Eve Crawford Peyton

One day, I won’t be packing so many lunches. Am I happy about this or sad? So much of my life revolves around the school calendar. This is true professionally – and has been for about the past decade, as I work for a high school now and worked for a university before that – but it’s even more true as a mom.  I have to keep track of A Days and B Days for my older one so I know when to schedule orthodontist appointments to coincide with a study hall. I have to remember that my younger one has science and social studies on Tuesdays and Fridays so that I can make sure she packs her purple binder and that she doesn’t have PE on Wednesdays so that’s the day I can wash her PE uniform. And then there’s the matter of lunches and snacks. I pack two lunches every night and then make sure Georgia has two snacks packed in her backpack since they eat late in the day at her school. I hit Trader Joe’s every Sunday to get burritos, fruits and veggies, seaweed snacks, dehydrated fruit, peanut butter pretzels (for my older one, who doesn’t go to a nut-free school), veggie straws, and chocolate-covered pretzels (for my younger one, who does go to a nut-free school). I alternate between Costco and Aldi every other Sunday for things like bocconcini, Goldfish, Pocky, granola bars, fruit leather, Gatorade, and frozen chicken nuggets. My husband, Robert, picks up the slack at Rouses, stocking up on Lunchables and Mini-Doritos. This suits us. I hate shopping, but I know exactly what the kids like and in what quantities they will eat it while Robert loves shopping and enjoys just browsing the grocery store and seeing what looks good. He sometimes goes to the store twice in one day, just to see if anything new came in. I joked to some friends the other day that, based on our shopping habits, I think that Robert thinks he is Parisian and he thinks that I think I am a Midwestern housewife snowed in in Minnesota. Still, though, we are in a rhythm for nine months of every year. And then summer hits and I sort of struggle a bit because I am a creature of routine and habit.  As I walked out of Aldi in mid-May, I thought, “That might be my last trip for school snacks of the academic year.” (To be clear: The kids still eat over the summer. But my older daughter spends summers with her dad in St. Louis, and Georgia doesn’t do day camp, so our consumption patterns shift pretty drastically.) I was initially happy. Packing lunches and snacks can be such a slog at the end of a long day, and it’s at least vaguely demoralizing to see so much food come back uneaten. Sometimes I feel like I am just throwing money away so I can feel like a decent mother who feeds her kids a wide variety of produce – because a lot of sliced cucumbers and carrots and grapes and strawberries (things my kids claim to like!) come back in their lunchboxes and go right down the disposal. But it slowly dawned on me that I don’t have too many more summers left with my older daughter. After this one, I have only one more where she will go back to school at the end of it; after the next one, she will be off to college or elsewhere in the wider world, and if she’s not eating her strawberries and carrots, I won’t even know about it. Farther down the road but still out there, still looming, is the fact that my younger daughter is already closing in on her teen years and one day she too will no longer need a packed lunch every day. My world has revolved around the academic calendar because my world has revolved around my kids. One day it won’t. It’s a terrifying thought, although also a little bit exciting to think: Who will I be when I’m not just a mom anymore? For now, though, I’ll just be at the counter, cutting the crusts off of sandwiches and smiling wistfully.