Curdling the Milk of Human Kindness

Every year, on the first day of school, the big sheaf of memos comes home. Standard information gathering, standard field trip permission slips, standard careful requests about whether your kid has a mom and dad, one or two of each, or a freaky trio of open-minded interpretive millinerists. Somewhere in there is the standard no-nuts form (this refers to snacks and lunches, not parents, otherwise enrollment would be drastically reduced): several students have life-threatening peanut allergies, don't send peanut butter, read labels, blah blah blah, don't be a nasty killer lunch person. I have absolutely no issue with sending nut-free lunches. It's occasionally a bit of a pain in the butt, but really, compared to having a kid that can die from licking a peanut butter cookie? Not such a trial. Whenever I see letters in the paper belittling the seriousness of peanut allergies or complaining that it's an imposition having to work around them, I feel angry at the letter-writers' selfishness and insensitivity and, it must be said, a tiny bit smug at how evolved I clearly am in comparison.
This year Angus's collection of papers only had the nut allergy alert form. Eve's had one for nuts. One for eggs. One for dairy. Dairy. DAIRY. I quote: "This means no milk, cheese, yogurt, pudding, or anything including milk ingredients." Sure. No problem. For my kid whose weekly menu goes: Cheese sandwich, macaroni and cheese, cottage cheese, scrambled eggs with melted cheese, and whenever we go to McDonald's she has a GRILLED FUCKING CHEESE?

I have trouble with transition periods. I feel shaky and anxious when the kids go back to school no matter what. New teachers. New routines. New math that I'm too dumb to help with. And now they're telling me that, what? I'm supposed to nourish my kid on fruit and air for six hours every day? The whole class won't be able to have pizza day? (Dude, don't you EVEN go messing with pizza day). In addition, I feel like a real tool being pissed about this poor kid's allergies, because clearly -- not her fault. So I spent the evening composing a reasonable, carefully-worded, please-don't-label-me-as-a-difficult-parent letter expressing my concerns. Then I took a few Ativan and went to bed.
The next day I picked up the kids from school and walked over to the park so they could play for a bit before we walked home. I pulled out Eve's agenda and found a memo in the front pocket. The subtext of the memo was "Dear Parents: Due to the volume of angry, hysterical mail, we have decided the milk allergy is no longer life-threatening. We don't believe for a minute that all your kids are vegetarians, but we don't have the energy to fight with you about it. You all suck, Sincerely, The Management".
I'm not sure what I've taken away from this. The uneasy sense that I'm only willing to protect someone else's kids when it's not too big a hassle? A new appreciation for how difficult and scary it must be to have a food-allergic child, along with dismay at the fact that I lost the chance to take the high road? (If only I had just waited a couple of days and let everyone else write the angry letters, while handing out recipes for soy muffins and tuna tartare sandwiches). I don't know -- I emailed a really good friend whose son is allergic to milk, eggs and nuts and asked for her thoughts. She said her son had never been in a dairy-free classroom and that she thought it was her responsibility to teach him to be safe, not everyone else's responsibility to ensure that no dangerous food ever came within ten miles of him. She also said some people are real assholes about it, though (well, she put it more politely). I hope I wasn't. It definitely wasn't a stellar episode in my ongoing effort to stop over-reacting and blowing things out of proportion.
At any rate, I'm grateful to be in a world that still includes cheddar, swiss and Parmesan. And I'm still not sure having to write a letter saying "For the love of God, don't take cheese away from us!" tops having to go to Rogers Video and admit that I returned a Garden State case with a Dora's Pirate Adventure DVD inside on the parental humiliation metre. So, you know, there's that.