My eight-year-old skipped lunch for six weeks to buy a red dress for the little girl across the street. The next morning our lawn was covered with fifty lunchboxes — and taped to the biggest one, a beat-up metal thing sitting alone in the middle of the grass, was a note that said OPEN THIS ONE FIRST.

What I did not notice, because I am telling this honestly and not making myself the hero, was that he had also stopped buying lunch at school.

Every day I gave him three dollars. Every day he put it in the sock. And every single evening when I asked him what he ate, he told me a real, specific, invented lunch — chicken patty, the corn, the applesauce cup — because he had eaten those things before and knew what was on the rotation.

Six weeks.

I found out the day he came home with the bag from Deerling's, holding it with both arms like it was a bird.

And I want to be very clear about what happened next, because I've seen how this story gets told and it usually skips the part where a mother sits down on the floor with her kid.

I was proud of him. I told him so and I meant it.