Modern Technology Meets Maternal Guilt

Packing school lunch is one of those parental tasks that's mostly pretty enjoyable -- especially if you have time to write silly little love notes to stick in with the sandwich & sundries. It's definitely work, though: you gotta keep the pantry stocked with bread, and use it before it gets moldy, and remember which flavor of yogurt each child prefers, and cut up the apples just right, and so on. Not only that, it's work that takes place during the harried 45 minutes that you're also trying to get everyone out of bed and dressed and breakfasted and packed up and out the door with their shoes tied and coats on and field trip permission slips signed, and maybe throwing in a load of laundry and filling up the dishwasher while you're at it. Some days you just can't pull it off.

And there are days when you do pull it off, but then somebody leaves his or her lunchbox on the kitchen counter, and then you have to decide if you have time to run back for it before you go to work, and you wonder: when they grow up will they remember with gratitude the times you made this extra effort, or will they resentfully recall the times you didn't, and they were stuck eating slimy "Meal in a Peel" from the school cafeteria?

All of this maternal exertion would be tolerable if the whole performance weren't basically on display for the amusement of the volunteers and staff who monitor the lunchroom. These are the people who read your silly notes aloud to the child who can't decipher your scrawl, who make excuses for you when you cut the sandwich into rectangles instead of triangles, who lend your children money when their cafeteria accounts are low. They try not to laugh at the faces your 6th grader makes as she chokes down a cafeteria sandwich, and stop you in the hall to tell you not to bother packing a yogurt for the 2nd grader, because he never, ever eats it.

Sometimes their interventions become the stuff of legend: one morning in desperation we grabbed a couple of granola bars from a pile of strays at back of the cupboard and shoved one into each child's lunchbox, trying not to wonder which soccer season they were leftover from. When Simon complained to the principal (who happened to be monitoring lunch that day) that his granola bar had worms crawling on it, his concerns fell on deaf ears -- perhaps because he had cried wolf so many times before about perfectly edible lunchbox items -- and the granola bar was tossed into the garbage without a second glance. When Josie approached a few minutes later to complain about hers, the slightly exasperated (and apparently hungry) principal grabbed it and chomped into it defiantly, to prove to her that there was nothing wrong with it.

You can, perhaps, imagine our horror when we heard about this incident later that afternoon. After a little investigation into the dark depths of the cupboard, we determined that the crunchy granola bars in green wrappers were fine, but the chewy granola bars in gold wrappers were indeed infested with moth larvae. A mortifying conversation with the principal assured us that the granola bar he consumed was maggot-free, but it seems Simon's was one of the revolting ones. As a result of this episode -- which we are pretty sure will be recounted on a therapist's couch years from now, completely eclipsing thousands of happier lunch moments -- granola bars of all kinds are now banned from the lunch menu.

All of this may explain the arrival of this photo in our inbox on Wednesday:



It appears that the container of salsa we packed in Simon's lunch exploded sometime during the morning, soaking the chips, sandwich, and cookies, and ruining his Ironman lunchbox.

Fortunately an alert lunchroom monitor was there with an iPhone to document this travesty. And send the evidence to Simon's mother. Who may need to discuss the matter with her therapist.