going home for lunch

When I began grade school, in 1959, the year I started first grade, all the kids in my school walked hoe for lunch, had lunch with stay-at-home moms and walked back to school. The few kids who hd no moms at home at lunch time, i.e. moms who worked outside the home, they all ate lunch in one classroom, probably with some teacher on lunch duty.

All the kids who had stay-at-home moms felt a bit sorry for the kids who ate lunch at school. I could not imagine what it would be like to not have a stay-at-hoe mom.

I guess the world changed a lot from 1959 to 1967 when I graduated form the 8th grade. Sometime in my later grade school years, everyone brought lunches to school, ate lunch at school and we all got out a little earlier. This earlier discharge caused a new set of problems for the kids with outside-the-home working moms.

What changed?  I guess women were entering the paid work force more and more. Maybe my packed-to-the-gills baby boom laden school was trying to be modern.

Once, when I wsa in the third grade, I passed out on the school playground. The school called my mom to tell her she hd to come pick me up, that the school did not want to be responsible for what had been a longish time with me unconscious on the playground. I had also fallen smack hard on my forehead so the school wsa worried about a concussion.

MY parents, like most households in my world around 1960, the year I passed out on the playground for no apparent reason, shared one car. And usually my dad took that car to work. Mom only kept the car if she had a specific reason to need a car but a stay at home mom with a baby in the house and three or four kids to feed at lunch time rarely needed a car.

When the school called to say "Come and get her, we can't be responsible if she is concussed", mom said "I will have to bring the children's wagon and haul her home in the wagon." The school person on the phone might have gasped as she said "A wagon? I don't think it wise to haul an unconscious and maybe concussed child home in a wagon." Mom said "well, that's all I've got."

Mom knew other moms at home but all of them also shared the family car with their men and their men took the family car to work.

Mom got off the phone and began to bundle up her latest baby and was trying to figure out how to haul unconscious second grader me and her newborn in a wagon, when a priest from our parish called. He said the school nuns had told him I needed to go home, that mom had no car and he would bring me home. And he did.

I wish I remembered exactly when kids at my school stopped going home, midday, for lunch. It was such a different time.

This shift, to eating lunch at school, must have happened when I was in the 7th grade. Because my brother Chuck the fuck was still in the school and we still went home for lunch. Older kids had a different lunch time than younger kids so I ate with Chuck and Joe and Tom and Dave ate together. It never occurred to me back then that giving my mom two lunch shifts of children to feed was adding to her work load.

Whatev.

I remember that I was in the 7th grade when my brother Chuck, teasing me in particularly nasty comments, although he was always nasty and I have no recollection, not once, of either of my parents ever telling Chuck to shut the fuck up, to stop tormenting his sister. Chuck did not torment Joe who was a hella lot bigger than Chuck, albiet two years younger than him. but Chuck was fine with teasing a girl.

So one day, when I was in the 7th grade, Chuck said something I considered truly despicable and I threw my fork at him. Flinging that fork was not quite a concious choice. I was shocked by whatever Chuck had said, deeply hurt, triggered and I flung that work instinctively, without thinking. Mom was not home. She had gone over to Mrs. Danaher's for some reason. Mrs. Danaher lived on the next block, had lots of kids like mom had.

My flunk fork, and all four of ite tines, landed in the upper park of Chuck's left cheek, four tiny puncture wounds. Chuck could not have been very wounded because he jumped up, taking care to hold that fork in its four puncture holes, and ran down to the Danaher's to show my mom.

Duh.  The work was not really embedded in his face. He held it in to 'show mom' what I had done. Fuck that asshole retroctively. The fork proved I was wrong and my mom, and neither my dad ever would listen to me tell them what he had said. The fact of his four tiny fork tine punctures was my doom.

I was punished by not being allowed out to play after school for a long time. Ha. I was never allowed out to play unless I was toting mom's babies along with me. So I was never allowed 'out to play'. I was always working for mom, her own Cinderella.  I doted on my two baby brothers at that time, Tom and Dave. My punishment only meant I had to take care of them at home for awhile.

It was sometime after the fork assault that our school stopped having kids go home for lunch.

I did not understand then and I don't understand now why giving us 20 minutes to eat lunch at our desks, bag lunches from home for my school had no in-use cafeteria (it had one but that school did not ever use it) added up to being let out of school one hour and fifteen minutes early.

Cultural change, especially when it is imposed on communities without any community buy-in, no engaging of the comunity, is hard. It's not that people don't want to change but people don't wat to 'be' changed.

In my Catholic parish world, nuns and priests had godlike powers with the priests of course having ore power than the nuns. I know tose nuns had to get the priests to okay that lunch change.