Brown Baggin It

Because I haven't posted in 2 years, I have some stories saved up. There are notes everywhere, every loose piece of paper that isn't a bill or doesn't have directions on it, has some kind of 'n-kite' (narish-kite a.k.a. silliness in Yiddish) written on it.
For some reason I was thinking (you were thinking?!... ha ha). Yes, I was thinking, about bringing my lunch to school growing up and what an ordeal it was.
My mother stopped making lunches early on, like when I was in grade 5 (5th grade to the Americans).
Apparently I complained too much about how she made them, I can't imagine that, it simply doesn't fit the profile. I was however left to my own devices early on, a lot like Little Orphan Annie, but without the cute dog. I was the only one in my small private Yiddish/Hebrew school class of 14, to have a self made lunch.
My Mother always ahead of her time and a woman with self confessed life long food issues didn't allow any packaged sugared crap in the house and she sure as hell didn't bake. We had healthy food. There was no way of building a respectable/tradeable lunch out of what we had.
Not only did I have a powerful sweet tooth, but I was also desperate to fit in. Being one of 2 in my SCHOOL with a divorced family, I already stood out and felt a steady sting of humiliation from that, as well as having a working Mom and living in a condo and having a non-Jewish Step-Father... it just goes on, don't get me started.
So, making a lunch that fit in, so that I would fit in was difficult if not impossible, and frankly very important. My solution was to save my allowance and buy Halloween sized treats. I stored them under my bed, bringing one each day in my otherwise lame lunch. I was being the loving T.V. Mom to myself that I wished I had. When I was out of candy, I took to "forgetting" my lunch, impersonating a space case, and forcing my colleagues to donate, as they were required to do in such situations. They usually only gave up carrot sticks, but sometimes one would cough up a tin of pudding or a small bag of chips.
When I got into Junior High and High School, I needed to save my allowance for nachos and fries at the mall. For lunch, I would stuff a frozen muffin in my bag and pretend I was on a diet, nobody notice the incongruity of the diet with the nachos and fries. In University I went to Tortellini's everyday (the cool on campus eatery), with the beautiful girls who were my friends. I lived in the dorms and had access to a 'free' bag lunch, but no way, not for me. I was not going to stand out, meat tortellini with meat sauce for me- obviously pre-vegetarian.
I left out the time my Mother, Brother and I spent the day making sandwiches to freeze, something my Mother read about in Ms. It's just too sad, tuna and mayo don't defrost very well.
Being in New York is great for me, there is no way to fit in. Fitting in only means being yourself, it's a beautiful thing. There are days I don't know what to wear, I am not sure who I am, but I almost always know what to eat, or at least what to buy from the grocery store and I never buy the pre-packaged sugar crap, even if that's what everyone else is doing.