My mom was very strict about including healthy stuff in my packed school lunches and this bothered me deeply because how can you expect a child to believe that her family loves her when all her friends are eating Twinkies and she is stuck with a bag of carrots?

Even worse than carrots was the never ending bologna sandwiches.

So, like the typical kid that I was, I often didn't eat my lunch. This never went over very well when I returned home from school and my mom found my uneaten bologna sandwich at the bottom of my Barbie lunch pail. She always gave me a lecture about all the starving children all over the world and how grateful I should be for the food we have, but I had a very hard time listening to her over the rumble of my stomach and the voices in my head trying to mastermind a plan to sneak a reach into the cookie jar.

There was one day in particular that I remember coming home from school and because it had been a very long and exhausting day of playing house and colouring inside the lines, I just didn’t have any energy left to have to deal with my mother and her starving kids lecture. So after I got off the bus, my lunch pail and me made a mad dash for the house and hid behind the door to our front entrance.

Now, a clever kid might decide to toss the left over evidence of unconsumed lunch products in the garbage before returning home and handing their lunch pail over to the discerning eye of their mother, but I was not clever. I was stubborn. And dammit, enough was enough with the bologna already

I didn’t exactly have much of a plan other than to just sit behind the door and hide indefinitely. I had yet to work out the logistics of how long one must remain hidden when on a bologna strike or how one even goes about re-entering society again after god only knows how long I would need to remain in hiding.

After sitting there for a while, I heard my mom walk outside and call my name.

I remained silent.

Concerned, my mom returned inside and I heard her call the bus company to find out where I was. After learning that I had already been dropped off at home, my mom panicked and called the police.

This worried me greatly because I thought that she was going to have me arrested for not eating bologna.

There was no way I was coming out of hiding now.

After several hours of listening to the mayhem unravel outside my house over the search for me and my bologna sandwich, I grew very weary. So while my mother was having a panic attack trying to find me, I decided to take a nap.

Several hours later my mom finally found me curled up in a ball behind the door, sound asleep, clutching my lunch pail.

When she asked me why I hid behind the door while she was out of her mind with worry trying to find me, I confessed that there was a bologna sandwich in my lunchbox.

And as the story goes, me and my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches lived happily ever after.

Labels: It's All About Me