Home For A Lunch

When I was a child I lived a five-minute walk from my school.  I would go out the back door, skip down the alley, squeeze through the crack in the fence, and saunter down the well-worn path alongside the plateau area that was flooded to become an ice rink in the long, long winters.  The plateau was between two hills sloping the same way; in winter we would sled down the steep hill, hitting the ice rink, and – if one was lucky with conditions or had enough kids piled into the wooden sleds – clearing the ice rink to go down the hill on the other side, which ended in a row of fences.  To my knowledge, no one ever hit the fences at the bottom, but if they did, it wouldn’t have been a cause for alarm.  It was the early eighties, after all.  Past the ice rink was the playground with the rickety teeter-totters of which I had been bumped off of many times, the squeaky, tippy swing set, and the wooden play structure that would give you splinters if you so much as looked at it.  The field with the baseball diamond and soccer field lay ahead, and there stood the school, a dark brown brick building with ugly orange doors.  I would reverse this trip every day at noon to go home for a hot lunch. 

Lunches of my childhood were the same whether I was at home or if I “ate over”, as we called it, at a friend’s house: soup and sandwich – grilled cheese or bologna, Campbell’s Tomato or Lipton’s Chicken Noodle – Zoodles, or Kraft Dinner.  Everyone I knew went home for lunch.  In my suburban, stay-at-home mom neighbourhood, eating lunch at school – save for the occasional extra-curricular club or activity - was not even an option.  Almost everyone had a mom at home to serve them and any extra friends lunch; the few who had working moms would go to a neighbour’s house, hired expressly for the purpose of lunch provision and noon hour care.

My kids do not eat lunch at school.  They come home every day except for early-dismissal Fridays, but instead of walking I drive them, given that this hour has 55 minutes and a fifteen minute walk there and back, not to mention the attiring and discarding of winter clothing would eat the time meant for eating.  And so I pick them up every day at noon, but these days they are in the extreme minority; one little girl from Mark’s class goes home for lunch three days a week, no one else in Jake’s class of 29 does.

I worried, then, when I was asked to contribute to the resurrecting of the Ladies Who Make Lunch, that I would be disqualified since I don’t belong to the club who wearily and with great boredom pack lunches every day; I merely pack snacks for their morning nutrition break.  However, and this is true of motherhood as a whole, we are all in this together.  Whether our children eat at school or at home, lunches are like laundry: vitally necessary and tediously never ending.  We tend to the nourishment of their little souls, their little minds, and their little bodies, and a big part of that bodily nourishment lies in the noon hour munching.  We all rise to the occasion even if that occasion is a tedious, unvarying chore. 

Join us, the Ladies Who (Make) Lunch, as we navigate the muddy waters of lunch preparation.  Follow us as we swim through the ocean of sandwiches, Thermoses, carrot sticks and cookies.  You’ll find recipes, ideas, memories, and diatribes as we rage against the machine of relentless lunch making in the face of school restrictions, allergies, and picky eating.  I’m Nicole; my fellow Ladies are Beck, Janet, Hannah, and Sue.  Come (make) lunch with us!