Humor | Parenting

Mommy, If Someone Spat in Your Lunch Would You Still Eat It?

A Harrowing Choose Your Own Adventure!

Make her eat them or order Uber Eats? (Made by author in Canva)

The dreaded school name flashes on my call display. I mentally cycle through the reasons. Vomit. Fever. Lice.

Not lice. Please not again.

I brace myself, slide my greasy pizza finger along the screen, and answer the call. A small voice belonging to my nine-year-old daughter is on the other end of my tentative hello.

“Mommy?”

Hi, you’ve reached the voicemail box of… I want to say. But instead, I say, “What’s wrong?” in a clipped tone that implies I’m busy (eating pizza). Shifting from foot to foot, I prepare to downplay whatever this is.

Lice? Well, where do you think she got it from in the first place?
Fever? We just run hot in our family.
Vomit? Prove it’s hers. It could be anyone’s. Name three things she ate this morning.

This is the dark side to balancing a full-time job with parenting most days.

“Mommy, I have a question for you.”

I need to have a talk with this administration about appropriate and inappropriate calls home. If this is another one of those calls where my daughter whispers into the receiver: “Can I come home, we’re doing patterns, again!” or, “I can’t find my mitten. I think I left it in my jacket or maybe at home or maybe oh never mind here it is.”

Robyn from Environmental is serial emailing me and I have a waste-o-time check-in with my boss in five minutes.

“Okay, what is it?”
“Um. Um. Um. Um.”
“DUDE!”
“Mommy, don’t call me that. Please.”
“Sorry, I’m in a bit of a hurry, what is the question? Is everything okay?”
“Mommy, if someone spat into your lunch, would you still eat it?”

Da fuck?

At this point in the story, there is so much I want to say and I can’t decide in what order to say it, so how about a good old fashioned choose your own adventure!