Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, let's talk about lunch. The brown bag kind.Little One* sees me packing his and says, "Oh, by the way. Don't put pickles in my lunch. Like. . .ever again."
"But honey. You like pickles. And with tunafish you need one. Everyone needs a pickle with tunafish."
"Well, remember what happened that time. . ."
"Don't be ridiculous. That was a long time ago. Yesterday the juice didn't leak through the bag, did it? I used the special snacksize ziplock bag and it worked, right?"
He has frustration in his eyes, his voice a nervous edge. "But what if it hadn't? What if it had leaked. We were lucky this time, but what if we aren't the next?"
I'm patient. "It didn't leak. The pickle didn't leak. Correct me if I'm wrong. The pickle leaked only that one time, but yesterday, no plastic wrap, just the zip-lock, the pickle juice did not get all over your notebooks. Right? A new paradigm."
"I know. But what if it does? Why take the chance?" He's waving his hands passionately, they tell it all.
"I'll tell you why it's worth it to take the chance, but only if you really want to know."
He looks at me skeptically. "Hit me."
"Because one day you'll be married and maybe she'll be packing you a lunch with a pickle and you'll see her doing it and you'll stop her, irrationally. She'll look at you with confusion and say, 'But you LOVE pickles,' and you'll say, 'But not in my lunch.' Then you'll tell her the story about what happened to you when you were nineteen and she'll blame me."
I go on. "You have to get over this for the sake of your marriage and for the sake of my relationship with my future daughter-in-law. I'm at risk here, risk of conflict, abandoment. All of it."
He sighs. "Does it always have to come to this? My future relationships?"
"Yes."
"Don't you think you're exaggerating a little?"
"Uh, uh. This is important. And there's more to it, of course. The only way you'll get over the trauma is to grab a pickle by the bumps, double wrap it if you have to, but pack it and eat it with your sandwich at school."
"You're not going to blog on this, are you?"
Poor guy.
therapydoc
*Not so little. Almost twenty years old, he towers over me.
