I fear we have nearly reached the end of it without even mentioning that May is
May School Lunch Awareness Month.
The awareness ribbon for this particular issue is made up of questionable strawberries,
and all of the packages of seaweed snacks you have been storing in your pantry that not one kid has touched, but they all swore in Costco that they loved, reminding you once again that you should listen to your gut.
May School Lunch is a non-preventable disease, and appears to affect wide swaths of American mothers.
Summer does come as a treatment.
Research shows it typically lays dormant until symptoms are triggered by motherhood burn-out, too many emails about spirit days and year-end events from the schools,
and feeling, frankly, pretty over being called and touched.
May School Lunch might come on slowly at first, with sufferers just beginning to only care slightly less about the age of the grapes they’re bagging, or how long those crackers have been left open, but, if left untreated for too long, severe sufferers have been known to start showing signs of the disease’s progression by doing things like packing, say, entire whole garden zucchinis in their child’s lunch.
Mother’s experiencing May School Lunch symptoms will have difficulty seeing the problems it can cause. They will, perhaps, deflect blame, and bring up how grateful their children should be for that garden zucchini, and tie their speeches back to the starving African children a lot.
Symptoms may include, but are not limited to:
- Apathy
- Hopelessness
- Sudden urge to clean out the pantry
- Slouched shoulders
- Staring at a group of condiments with a distant gaze
- Food Dysmorphia, characterized by an apparent misunderstanding of how things like a ziplock bag full of last night’s spaghetti and a marinara stained plastic fork might look.
The treatment for May School Lunch comes only with complete abstinence of packing lunches for a 10-12 week period.
Witnesses to the disease may observe the healing process taking place in the mother in the summer months with such signs as the children eating bags of Doritos for breakfast, and them making their own selves Totinos for lunch, as the mother asks them things like if their own feet and hands are broken.
To an untrained eye this phase may seem like the mother simply not caring for her children at all anymore,
but science now shows that this is actually a Motherhood Dormancy Period,
necessary for the revival of her full lunch-packing strength come the fall.
Observation of a mother affected by May School Lunch can be most easily recognized when children are spotted in the middle to end of May carting barely edible things in their lunch sacks,
(i.e. whole melons, bags of shredded cheese, tree bark?)
or using non-traditional items as food receptacles. (produce bag, sunglass case)
It is important to know that the children are not the ones suffering in such instances, and are generally highly adaptive at this phase.
This is, instead, a sign of a mother in need of support.
Yes, those crackers may be the texture of a display board,
but it’s better for your digestion to chew longer, anyway.
Yes, that’s the same carton of yogurt that’s been shuffled around the refrigerator since last October.
Consider it an old familiar friend.
You literally buy yogurt old. That’s what makes it what it is.
Focus should not be placed too heavily on expiration dates here.
Instead, May School Lunch should be treated with words aimed at the mother like,
“You’re doing so well,”
“You’ve got this,” and
(seen as most effective) “You’re almost to the end.”
It’s OK, Mama.
Just give the kids those plantain chips they promised they liked, or that half-empty $4 kombucha they begged for, and you skipped your own treat for.
They don’t eat lunch anyway in May, and they hardly ever did.
STICK IT IN.
It’s always just pulverized to oblivion when it comes back through the door.
How else would they have their daily blood sugar crash and after school melt down saying that they’re starving? You’ve all got a standard to uphold.
Tablespoon of jam left in the jar? They like jam.
STICK IT IN.
Might as well have some fun with it, since it’s all going in the trash anyway.
So, send them a whole garden zucchini, then take a picture of their face later as they confront you.
That picture will, for years, be your reward.
No one really does the cute food, or the cat shaped rice molds unless they’re on Instagram.
You’re doing fine. You’re doing great. You are right on track.
May is not for melon balls.
May is for a little thing I like to call “fried-rice-in-a-sack.”
If you or a loved one is suffering from May School Lunch, please know June is coming.
We stand in support.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
