When All Else Fails

There is no question that being a kid can be tough. Homework has to be completed and then turned in (that's often the harder task around our house), rules have to be followed, expectations of parents and teachers have to be met. What's a kid to do with all this pressure?

Many years ago, in a small town in Pennsylvania, I can remember facing a difficult choice.

Mom had worked things out so that all eight children could be fed and bathed and put to bed every night with the least amount of fuss possible. Sandwiches for school lunches were made in a sort of assembly line, with slices of Wonder bread laid out in two rows. One parent slapped on the butter and the other parent added a slice of American cheese, the sandwiches were put into waxed paper and dropped into brown paper bags along with a box of raisins, and voila, lunch for school was ready.

Baths were a matter of allowing us, often in pairs, to dip in and out, with a scrub here and there, towel off and get into flannel pj.s made by Grandma in graduated sizes.

Everyone had the same bedtime, 7:00 or 7:30, regardless of their age so that one parent could read one set of bedtime stories, usually from Old Mother Westwind, and be done for the evening.

As I said, I faced one particular difficulty. I loathed the lunches my parents packed on their assembly line and could never quite finish one during lunch period in the school cafeteria. A cafeteria, by the way that did not in those days offer hot lunches. My teachers, having lived through the Depression, were not about to let children waste food by throwing any of it away. All left-overs had to be neatly packed up into the brown paper bags and taken home every afternoon at 3:00.

This would not have been difficult but for the fact that my parents also had a rule. No lunch food could be returned uneaten from school.

So I faced a choice. Would I risk my parent's displeasure or my teacher's? I talked it over with my best friend while walking home one day. Gretchen, an Irish Catholic from a similarly large family pointed out that it was mainly a matter of consequences. Was it going to be worse to stay after school, the usual punishment for offenses large and small, or be disciplined in some unforeseen way by my parents? What if my parents sent the same partially uneaten sandwich to school again the next day?

Horrors.

We stopped on the bridge that spanned the Tidioute Creek (or The Crick, as the locals called it) and contemplated the problem. Suddenly, without having to think more than a few seconds, we looked at each other, smiled, and then took out the contents of the brown paper bag and tossed them into the creek.

Problem solved.

This proved to be such a handy solution, we took to stopping every day to deposit the remains of lunch, so that by the end of the school year there must have been a flotilla of cheese sandwiches making their way downstream toward the Allegheny River.

Creative children will always find a way!

I am not sure what lesson to draw from this story other than the obvious; some flexibility is required when adults place demands on their kids. If a child simply can't swallow a cheese sandwich, the sandwich will end up in the creek somewhere, or the dumpster, or traded for someone else's peanut butter.

Parents, you see, don't always win, and I suppose that is a good thing. As long as children don't hurt themselves it is probably wise to allow them to deal with being between a rock and a hard place from time to time. Though I am not one to encourage deception. I suppose I would rather know from my daughter now if she is taking any evasive action, so that we can work it out together. But my instinct tells me that there are things I don't know.

Do I really want to know?

Hmmm...I'm not sure.