Lunches during the summer were VERY laid-back – peanut butter sandwiches, soup from a CAN, leftovers from supper the night before (which led to The Girl wailing “If I had liked supper, I’d have eaten it LAST NIGHT!”), and probably some other foods that were so exciting that I HAVE COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT THEM. And yet the quickly approaching school year – they go back on Wednesday – has me planning elaborate school lunches again: homemade soups packed in thermoses, empanadas, heart-shaped gingerbread cookies, homemade granola bars and other overreaching, unnecessarily fussy plans. They’d be just as happy, you see, with store-bought granola bars and a package of crackers and cheese, which makes me suspect that these fancy lunches aren’t all that much about them, perhaps.
Their teachers will see their lunches, you see – or at least the rotating lunch monitors, since it’s obvious that The Boy, especially, has no need for an adult presence while he eats – and so their lunches become one of my only ways for my constant Parenting as Public Performance Art act (well, beyond my kids being bright and nicely dressed and clean and well-behaved. Beyond THAT.), since I can’t hang around in their classes all day. (Well, I could. Some mothers at the school volunteer all day, every day. Really. But the school frowns upon me bringing my disruptive toddler to the kids’ classes and since it’s apparently ILLEGAL to leave her alone at home by herself, we don’t spend that much time at school.) So the teachers and/or lunchtime monitors need tangible proof – for some reason – that I work very hard at my children’s lunches.
It’s also about them, my growing-so-big kids. During the summer, we were together all day, and so they had me all day as a constant presence. They didn’t NEED a thermos of homemade chicken soup as proof that they were loved, because I was following them around listlessly, breaking up fights and reading Five Little Peppers and and taking them out for ice cream AGAIN. The proof of love was there clearly enough and so lunches became just a brief meal that interrupted their constant snacking. But now they’re going to spend the majority of their days away from me, and so I feel this need suddenly to make them homemade gingerbread cookies – full of iron, which they need, and heart-shaped for my heart, my very love, for my still-small children to carry out into this big scary world away from me.