The Art of Packing Your Kid's School Lunch
June 01, 2010, By Ron Mattocks 2 comments
Among the litany of tasks endemic to my role of stay-at-home dad, packing my stepdaughters’ lunches ranks above all others in terms of loathsomeness. Scrubbing dishes, washing clothes and shopping for groceries aren’t exactly bonbons and video games, but none of them incur unsolicited feedback either. The girls could care less about clean flatware or double coupon savings, but should I send them off to school with an intact apple rather than a sliced and peeled one, it’s a sure bet I’ll hear about it at the bus stop that afternoon.
“You did it again,” they both will say in a flat greeting.
Of course being the adult, I am quick to reset their expectations, but even so, this still fails to prevent them from leaving me less than subtle reminders whenever opportunities present themselves. A few weeks ago my (jobless) six year-old, Avery, sauntered into the kitchen, noticed I was slapping together turkey sandwiches and admonished me for royally screwing up her order the previous day. “And don’t forget the mustard this time—both sides.”
The fact of the matter was I hadn’t forgotten—we had run out—something I emphatically brought to Her Highness’s attention, adding that she would just have to suffer until I could run to the store again. Who do these kids think they are that they can tell me what I am or am not to be doing when it comes to their entrée selections? In my day questioning the hand that literally fed you was akin to shooting someone in cold blood—you could expect nothing less than the death penalty for such a transgression. Two hundred straight days of peanut butter and jelly slathered between dry bread? On day 201 you had better choke this sticky delight down your throat and smile while doing it. Rumor has it that after I left home, one of my sisters filed a modest complaint concerning the over-ripe nature of the bananas to which our mother responded by hurling a potato chip at her like a ninja throwing star. You can still see the scar in my sister’s neck sixteen years later.
Unlike my sister, I was smart enough to avoid such mishaps by recognizing the combination of disdain and joylessness in my mother’s tired face as she lined up all the ingredients needed to start her assembly line process meant to produce another day’s lunch for her husband and four kids. Day after day, month after month, this was her routine—one carried out with all the enthusiasm of a exiled dissident banished to the Gulag where they were to pound big rocks into little ones. This is a feeling I now know all too well, causing me to wonder what it was that I did so wrong to deserve being relegated to such a fate after having been so careful to avoid my mother’s whipping radius whenever she defiantly snapped brown paper sacks open.
For countless mornings I have forced myself from bed and shuffled toward the kitchen much like the manager in the old Dunkin' Donuts commercials, only instead of telling myself in a zombified voice that it’s time to make the donuts, I chant, "it’s tiiime to paaack the luuunches,” and rather than perking up at the sight of an assortment of frosted delicacies, I imagine myself gouging out my eyeballs using the cold, wet baby carrots I am now stuffing into little plastic baggies. My only consolation in this is that I don’t have a couple of scamps observing my every move like OSHA inspectors anticipating a mistake at a nuclear power plant. One thing I’ve learned about kids is that if you want to test their commitment to an issue like say, a properly packed lunch, tell them they are more than welcome to watch as long as they are willing to wake up forty minutes earlier than normal. Of course, getting up at the crack of dawn is also a test of your own resolve, something which I’ve been questioning of late.
As much as I hate to admit it, my stepdaughters are wearing me down. For every lunch-related policy I enact, the girls manage to find some means of sidestepping the consequences. For example, after the girls consistently returned home from school with uneaten items in their lunch bags I laid down a law stating that they would get no afternoon snack unless they finished their lunches. To counter this, the girls simply tossed everything in the trash before getting off the bus, and their sneaky plan might have worked too had one of them not started purchasing replacement items from the cafeteria using the money their mother had placed in their lunch account for emergencies.
And that’s not all. Now the girls are employing some form of psychological warfare against me. For weeks they will rave about the cinnamon applesauce I’ve been feeding them and then suddenly, out of the blue they hate it. Why? When I asked this, the most coherent answer I receive essentially boils down to, “because.” The vagueness in this does little to calm my frustration after buying a Costco-load of their “favorite” vanilla wafers only to have the girls share with me their thorough disdain for these same cookies the very next day. Having survived years of the same exact lunch (a PB&J sandwich, chips, apple and milk) from elementary through high school, I can appreciate the need for some variety in the menu, but a heads up like, “Hey, Ron, do they have these cookies in another flavor?” would be more than sufficient in keeping me from banging my head repeatedly against the island countertop.
Still, despite this inexplicable behavior, I have started piecing together a possible theory: the lunches I’m packing aren’t good enough—not the food itself, but rather the food’s status. Brand names I’ve learned, hold a higher position in the food’s social hierarchy than do knock-offs of the same thing. Show up to lunch with imposter pudding and you might as well kiss your dreams of senior prom goodbye. Assuming this is indeed the case, that would explain the girls’ recent clamoring for the well-known, quality brand stuff shipped from China as opposed to the Country Value store brand I’ve been padding the grocery budget with.
It’s not just about what’s on the label but who as well. This I discovered after my other stepdaughter, Allie, blossomed into a pouty teenager immediately upon entering the second grade. The SpongeBob SquarePants and Hello Kitty decorated yogurt packets that were her favorites last year have since become “icky” and “gross.” She went into great theatrics pretending to gag down a few gulps in front of me to prove her claims, adding, “I think I’m allergic.” Funny how these “potentially fatal” allergies miraculously went away after I brought home the same brand of yogurt, this batch endorsed by the stable of Disney teeny-boppers that make me gag watching them.
In retrospect, though, I wondered why I even entertained the notion of switching yogurts based on a factor as ludicrous as the characters on the wrapper. Why bend to the demands and behaviors of my stepdaughters especially with a chore I despise so much? Why not go all old-school on them, hurl some food around, let them know who’s the boss, applesauce? But then again, what would be the point? After all, it’s not me that has to eat the junk I pack for them which is why I now make the girls pack their own lunches, a solution that appears to have solved all of our mutual problems.
They aren’t so picky about what they eat, and Ms. Pack Man is no longer the one losing sleep over it.
Ron Mattocks is a father of five in Houston, Texas and the author of the book Sugar Milk: What One Dad Drinks When He Can’t Afford Vodka. He is a featured contributor to ManoftheHouse.com.
Comments (2):