I greeted my first assignment as snack mom with undiluted pleasure. Like many of my contemporaries, I had delayed childbearing into the thirties, and had only two children. Now was the time for commitment to participate intimately in the life of my children and to bear witness to every school pageant, field trip and sports event. And if the new system required snack moms, then I was going to be one kick-ass snack mom, with creative and healthy snacks. The initial enthusiasm quickly soured by the second semester; instead of hand baked goodies, like everyone else I rushed to the store to get a box of just-in-time sugary Teddy grahams (who came up with that genius marketing idea) and a jug of sugary juice. I didn’t want to buck the system right away and become a pariah amongst the other attentive moms, but it did seem to me that children could bring their damn snack, thank you very much!
Snack mom is also very akin to the Halloween greeter, who must sit by the door for several hours and dispense candy to waves of unknown children. In one of the neighborhoods we lived in, our street consisted of houses that were fairly close together with short driveways, a very efficient street to trick or treat on. As the years went by, I realized that carpools were arriving on our street from adjacent suburbs, where I guess the trick or treating was less fertile. I would see a car pull up at the end of the street and disgorge six or seven kids with barely a token costume on. The car would wait while the kids made their way down our block, where they would then be picked up and moved to the next block.
Trick or treating was a two adult job, one to escort the kids, another to man the homefront. For several years in a row, Nick managed to be out of town for Halloween, so I had to juggle both responsibilities. I didn’t want our house to get egged, so I put a bowl of candy on our doorstep with a note asking children not to be greedy and take one candy each. When I came back after about an hour, all the candy AND the bowl was gone. The next year, I simply spread the candy out on the porch on top of some newspaper. One year I got home from work a little bit late, and Vashni, our babysitter from India, was fielding the first trick or treaters. She was entirely unfamiliar with the traditions of Halloween, so was quite perplexed when children came to the door asking for candy. She rushed around the house to find something to give the children and ended up putting a popsicle in each of their trick or treat bags!
I think that my mother shared the same frustrations, but she got very inventive about venting them. I remember that she would take a piece of raw liver in her hand, and ask all the older trick or treaters to shake hands with her. They would be left with sticky calf’s blood on their hands. I can’t imagine that this would be tolerated in this day and age, and would expect a summons from the police or children’s services. There was also a group of boys that mother particularly disliked, because they always took large handfuls of candy without any words of thanks. One year she got a whole bowl of tapioca and dotted some decoy candy on top of it. When the boys showed up, she offered them the bowl, and said, “We have too much candy this year, so just dig in as deep as you can!”
I thought that I would outgrow snack mom responsibilities as my children got into middle school, but then came the list of snack moms for all the soccer games. There were two snack moms for each game, one to provide the cut-up oranges at half time, the other to bring juice and a cookie at the end of the game. Some of the parents went whole-hog and arrived with a cooler on wheels lugging it across to field 13, or wherever we were. The kids would dig into the snacks, and then litter the ground with orange peels, water bottles, candy wrappers, etc. We then got an announcement asking the snack moms to stay after the game, since if there was too much garbage on the field, the team would be assessed a fine by the city. As the home team, this meant that we also had to pick up after the visiting team. I frankly snapped at this point and my revenge is recounted in the fanagram below:
The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like post, stop, spot, etc). The number of asterisks indicates the number of letters and one missing word will rhyme with either the previous or following line. Your job is to solve for the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem. Scroll down for answers.
I resented the concept of soccer snak mom, but the real coup de grace
Was watching greeding kids *******open juice boxes or throwing garbage on the grass
There were no thank yous – each one seemed a rapacious *******
I was so annoyed, I immediately began devious plans to retaliate.
My resolve was like ******* as I planned my counter attack,
Should I spike the juice, or perhaps give them a moldy snack?
When I found some lemons my plan began to crystallize,
I mixed them in with cut-up oranges for a ******* surprise!
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Answers: tearing, ingrate, granite, tangier
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