not a new theme to you, Regular Readers. I guess I just thought my girls would outgrow their distaste of making lunches and release me from this Sisyphean task. Instead it’s an endless juggling act of finding food they enjoy and fitting it, Tetris-like, into their nearly dead lunches boxes.
(Side note: by March, lunch boxes are the last place you should put food intended to stay fresh or uncontaminated. You’d be better off putting food in a middle school locker room. Whatever. I can’t fix that. My job is to make the lunches, not provide a life lesson on how the lunch boxes are maintained.)
Further, these older versions of my little girls who once got excited by a bag of Cheerios, now compared their lunches to “OKLs,” Other Kid’s Lunches.
“My friend’s mom makes her tiny chicken cutlets and sends them in with a special dipping sauce.”
Fascinating.
“My friend’s mom makes homemade calzone on Sunday’s so she has a piece each day in her lunch.”
Riveting.
“My friend has these little containers that snap open and snap closed which is way nicer than the Tupperware you send in with press-n-seal across the top.”
Utterly amazing.
I always answer lovingly (as you assumed I would). “That’s so great for your friends. When you start to experience near death symptoms from starvation because the boring turkey sandwich I made for you, and placed in an uncool container, is not adequately providing you with the nutritional fuel you need to live and breathe, then I will listen to you.”
Then in the late fall, they wanted to take frozen pizzas or cups of Ramen noodles. Microwaveable lunches: the ultimate cheat and nutritional disaster that no mom who loves their children’s health and mental wellbeing would ever consider.
But what about my mental wellbeing?? Look, throwing a cup of Ramen into their lunch was faster than painstakingly making a sandwich with the right cheese, the right condiment, on the right kind of roll so that they didn’t complain (except when they complained).
“Fine!” I said one day at the grocery store.
I bought a case of chicken-flavored Ramen. And it became easier to make lunches. They seemed happy about their microwaveable entrees. I stopped hearing about OKLs, and I decided the cheating was well worth it.
And then the coup de grace. Brace yourself.
One afternoon I picked up my girls and asked them about their day. I worked through the various levels of what “fine” meant and got to, “And how was lunch? Did you love your special, amazing, super unhealthy, Ramen?”
They said yes.
“Actually I need to tell you something,” my older daughter said, and giggled a bit. “Uh, what?” The giggle was suspicious.
“Well I just think you should know that I’ve been trading my Ramen.”
I gripped the steering wheel. “For what? Baseball cards? Unicorn stickers? I mean what on earth?”
“Homemade calzone. My friend is sick of it, but her mom keeps making them. So we trade and I get her yummy calzone and she gets my Ramen.”
It was a school lunch black market!! The seedy underside of the cafeteria crowd. And there I was, foiled again.
I couldn’t win. School lunches are designed to make parents lose. They are tangible representations of all the ways in which we love our children and want to nourish them, even if it’s boring turkey, and then they go and grow up on us. Maybe that’s why I’ve always resented the lunches with their patterned, pocketed ways.
This friend’s mom was kindly making calzone every Sunday, using high quality ingredients, folding in love with each doughy kneed, and unbeknownst to her, her daughter was eating 59 cent, gut- busting, Ramen.
Huh.
Well, I guess that meant my daughter was eating the folded up love and goodness. Maybe I was the winner after all.