Font ResizeAUSTIN, Texas — The week before I started second grade, my mom told me she wouldn't be making my lunch anymore.
I'd just turned 8. It wasn't just that my mom, a teacher in another rural town not far from our own, wouldn't have time in the morning to make sandwiches for my sister and me. "I didn't want you to feel like you were an elitist who was too good for school lunch," she says now.
I was both a picky eater and the new kid in a small school, and I knew the reputation school lunches had. We'd just moved to Missouri, and I was already self-conscious about how my new classmates would view me, so I decided I'd make my own lunch.
With the exception of pizza or chicken patty days on the school's menu, I made my lunch every day for 11 school years. My mom says she was surprised I stuck with it for more than just a few weeks.
With school starting, maybe this is the year your kids start making their own lunch.
For the first three years, I made my own lunch, my choice was turkey and cheese sandwiches (no mayo) or peanut butter and jelly.
Then, I started to get more creative, packing favorite snacks like cheese quesadillas or cottage cheese and black olives in Tupperware containers.
I learned tricks for packing food to be eaten later. To stop pickles from leaking out of plastic baggies, I wrapped them in paper towels. I kept chicken noodle soup warm in a thermos. I stopped storing crackers in the same bag with cheese; they
I had always enjoyed grocery shopping with my mom, but now I had a vested interest in what went in the cart. I learned early not to ask for Lunchables because my mom showed me how many more crackers and cheese you could buy for less per serving.
As we strolled the aisles, instead of indulging every gimmicky prepackaged food I reached for, my mom explained how that kind of food is marketed toward children and where to find the better-tasting, more-healthful and less-expensive alternatives. After all, she was making her lunch with what we bought, too.
My mom, who is a guidance counselor now, knew she was empowering my sister and me by not doing everything for us.
"Anytime kids have input in what they eat or do with their time or the rules that are made, it makes them more responsible," she says.
Of course, making my lunch every single day was a bummer sometimes, but once it became routine, I started to look forward to it, especially when I graduated to a cafeteria with a micro-wave. Hello, leftovers!
In high school, my football player buddies would complain about their mothers, who'd made them another turkey sandwich even though they'd asked for ham.
"Make your own darn sandwiches," I remember thinking to myself as I enjoyed reheated lasagna or Chinese takeout from the night before.
I grew to relish the control over what I ate. I knew how to make what I liked to eat, or at least how to reheat it.
As you can imagine, these skills carried me into college: I already knew how to feed myself, which was one less thing to learn when I moved out.
"My ultimate goal was to raise independent daughters," my mom says.
We got there, one sandwich at a time.
