Growing up, my packed lunches were 2 simple slices of crust-less white bread, often with a Kraft single-sliced cheese and ham. For a more bizarre and dangerous combination, it might have been buttered raisin bread but always teamed up with the same perfectly square cheese and ham. It might have looked fresh when it was first packed but the killer tropical humidity and heat always managed to put the capital ‘S’ in stink by the time I peeled opened my plastic lunchbox to reveal the limp cheese and equally soggy bread exhausted by its efforts to keep cool.
Did I eat them? Hell no! I must have scammed hot noodles off some unsuspecting friend and dumped the sad lunches in the back corner of the school bus every day at exactly 7.25 pm , probably as the bus rounded the corner into our estate where I lived.
I figured that my kids will not have to suffer through the boring lunches that I had. The health-food Nazi in me was determined that their lunches were going to be healthy. That meant that I’ve said “No” to whines and pleas for bought lunches at school. My kids aren’t going to buy pizzas and chicken Franken-nuggets even if they cost as little as $1.50 for a meal and if it meant saving me the headache of preparing lunches in the morning.
The Nazi in me was willing to prepare lunches in the morning just so that her kids could eat varied lunches like freshly packed salmon onigiri (Japanese rice balls) with seaweed or shrimp and cucumber sushi rolls or couscous with homemade meatballs; pasta with olives etc. Very rarely was lunch a simple ham and cheese sandwich and if it were, it would still have been browned in butter on the outside so that it looked liked the perfect cheese melt.
Yes, my kids will eat lunch – healthy, stylish and hopefully, not sweaty lunches.
But did I also mention that life can really throw a curve ball at the best laid plans?
Friday morning at the breakfast table, my kids talked about how some of their friends didn’t eat bread crusts and how most had packed ‘unhealthy’ lunches – according to their lunch-Nazi Mom’s definition. Then, Sean brought up that his friends voted his lunch as….drum roll..... the “Yuckiest!” Apparently, I only lost by a nose hair to some other kid’s mother who’d been packing her son -- “brown blobs” which were considered even far worse than my "Yuckiest" title. She reigned champion.
I’m flattered.
The only upside to my “Yuckiest” packed lunches is that my dear kids actually like them.
Or it could just be the strange voices talking in my head.
I leave you with a recent drawing by Aidan hopefully to distract you from my newly achieved lunch title. I'm the unmistakable brown and blue blob.
