The first time I felt it was in the first grade. I wasn’t in Mrs. Conn’s class, but she reprimanded me for talking back as we stood in line in the lunchroom. The feeling, a cold burn, rose briefly in my chest before sinking down, down, down, into the pit of my stomach. Woooop, went the Big Sink. Mrs. Conn was going to tell my teacher, Mrs. Page, that I had been disrespectful. This was serious. I was in trouble. At school.
The gracious Mrs. Page must have spared me from consequences, or else I don’t remember. What I do remember is that sense of dread, an intimation of final judgment. The institutional authority a teacher brings to a dressing-down is deeply intimidating to a 6-year-old. Looming behind her reprimand is the vice principal, the principal, and even the legendary permanent record. Maybe I felt this pang more acutely because I was a hopeless teacher-pleaser. Maybe kids who acted out more regularly were numb to the Big Sink. For me, though, the feeling was worse than any talking-to I got from my parents.
And it came back. During my first semester at college, I received an ominous summons via email to meet with a dean to discuss a “disciplinary matter.” Woooop. There it was. It hit again when I walked into the dean’s office later that week. Woooop. Fortunately, the dean began by saying, “I don’t think this is you.” He turned his screen around to show surveillance video of two young men in the elevator at my dorm, one of whom was smashing the electronic card reader with his fist. Earlier that night, the cameras had captured me and a friend, wearing the same color shirts as the perpetrators, in the same elevator. I knew I hadn’t done it, and the dean let me go.
I’m grown now, so I’ve put all that behind me, right? No such luck. Last week the Big Sink returned, courtesy of a call in the middle of the day from my older son’s school nurse. Nothing was wrong, she said, but she did have a very important question for me. Henry had a sandwich in his lunchbox that looked suspiciously like peanut butter.
As is probably the case at most schools these days, Henry’s classroom is “nut free.” (It is also free, his teachers once let slip, of any kid with a nut allergy of any kind. But policy is policy.) The school has made this prohibition exceedingly clear. There are no-nut signs posted on every classroom window, seeming to say, “Abandon all nuts, ye who enter here.” The nut ban made it into every piece of orientation literature we received, starting in the summer and right up through the first day of school.
At the parents’ meeting in late August, the teacher and the school nurse made separate speeches emphasizing that no nuts or nut-related products were allowed in lunches, snacks, or birthday treats. As the nurse listed all kinds of nut-based foods that were no-gos, I started thinking of Christopher Guest’s character in the mockumentary movie Best in Show telling his interlocutor about his preternatural ability to “name every nut that there was.” Peanut, hazelnut, cashew nut, macadamia nut, pine nut, pistachio nut, red pistachio nut, all-natural white pistachio nut. I was shaken from my daydream when another parent in the classroom asked, incredibly, if almond butter was okay.
Ever the teacher-pleaser, I have of course very obediently abided by the no-nuts diktat. Each school night I make Henry a sandwich with sunflower butter, an expensive spread that tastes just enough like peanut butter to fool a 4-year-old—with zero risk of sending a hypothetical allergic classmate into anaphylactic shock. But anything that looks as if it might carry even a trace of nut or legume is supposed to be meticulously labeled as safe, along with the date and (I may be exaggerating slightly) a notarized document authenticating its nutlessness.
I have followed these guidelines, at times grudgingly, but the nurse’s call suggested something was amiss. “There’s no label,” she said. Suddenly, I was right back to first grade. Woooop. I assured her it was safe, which was all she needed to hear, and apologized profusely for my slip-up.
This time, the Big Sink lingered, especially after I got a text message from my wife, who was out of town, wondering about the calls she had missed from the school and if there was something wrong with our son’s lunch. She had no doubt felt the Big Sink, too.
Does it ever go away?
