Goodbye Home-made Lunch
Sending my daughter to high school and the loss of the lunch connection
Issue 47: From Sara Kate
The transition from home-made lunch to no-made lunch actually happened a year ago when my daughter went from a K-8 school with no meal plan, to a high school with a cafeteria and off-campus lunch privileges. But it wasn’t until just this week when, in that back-to-school flurry of cabinet cleaning, I finally said goodbye to the relics of my decade plus rhythm of making her mid-day meal by donating our drawerful of lunch containers to another family. It hit me, and hard, that I’m never making school lunch for my daughter again.
This was a connection we shared for so long, it became muscle memory. Sure, as a food pro, I took pride in the meals I could pull together for her—many from Dynamite recipe testing—and even bigger psychic pride in the days when I could admit that I didn’t have all my ducks in a row and had to punt with a simple sandwich or a sort of healthy buffet of snacks. Both felt like an accomplishment for someone like me. A practice that built over many years.
But the real way we connected through lunch was my handwritten notes, something I picked up from my own parents. Unlike a sappy birthday card she had to open in front of me, or—the more recent iteration of my written affection—a love text that pops up on her phone without warning, the lunch notes were steady, expected, and because they were always folded in half, she could decide when (or if) and where to read them, keeping them closed if she didn’t feel like reading them while she ate.
We barely ever discussed these jottings, but I know she saved them because over the years I have encountered masses of them stashed in little zipper pockets and side sleeves of whatever insulated lunch box contraption she convinced me to buy her that year. (Raise your hand if you got through your entire schooling back in the day on brown paper bags. Me!) Every so often I would retrieve these balled up notes and transfer them to a Ziploc I shoved in the back of that drawer. A collage one day? A gift to her when she graduates from college? I didn’t dare dispose of them.
On the day I got rid of the containers, I went through that bag of notes and spent a good hour flattening them out and arranging them in chronological order, trying to piece together what was going on in our lives at the time: a grandparent about to visit, a big test that day, a hard time with a friend. It was a visual piecemeal diary of all the storms and glories we passed through over the years as mother and daughter and really got me thinking about the ways we create meaning during meals, even meals we don’t share together. A note, a candle, a blessing. It isn’t about the food alone.
Why I took a whole year to sift through that drawer with its bento boxes, insulated Thermoses, nesting sets of cutlery and kiddo chopsticks, and the bag of notes is a bit of a mystery. I think that during this past year as she made her way through her first semesters of high school, I was confronting a lot about the change of my role as a parent. Maybe I wasn’t ready to clean out the drawer, which meant accepting the reality of not having a little kid anymore.
The truth is, as our children get older, we move through so many of these transitions. Teens, I find, need less and less of the daily duties of parenthood like lunches and ferrying back and forth to playdates. But they still need to know they are loved, that need humans of all ages share. And of course loving her isn’t a challenge, no way. But, without lunch, finding ways to slip her these notes sometimes is.
The other day I put a note in her sneakers. I’m pretty sure that one went in the trash after using it to wrap up a wad of gum. I guess the trick is to just keep communicating that love, whether it’s over a meal or not, whether is ends up in a plastic-protected archive or in the garbage, and know that it is still a parent giving their child nutrition and sustenance.