Bento Box Mommies

I am both a cultural anthropologist and the mother of a kindergartener. If forced to pick sides in the Mommy Wars, work won. I love my son to death of course, so much in fact that I take my responsibilities as a co-breadwinner extremely seriously. Still, I get a kick out of reading Parents/Parenting and whatever copies of the Seven Sisters my dentist keeps on hand (I seem to have a weak spot for cupcake recipes, go figure).

I also subscribe to websites like that of "Better Homes and Gardens" even though currently I have neither a home (we have a small apartment) nor a garden (does a balcony count?). They ping me weekly with enticing come-ons like New Spring Sides for Easter, though as a non-Christian household, we won't really need that Asparagus Bake for a visit to Grandma's snowy linen-laid table (does my mother even know where her oven IS these days?)

Yet, of all of the features of these magazines, none blow my mind quite like the after-school snacks featured on the Better Homes and Gardens website Elaborate concoctions and confections currently decorating the site include frogs made out of pickles (what kid eats kosher dills?), strawberry fool for your little renaissance man, and a 'walking-stick' from peanut butter, pretzels and mini marshmallows, and smiling pineapple salads. I've often wondered who makes these. My stay-at-home mom friends sure don't - they serve up cheese quesadillas from Costco, and Uncrustables, the pre-made-frozen-to-be-thawed-crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from Smuckers.

I have even considered making a research project out of this, just to find out if there are ANY mothers who do this type of time consuming edible art. My theory, as always cooked up in the shower before work, is that these after-school snacks are insinuating themselves into American culture, becoming to American moms what the Bento Box is in Japan:

"Bento is whatever you want it to be, as long as it's at least 10 different types of food each in tiny quantities, ideally half of which are squiggly mushy things with daikon, all served up in a multi-compartmented box. It's quite good. In kindergarten, though, bento calls for no-holds-barred maternal competition. A high school ex-student of mine once told me that bento offered Japanese moms a rare chance to show their creativity and love in a public forum, albeit a school lunchroom, and that moms sometimes went to extreme lengths and woke up at terrifically early hours to be able to provide their child with the most aesthetically-pleasing lunch possible. Department stores stock all manner of accessories to help moms turn ordinary sushi rolls into extraordinary tiny seaweed-outlined pandas, hot dogs into octopi, raw carrots into goldfish, onigiri into popular cartoon characters."

In contrast, at my house we have a drawer that I keep filled with snack packs of goldfish, teddy bears, and fruit rollups for him to forage in. In anthropology we explain this difference as the distinction between two poles of childrearing practice, independence vs. dependence training. In other words, from the day he was born I have essentially thrown stuff at my son and told him to get the heck on with the process that will culminate with him leaving home at age eighteen and me weeping into his discarded Pokemon pillowcase from empty-nest syndrome. A Japanese mother has spent these precious years binding her children ever more closely to herself and ultimately to society. Her kid will be an adept team player while my kid will be adept at self-gratification. Or so goes the theory at any rate.

Now, in fairness, I have yet to provide my son with his lunch on a daily basis, as his preschool does that quite nicely. However, when he goes to kindergarten this fall, getting sucked into the cut-throat cuteness competition is well within the bounds of possibility. Why is this so?

I think that the same drive unites the world of moms. We have choices to make, everyday, that may help or hinder our children. We will never know to a certainty how much their success or failure in life hinged upon these choices. Do we send them to the right schools? Did we nag about homework too much? Not enough? Should I have gotten him the new game system when he asked? Or was it good to model self-restraint?

On some level, I must believe that my lunch choices for him can influence whether he is happy, smart, socially well adjusted and popular with his peers - or turn him into a social outcast eating liverwurst and onions in the corner alone. I must believe that, in this arena, as maybe in no other, I can control the outcome. I can use it to demonstrate my competence to the other mothers. See, I work full-time and still find time to prepare attractive and balanced meals! I don't suck as a mom! This arena provides me with at least some validation that I am doing my job correctly. A validation that is sorely lacking elsewhere in our society, where parents of every stripe are constantly given reasons to feel defensive. Now, all I need to do is find the perfect lunchbox before September and everything will be perfect, I'm sure.