My mother’s hidden Hershey’s bars

In the refrigerator meat drawer, way in the back under the cheese and lunch meat, I found my mother’s stash of Hershey bars. Three of them. I was probably ten years old, innocently looking for a snack. I gasped. Chocolate—a rare treat in our house. We had chocolate chip cookies sometimes, Oreos if my mother bought them, and she baked cakes, but never solid chocolate in bar form. I couldn’t remember ever getting a chocolate bar outside of Halloween.

I stood there staring at them, wondering what to do next.

Chocolate is my weakness, the way potato chips are my husband’s. Every so often I find a small, empty bag of Lay’s flattened and tucked into the side of the family room chair. He doesn’t want me to know. I throw it away and keep his secret. I believe in satisfying occasional cravings lest we go mad.

I do the same. I’ll buy myself an “Everything Chocolate Chip Cookie”—soft and thick, studded with chocolate chips, chocolate candies, broken pretzels, and nuts. I eat half and hide the rest. I’ve also been known to pick up a Nestlé Crunch at the store and eat it before I even get home. No one will ever know.

It turns out at least half of us hide food from the people we live with. One study found that 46 percent of snack-hiders simply don’t want to share, while 53 percent said their family members would eat everything if they knew where to look. If you hide treats, you’re in good company.

“Hey, what’s this?” I asked my mother, standing in front of the open refrigerator, staring at the Hershey bars. I knew better than to take one without asking, but I sensed—correctly—that she might share.

She acted nonchalant and handed me a bar. But I never found chocolate there again.

Apparently, two-thirds of American moms admit to having a secret stash. When I was a girl, I once snuck an unopened bag of chocolate chip cookies into the TV room, planning to eat just a few before my mother noticed. I ate more than half the bag. Each cookie tasted better than the last. Overcome with guilt—and unable to hide the evidence—I confessed.

“Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” she said, and put the bag away.

So maybe it’s no surprise my mother hid the Hershey’s from me. Or that I hide chocolate now. Some hungers are better managed quietly, behind the cheese and lunch meat.

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Linda K. Sienkiewicz is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and essays. Her second novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments, is coming October 27, 2026, from Regal House Publishing: When love letters from a despondent stranger land in her lap, an anxious overthinker becomes convinced she’s the cure, and sets off to save him, and herself, blissfully armed with nothing but magical thinking.

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