Vachon Imagined

Every so often I volunteer at my son’s school cafeteria, where I become a janitor, gatekeeper, and crowd control all in one. It’s a strange kind of performance — you don’t audition for it, you just show up in sensible shoes and suddenly you are responsible for the flow of humanity between pizza trays and milk cartons.

And every time my son sees me, it’s like the sea parts.

He locks in instantly — there she is. Not just a mom, but his mom, standing in the middle of fluorescent chaos like I have secretly been stationed there my whole life waiting for this exact moment.

Of course, I eat it up.

I am not above that.

It reminds me of being a kid myself, scraping every last bit of my grandmother’s macaroni and cheese off the plate while my mother insisted on logic and proportion: it’s gone, Vachon. Gone is gone.

And still, I show up unannounced on purpose, just to feel that recognition land again. For him too, I tell myself. But also for me. For now, in that small contained universe of a school cafeteria, I am a rockstar. Not a metaphorical one — a literal one in a fluorescent-lit room where someone just yelled “no running!”

And I suppose somewhere, in a small fractured corner of him becoming a teenager, then a man, I will always be that.

But here’s the other thing I notice in those rooms.

I instantly categorize children.

It happens before I even think about it. The troublemaker. The quiet one. The polite one who says “thank you” like it’s been carefully rehearsed at home. I do it with gender too, mostly because I never had a daughter — sweet little girls with pink sequined lunch boxes and glitter water bottles, and for half a second I am inside a My Little Pony commercial, briefly transported back to being ten years old myself.

Until one of them interrupts the whole illusion.

A little girl who is pure fire, pure audacity, no apology available and none needed. And I think: oh. never mind. There she is, refusing the entire script.

And I love that moment too.

The moments are fun. Watching them, witnessing them, letting them unfold without trying to hold them still.

But the categorization — that part is less fun.

Because it’s the seed of everything else. Every misunderstanding. Every assumption. Every small social fracture that eventually grows into something much larger. The quiet habit of deciding who someone is before they’ve had a chance to finish becoming.

Not letting people simply be, first.

They never agreed to be confined — not to lunchrooms, not to lunchboxes, not to moms or rockstars or troublemakers or anything else we quietly assign them between glimpses, thoughts, ideas, feelings, or bites of cafeteria pizza.