{"id":2336,"date":"2016-07-05T13:41:13","date_gmt":"2016-07-05T18:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/?p=2336"},"modified":"2016-07-22T17:08:39","modified_gmt":"2016-07-22T22:08:39","slug":"dear-kid-on-my-sons-soccer-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/dear-kid-on-my-sons-soccer-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Kid on My Son’s Soccer Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lemon_wedge\"<\/a><\/p>\n


\n<\/a>Dear Kid (number 9 I think) on my son\u2019s soccer team,<\/p>\n

This apology has been gnawing at me for almost 20 years.\u00a0 You see it was me, I was the one who slipped a lemon into\u00a0your half time snack of orange slices.\u00a0 When your innocent face turned into a sour grimace I immediately knew that I could be in big trouble \u2013 that my son\u2019s participation on the team would be in jeopardy if you had publicly demanded accountability and an apology from a sadistic snack mom.\u00a0 So thank you for peacefully swapping out the lemon for an orange.<\/p>\n

Believe me, it wasn\u2019t personal. I remember you as a friendly kid with tousled hair and an easy smile \u2013 not a superstar, just a steady and reliable presence on the field. And I could say the same for your parents, they weren\u2019t screamers on the sidelines, but quietly supportive, both for you and the entire team.\u00a0 If I really wanted to target the lemon, I would have earmarked the resentful coach who once referred to his responsibilities as baby-sitting, but who also offered private coaching lessons with the implicit promise of increased playing time as a coach\u2019s\u00a0prerogative.<\/p>\n

No, I didn\u2019t think of any of those subtleties as I cut up the fruit before the game. This was nothing more than a misguided rebellion against my designated role as snack mom.\u00a0 As a new mother, I was unprepared for the responsibility.\u00a0 When I grew up in the 1960s there was no such thing as a snack mom.\u00a0 If you wanted a snack, well you just brought your own damn snack.\u00a0 My first assignment came when you were all in preschool, and in my naivet\u00e9 I vowed that I was going to be the best snack mom ever, offering only homemade and nutritious\u00a0treats.\u00a0 I scorned those lazy moms resorting to sugary Teddy Grahams and juice boxes laden with corn syrup.\u00a0 My promise lasted less than one year; I quickly devolved into the\u00a0archetypal\u00a0frantic\u00a0snack mom, rushing to the grocery store at the last minute to scoop up the convenient snacks that I had smugly demonized.<\/p>\n

When you graduated from elementary school, I thought my snack-mom days were mercifully over, but no, in came the schedule for soccer games.\u00a0 Instead of simply delivering the snack to the school, I now had to load up a cooler, drive many miles to a remote game, and lug the cooler across a vast soccer complex, struggling to find field 8A, or was it 14C?\u00a0 I learned to bring binoculars to spot your blue jerseys, but it seemed that every other team was wearing blue.\u00a0 With the cooler bumping awkwardly behind me, I wended my way through a sea of identical 12-year-old soccer players and their families.\u00a0 From 10,000 feet the scene must have looked like the exercise yard of a giant puppy mill.\u00a0 Soccer snack mom was a dehumanizing experience.<\/p>\n

I promise you, my lemon was a pure impulse.\u00a0 It was just sitting there on the counter right next to the oranges, left over from the previous night\u2019s fish.\u00a0 I casually\u00a0swept it into the mix and concealed it among the orange slices.\u00a0 I will admit to a momentary flush of vindictive pleasure, but truthfully I forgot about the lemon until I saw your reaction, and any pleasure immediately turned to remorse.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say that I was ashamed at what I did; I was striking a subversive blow for all the discontented snack moms sprinkled across the sprawling soccer fields.\u00a0 The cause was just, the execution poor, and I\u2019m sorry it was you who got caught up in my defiance.<\/p>\n

I also want to reassure you that my rebellion was committed by me and me alone; there was no collusion between any other parents, your teammates or opponents.\u00a0 And most importantly this was an isolated act.\u00a0 I was not standing at the precipice of a slippery slope, transitioning from a harmless prank to something evil, like slipping a dab of dog food into homemade cookies, or those truly dreadful things you hear about on Halloween.\u00a0 Your grimace was enough to teach me my lesson.\u00a0 Besides, from that point forward, my husband insisted that he take over the duties of snack mom.<\/p>\n

I have one last favor to ask.\u00a0 Even though it has been two decades and I have moved to a distant suburb, I would appreciate it if we could keep this little incident just between the two of us.<\/p>\n

With belated but sincere\u00a0apology,<\/p>\n

Liza Blue<\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>Share: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Kid (number 9 I think) on my son\u2019s soccer team, This apology has been gnawing at me for almost 20 years.\u00a0 You see it was me, I was the one who slipped a lemon into\u00a0your half time snack of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[34,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mcsweeney-rejects","category-what-i-did"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-BG","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2336"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2364,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2336\/revisions\/2364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}