As I have written about before, I attended a parochial school for the majority of my grade school career. It didn't have a lunch program, so every day, every damned day, you brought your lunch. Mine went in a metal Mickey Mouse Club lunchbox. This is back when such things were metal and people didn’t worry that their children were going to fall on the things and get lockjaw or staph or Ebola or just flat out cut off their own heads or the heads of children around them. You had to be tough to grow up in the '70s (please ignore the sound you hear. It is just the groans of all the Elastic Waist readers who are under 30 or over 40) so you got a tetanus shot and took your Flintstones chewables and braved the cruel, unfeeling world on the merit of your wee little Buster Browns.

My mother was not a lunch maker. In fact, I only had the lunchbox because I had cried to my grandmother that my mother never remembered to buy brown lunch bags and instead sent my lunch in whatever she could find, be it white Chinese takeout bags or plastic shopping bags and in one horrifying incident, an empty bread bag, crumbs still nestled down in the crinkles. All of this would simply serve to underline the fact that I was very different from the other kids in my private school. They all had their original set of parents, and wore clothing that was neither wrinkled nor of questionable origins. Also, they did not already have breasts bigger than those sported by the third grade teacher and they were not wearing pants bought in the Juniors section.

The school had one rule regarding lunches: if your parents put the food in your lunch, then they wanted you to eat it, so you couldn’t go to recess until you ate it. All of it. This was before Fruit Roll-Ups and Lunchables, but the lunch-friendly kid stuff like Cheetos and cans of pudding always went without a problem. But if you ate around the middle of your apple, the way they do in cartoons? Not good enough. The core had to be a carefully nibbled cylinder, preferably with the seeds poking through. Your sandwich crusts? Damn right you’re going to eat them. Needless to say, I was always a good eater. I never had a problem finishing all of my milk or eating even the weirder sandwiches that my mother concocted, maybe in an attempt to dampen my love of food, things like peanut butter, raisins and carrot slaw or leftover soyburger with cabbage (this is also the origination of my abhorrence of mayonnaise, having slogged through countless soggy tuna sandwiches that had been sitting near the classroom radiator all morning). Usually, she’d foist whatever was left over from dinner the night before, which meant that I had many meals of cold chicken and bok choy from her night gig as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. I was 17 before I realized that pork lo mein was intended to be eaten hot.

Then one day (around the same time as the Schwinn incident), I opened up my matching Mickey Mouse Club thermos, fully expecting to see some tepid wonton soup or if I was lucky, actual Campbell’s Chicken and Stars from the can (I found this preferable because, well, I was eight), but instead found some orange chunks floating in fluid. Then I looked at my meatloaf sandwich and remembered that the side dish that night had been boiled carrots. I chomped them down, because, hey, I liked carrots, even cooked soggy ones, and then went up to the teacher to show her my empty lunch box and be excused for noon recess. She checked my thermos and saw the carrot water and sent me back to my desk. Yes, the water my mother had included to keep the carrots warm(ish)? I was expected to eat it.

I never cried at school. Everyone else had cried at one time or another, between the taunts or skinned knees, but I never did. The three-tiered death knell of weirdness (fat girl, divorced mom, rented house) set me up for so many attacks from my Wonder Bread peers that there was almost nothing you could say to me to shake my cool. I had fallen a million times on icy playgrounds, been punched in the face (resulting in the toughest and coolest black eye ever), and received a broken thumb during what is a textbook case of why the game Murder Ball should be outlawed from our phys ed curriculum, but never once did I burst into tears. However, being sent back to drink nasty carrot water, to be punished for my mother using my lunchbox as a garbage disposal? There may have been some furtive tears.

I sat at my desk and missed half of the recess period, glaring at my teacher, wishing for a vocabulary that could have explained that she was being ridiculous, that my mother never intended for me to actually drink the fucking cooking water for the carrots. The other children were long gone out to play, the best swings claimed, the monkey bars completely populated, and there I sat, glaring at a 20-something third grade teacher who was getting exasperated about not being able to leave the classroom and hit the smoking lounge, chided me, tsking and saying that she never expected someone with such a good appetite to have problems finishing her lunch. The littler girls like Jackie or Kelly, sure, but certainly not Weetabix. By being a fat girl, by being hungry, I had lost the right to refuse to eat anything. I couldn't find something distasteful because come on, I ate everything. Finally, she told me that if I didn’t drink the carrot water, that I was going to miss afternoon recess too, and then have detention after school until I finished it. I pinched my nose, closed my eyes, braced myself and thought of England. It was ten years before I touched another cooked carrot. —Weetabix