When I was in fifth grade, a new student at a new school, a popular girl in my class took a dislike to me on my first day, according to her, because I "played kickball wrong,"" talked "too smart, like a book or something," and "had a weird name."
My response was to ignore and deflect. She called me ugly. I would respond with a phrase I'd heard my mother say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." She called me stupid. I would roll my eyes and head down the hallway to my gifted enrichment class. She called me clumsy. Well, I was clumsy. There was no point in arguing there.
But I didn't attack her back, in the way she was attacking me. I didn't call her names. Even as she called me a coward and spat in my face while the other students, cowed by her, laughed.
I wasn't a coward. I wasn't a doormat. I was a Christian (then, at least in name), and I had been taught by what I had read about Jesus to turn the other cheek. I was a book addict. I had read Tolkien, and Lewis, and L'Engle. At ten, I plucked my personal morals from fantasy worlds where heroes triumphed by sticking to their values, and the high road always led, eventually, to victory.
And perhaps more importantly, once, a few years earlier, I had let a visiting step-cousin of mine pressure me into joining her and some friends in publicly mocking a kid in our neighborhood who everyone thought was a little quirky. As I had seen the tears well up in that little girl's eyes, and seen her turn and run away to her mother's house while the circle of children I stood in laughed, I suddenly had to suppress an overwhelming urge to vomit.
I apologized later that day. But the hurt in that girl's eyes didn't disappear with my apology. I had broken a trust between us. It was irreparable.
We would never be friends.
And that day, I vowed never again to join in a mocking circle meant to destroy another person's self-worth.
So, I deflected, and avoided, and ignored. My refusal to be goaded into a petty reaction by that popular girl in my fifth grade class infuriated her. She tore my books. She stole my homework. She wrote fake love letters to boys in my name. She lied to the teacher to try to get me in trouble. She lied to my friends and told them I had done terrible things.
The more I refused to fight back, the more I refused to run and cry-- the more I just stood there and took it, the angrier that girl became. "You're jealous of me," she would scream. "You wish you could be just like me."
I didn't.
I really didn't.
Maybe I should have fought back. Maybe I should have insulted her in front of everyone, or spread a rumor about her, or smacked her in the face. This was, after all, the real world, the real, savage world of human children, all jockeying for position in a social hierarchy, playacting at a very serious game they had watched their parents play. In the real world, sometimes turning the other cheek turns out badly.
In the real world, sometimes you have to hit back.
But I hadn't read Lord of the Flies yet.
So one day, when that girl, antagonized beyond words by my simple refusal to fuel her drama fire, icily informed me that she had scheduled a fight between the two of us on the playground at recess, and that if I didn't show up, her enforcers would find me and make me pay for the insult?
I showed up. I stood tall and faced her livid face as two of her lackeys distracted a teacher and the schoolchildren gathered around in a tiny circular mob, whispering their chant, "Fight! Fight!"
And I said, "Hit me."
The girl sputtered. "What?"
I repeated it. "Hit me. Go ahead. Hit me as hard as you can. Hit me if you want to, but I won't hit you back. I'm not like you. I don't hit people just because I don't like them. So go ahead. Hit me."
"But it's a fight! You have to fight!" She rocked back on her heels and whipped her head back and forth, searching the little crowd, which had gone silent.
"No, I don't. You're the only one who wants to fight. I didn't ask you for a fight. You asked me for one."
A few of the kids in the crowd giggled.
They weren't giggling at me.
The popular girl screamed a terrible, primal scream of frustration. And ran. She pushed through that little crowd of children, and ran away from me.
I write about this incident from my childhood today because that moment changed me. It made me, in many ways, who I am.
I'm wise enough now to know the high road may not always lead to victory. I also know myself well enough to know that, try as I may, I don't always succeed in taking it. I'm a terribly imperfect person, as easily ruled by fear and emotion as anyone else. I sometimes say things I don't mean out of anger, and later regret them. I sometimes fail to say things I should, out of fear.
But know this: every time someone responds to an honest disagreement I have with them by lobbing a petty insult at me, or telling a lie, or spreading false rumors, or demanding that I fight, (or censoring my posts on a community site for political reasons, or blocking me on Twitter, or defriending me on Facebook, or any of the other hundreds of petty ways people slight one another on the internet these days) I am inevitably drawn back to that day on the playground, and the peace and strength that suffused my whole being in that one moment of triumph, when I said, "Go ahead. Hit me."
So, go ahead.
Hit me.
I'm not like you.
And no, actually, I'm not jealous.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
What I've Been Writing Lately Elsewhere
Earlier this week I posted about my favorite Indian cookbook on my lovely friend Debbie's blog for the vintage-obsessed, Did You Buy That New.
On Sustenance, I put up some beginner's tips for starting seeds indoors.
And today I posted to MOMocrats about the 21st century American phenomenon of health-insurance-based marriages of convenience.
On Sustenance, I put up some beginner's tips for starting seeds indoors.
And today I posted to MOMocrats about the 21st century American phenomenon of health-insurance-based marriages of convenience.
Monday, February 15, 2010
In Which I Resume Chronicling My Gardening Addiction
Readers of the backyard food growerly persuasion take note:
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Writing, Parenting, and Sensory Disorders
I write fairly often about my son's struggles with Sensory Processing Disorder. About his eating issues. About the way his motor skills delay affects him on the playground. About his problems concentrating in a noisy environment at school. I write about how these issues affect me as a parent, about my own struggle to smooth a path through this world for a child with a developmental delay.
I worry, sometimes, about writing publicly about these things, because I don't want to embarrass my child by revealing too much about his personal struggles. I don't want to unreasonably skew the way others who have never met him in person might see him. I don't want to label him permanently as a person with a problem. I want the world to see him as a child with a disorder, not as a disorder attached to a child.
So I worry. And I censor myself, sometimes. And sometimes I freeze up altogether, unsure of how much to write.
I think carefully about what I do write. I weigh the costs and benefits of telling a story about my child, carefully, before I push the publish button. If I write this story, will it help me think through a problem? If I share it, will that help me find advice from others who may have had similar experiences — advice that may help me help my son? Will it help raise awareness about sensory disorders? Will it help another parent of a child with sensory issues feel a little less utterly alone?
I like to think that by writing publicly about my family's experiences with my son's sensory problems, I am helping to create a future world in which those problems will be better understood. I hope that one day, the acronym SPD will be as familiar and commonly understood as ADHD, and that the label will carry as little mystery as an ADHD label, and no stigma.
I hope that ten years from now, when my son explains to someone why trying new foods unsettles him and the sound of a vacuum bothers him and climbing a staircase makes him nervous (and also why he can memorize the drum track of a song after hearing it just a few times, and why he never fails to notice a friend's new haircut, and why he can tell you what precisely seasonings went into a sauce, and why he can tell from across the house when cookies in an oven are finished baking, just by the slight shift in their smell) that instead of "You have a sensory disorder? What on earth is that?" he will hear "You have a sensory disorder? Oh, that makes sense!"
And I hope, too, that one day, when my son is grown, he will understand that is why I wrote about him. To pave his way.
I worry, sometimes, about writing publicly about these things, because I don't want to embarrass my child by revealing too much about his personal struggles. I don't want to unreasonably skew the way others who have never met him in person might see him. I don't want to label him permanently as a person with a problem. I want the world to see him as a child with a disorder, not as a disorder attached to a child.
So I worry. And I censor myself, sometimes. And sometimes I freeze up altogether, unsure of how much to write.
I think carefully about what I do write. I weigh the costs and benefits of telling a story about my child, carefully, before I push the publish button. If I write this story, will it help me think through a problem? If I share it, will that help me find advice from others who may have had similar experiences — advice that may help me help my son? Will it help raise awareness about sensory disorders? Will it help another parent of a child with sensory issues feel a little less utterly alone?
I like to think that by writing publicly about my family's experiences with my son's sensory problems, I am helping to create a future world in which those problems will be better understood. I hope that one day, the acronym SPD will be as familiar and commonly understood as ADHD, and that the label will carry as little mystery as an ADHD label, and no stigma.
I hope that ten years from now, when my son explains to someone why trying new foods unsettles him and the sound of a vacuum bothers him and climbing a staircase makes him nervous (and also why he can memorize the drum track of a song after hearing it just a few times, and why he never fails to notice a friend's new haircut, and why he can tell you what precisely seasonings went into a sauce, and why he can tell from across the house when cookies in an oven are finished baking, just by the slight shift in their smell) that instead of "You have a sensory disorder? What on earth is that?" he will hear "You have a sensory disorder? Oh, that makes sense!"
And I hope, too, that one day, when my son is grown, he will understand that is why I wrote about him. To pave his way.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Backstage, Center Stage
When I was in high school, all of my best friends were in theater. The boy I went to prom with Junior year and the boy I didn't go to prom with Senior year and the boy I went with instead of that other boy I didn't go with were all actors, who had taken more than one turn under the bright lights on our battered school stage. My friends went to acting workshops out of school, and sang musical theater songs at the tops of their lungs while driving with all the windows open down the highway, and worked at The Muny or The Fox in the summertime just to be near the stage.
I was never an actress. As a teenager, I had terrible stage fright. I took Drama one year in eighth grade as an elective, and I would freeze up so badly just acting in front of a twenty-person class of my friends — stammering my lines out, my whole body shaking — that my teacher took pity on me and found an excuse to declare me her "Assistant Director" for the rest of the year so that I could hide in a corner with a binder and a pen, taking notes on blocking and lighting and whispering my friends' forgotten lines.
Later, in high school, I worked backstage. I learned how to saw wood and paint shadows and hang lights and program a sound board and make an empty black box look like castle courtyard or a Manhattan living room or a submarine or a one-room schoolhouse or a forest in June. While my friends took the spotlight, and the applause, I dressed in black to better blend in with the shadows and made sure their cues came on time.
And I liked it that way.
These days, I don't stammer or shake when speaking in public. I can give a presentation to a room of 50 bloggers without breaking a sweat. I can meet famous people I admire without swooning (okay, except for Alice Bradley). I can speak on TV or a radio show without butterflies. I can interview members of Congress without blinking an eye.
But I still don't like the spotlight. I'll stand under it when I need to, because it helps me meet people I need to meet, or reach people I need to reach, or get the word out on issues that are important to me. I'll take center stage, because it helps me get things done. But I don't seek it for its own sake.
What can I say? I'm still an introvert. An introvert who has learned to play extrovert fairly effectively when need be, but still feels an uncomfortable twinge at the idea of seeing her name in lights.
After all these years, I find I still prefer to be the one behind the scenes.
Last week I learned my son's school will be having a talent show. I asked him if he'd signed up to be in it. He said no.
"I had a choice to be on stage or in the audience, and said I would just be in the audience," he explained. "I couldn't really think of any talents I have."
No talents? My child? No talents?
No way.
"Everyone has talents," I responded. "Everyone has something special they are good at. There is not a person in this world who is not talented at at least one thing. And you are talented at many things. I've seen you show lots of talent. Don't tell me you don't have any talents!"
But then, mid-stage-mother-encouragement speech, I suddenly wondered: What if he didn't want to be in the talent show? Not because he thought he was not talented, but because he had no interest in performing in front of a crowd? I mean, I want to encourage my kid to believe he can achieve great things in life and all that, but he is five years old.
What if the idea of performing in front of the whole school made him nervous? What if he was just genuinely excited at the idea of watching his friends?
It's not like there could even actually be a talent show if every kid in the school were fighting for a spot on stage.
In every theater, someone has to be in the audience.
And someone has to work backstage.
So I said, "I want you to know, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be in the audience — the audience is just as important as the people on stage. Without an audience there would be no one to see a performance. So if you want to be in the audience this time, so you can watch and support your friends, I think that's a very good and very kind thing to do. Or if you would like to help your friends get ready for their performances, that would be a good thing to do, too. But I want you to remember that you do have talent, and you do know how to do lots of things that other people might like to see. So I'm happy that you want to watch your friends perform this year. And maybe next year, if you feel like it, you can take your own turn on stage . . ."
"Oh, wait!" he suddenly shouted, interrupting what was surely about to turn into a very exciting lecture from his mother on dramatic theory, "I forgot. I can play the piano!"
(He forgot he can play the piano? Seriously? How much money have I spent in the past two years on those weekly piano lessons?)
"I will play a song on the piano!" he continued. "I'll play it and everyone will watch me and it will be great."
And every day since he has been talking excitedly about how he will play the piano, in front of the whole school, and they will all see how good he is at playing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Is he nervous? No. Not a whit.
Just excited as all get-out that he'll be in the spotlight.
I get the feeling this may be the only first of several performances in his future.
And I'll be so proud to support my little performer, as usual, from backstage.
I was never an actress. As a teenager, I had terrible stage fright. I took Drama one year in eighth grade as an elective, and I would freeze up so badly just acting in front of a twenty-person class of my friends — stammering my lines out, my whole body shaking — that my teacher took pity on me and found an excuse to declare me her "Assistant Director" for the rest of the year so that I could hide in a corner with a binder and a pen, taking notes on blocking and lighting and whispering my friends' forgotten lines.
Later, in high school, I worked backstage. I learned how to saw wood and paint shadows and hang lights and program a sound board and make an empty black box look like castle courtyard or a Manhattan living room or a submarine or a one-room schoolhouse or a forest in June. While my friends took the spotlight, and the applause, I dressed in black to better blend in with the shadows and made sure their cues came on time.
And I liked it that way.
These days, I don't stammer or shake when speaking in public. I can give a presentation to a room of 50 bloggers without breaking a sweat. I can meet famous people I admire without swooning (okay, except for Alice Bradley). I can speak on TV or a radio show without butterflies. I can interview members of Congress without blinking an eye.
But I still don't like the spotlight. I'll stand under it when I need to, because it helps me meet people I need to meet, or reach people I need to reach, or get the word out on issues that are important to me. I'll take center stage, because it helps me get things done. But I don't seek it for its own sake.
What can I say? I'm still an introvert. An introvert who has learned to play extrovert fairly effectively when need be, but still feels an uncomfortable twinge at the idea of seeing her name in lights.
After all these years, I find I still prefer to be the one behind the scenes.
Last week I learned my son's school will be having a talent show. I asked him if he'd signed up to be in it. He said no.
"I had a choice to be on stage or in the audience, and said I would just be in the audience," he explained. "I couldn't really think of any talents I have."
No talents? My child? No talents?
No way.
"Everyone has talents," I responded. "Everyone has something special they are good at. There is not a person in this world who is not talented at at least one thing. And you are talented at many things. I've seen you show lots of talent. Don't tell me you don't have any talents!"
But then, mid-stage-mother-encouragement speech, I suddenly wondered: What if he didn't want to be in the talent show? Not because he thought he was not talented, but because he had no interest in performing in front of a crowd? I mean, I want to encourage my kid to believe he can achieve great things in life and all that, but he is five years old.
What if the idea of performing in front of the whole school made him nervous? What if he was just genuinely excited at the idea of watching his friends?
It's not like there could even actually be a talent show if every kid in the school were fighting for a spot on stage.
In every theater, someone has to be in the audience.
And someone has to work backstage.
So I said, "I want you to know, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be in the audience — the audience is just as important as the people on stage. Without an audience there would be no one to see a performance. So if you want to be in the audience this time, so you can watch and support your friends, I think that's a very good and very kind thing to do. Or if you would like to help your friends get ready for their performances, that would be a good thing to do, too. But I want you to remember that you do have talent, and you do know how to do lots of things that other people might like to see. So I'm happy that you want to watch your friends perform this year. And maybe next year, if you feel like it, you can take your own turn on stage . . ."
"Oh, wait!" he suddenly shouted, interrupting what was surely about to turn into a very exciting lecture from his mother on dramatic theory, "I forgot. I can play the piano!"
(He forgot he can play the piano? Seriously? How much money have I spent in the past two years on those weekly piano lessons?)
"I will play a song on the piano!" he continued. "I'll play it and everyone will watch me and it will be great."
And every day since he has been talking excitedly about how he will play the piano, in front of the whole school, and they will all see how good he is at playing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Is he nervous? No. Not a whit.
Just excited as all get-out that he'll be in the spotlight.
I get the feeling this may be the only first of several performances in his future.
And I'll be so proud to support my little performer, as usual, from backstage.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Literary Overflow
The gods of literature and learning may strike me down, but this morning, while putting things away in my son's room, I had the thought, "My child has too many books."
One of the first things I bought for him before he was even born was a set of board books. My uncle sent me an Amazon gift card with instructions to use it to buy "things the baby will need," and my very first thought was, The baby will need books!
At my baby shower I was disappointed to receive only two children's books as gifts. When he was born I lamented the fact that only one small shelf on the bookcase in his nursery was actually occupied by books, the rest being filled with clothes and toys. For the first few months of his life I scoured used book sales. When people asked what he wanted for his first birthday, I slyly hinted that due to the generosity of his several sets of grandparents, he already had far too many toys for our small apartment, but a book — a book we would have room for. I repeated this message at his second birthday. And his third. And I kept using this excuse even after we moved to a bigger house.
So he acquired books about cars, books in about pets, the Thomas the Tank Engine books, the Little Bear books, and the Dr. Seuss books. Then his youngest uncles outgrew their books, and he wound up with a series of hand-me-downs.
We bought a bigger bookcase.
Then we joined the library storytime club and once a week while he listened to the librarians read books I looked over the library book sale table (Used Children's Hardbacks for Only 50 Cents!) for kids' science books that weren't too outdated. Suddenly his shelf bloomed with gently worn books about fish and birds and trees and honeybees and butterflies and the solar system.
Now he's in school and we get the Scholastic catalogs and we go to the school book fairs and his teachers send home free donated books.
And his bookcase shelves are bowed with the weight of his books. And his nightstand is covered in books. And he has books creeping onto my own overflowing bookshelf, and books on the coffee table in the living room, and books on the floor.
Last night he brought home a free book from school and this morning I realized I had literally no place to put it.
His room is already so packed with books and toys that there is certainly no room for a new shelf. He has outgrown so many of his books. Maybe it's now time to give some of them away? I mean, we'll have to make room, someday soon, for Little House on the Prairie and The Chronicles of Narnia.
But what to give away?
Sometimes, even now, when he's sad or scared at night or he's not feeling well, he still asks me to read him The Runaway Bunny or Goodnight Moon.
And I can't give away Moo Baa La La La. That's the first book he ever read all by himself! I should frame it or something.
And Green Eggs and Ham is a classic. Come on. Kids never outgrow that book. (Especially kids who are picky eaters.) So what if I have it memorized? Tossing out Green Eggs and Ham is like tossing out Chaucer.
Of course he needs two Mother Goose collections. They each have different versions of the poems. What better way to demonstrate to a five-year-old how regional variations develop in oral poetry?
A Color of His Own cannot go. That's the first book I ever read to him. And anyway I keep thinking it's sort of an allegory about exceptional people not fitting in to society and he'll probably appreciate that when he's older given his giftedness and his sensory disorder and all that.
Gatos? Hell no I am not getting rid of that little battered Baby Einstein board book about cats. It's not just the first book I ever read to him in Spanish — it's also the book I took to comfort him when he had surgery and he clutched it all night long. GATOS HAS TO STAY.
Ahem.
Perhaps we need a bigger house.
One of the first things I bought for him before he was even born was a set of board books. My uncle sent me an Amazon gift card with instructions to use it to buy "things the baby will need," and my very first thought was, The baby will need books!
At my baby shower I was disappointed to receive only two children's books as gifts. When he was born I lamented the fact that only one small shelf on the bookcase in his nursery was actually occupied by books, the rest being filled with clothes and toys. For the first few months of his life I scoured used book sales. When people asked what he wanted for his first birthday, I slyly hinted that due to the generosity of his several sets of grandparents, he already had far too many toys for our small apartment, but a book — a book we would have room for. I repeated this message at his second birthday. And his third. And I kept using this excuse even after we moved to a bigger house.
So he acquired books about cars, books in about pets, the Thomas the Tank Engine books, the Little Bear books, and the Dr. Seuss books. Then his youngest uncles outgrew their books, and he wound up with a series of hand-me-downs.
We bought a bigger bookcase.
Then we joined the library storytime club and once a week while he listened to the librarians read books I looked over the library book sale table (Used Children's Hardbacks for Only 50 Cents!) for kids' science books that weren't too outdated. Suddenly his shelf bloomed with gently worn books about fish and birds and trees and honeybees and butterflies and the solar system.
Now he's in school and we get the Scholastic catalogs and we go to the school book fairs and his teachers send home free donated books.
And his bookcase shelves are bowed with the weight of his books. And his nightstand is covered in books. And he has books creeping onto my own overflowing bookshelf, and books on the coffee table in the living room, and books on the floor.
Last night he brought home a free book from school and this morning I realized I had literally no place to put it.
His room is already so packed with books and toys that there is certainly no room for a new shelf. He has outgrown so many of his books. Maybe it's now time to give some of them away? I mean, we'll have to make room, someday soon, for Little House on the Prairie and The Chronicles of Narnia.
But what to give away?
Sometimes, even now, when he's sad or scared at night or he's not feeling well, he still asks me to read him The Runaway Bunny or Goodnight Moon.
And I can't give away Moo Baa La La La. That's the first book he ever read all by himself! I should frame it or something.
And Green Eggs and Ham is a classic. Come on. Kids never outgrow that book. (Especially kids who are picky eaters.) So what if I have it memorized? Tossing out Green Eggs and Ham is like tossing out Chaucer.
Of course he needs two Mother Goose collections. They each have different versions of the poems. What better way to demonstrate to a five-year-old how regional variations develop in oral poetry?
A Color of His Own cannot go. That's the first book I ever read to him. And anyway I keep thinking it's sort of an allegory about exceptional people not fitting in to society and he'll probably appreciate that when he's older given his giftedness and his sensory disorder and all that.
Gatos? Hell no I am not getting rid of that little battered Baby Einstein board book about cats. It's not just the first book I ever read to him in Spanish — it's also the book I took to comfort him when he had surgery and he clutched it all night long. GATOS HAS TO STAY.
Ahem.
Perhaps we need a bigger house.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Things I Have Recently Learned
I have recently learned that teachers who can tell the difference between a picky eater saying a food tastes weird because he's picky and a picky eater saying a food tastes weird because he's suddenly and totally unexpectedly developed an allergy to it and is about to go into anaphylaxis are worth their weight in gold. Especially when that teacher tells you later that she is so sorry this reaction happened under her watch. (Sorry? For jumping in and making my kid toss out the Cookie of Death when lesser classroom heroes may have told him to shut up and eat? Seriously, that action earned you possible naming rights to my next kid.)
I have recently learned that yes, despite his eventual total recovery from his allergic reaction after a double dose of Benadryl, my son did in fact show several bright waving red flags indicating anaphylaxis during his allergy attack, and the emergency room doctor who treated him should have given him a child-sized shot of epinephrine immediately instead of a second dose of Benadryl, and in fact took a big fat unnecessary risk by not doing so.
(So, if your small child ever eats something and then immediately complains of an itchy tongue, breaks out in hives, develops facial swelling, flushes red all over, complains of stomach cramps, and then starts coughing without cease, and you take him to the hospital and some stonefaced overtired ER doctor who seems irked at having to even speak to you tells you to just give your kid a little more Children's Benadryl,PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE STICK HIM WITH HIS OWN NEEDLES make sure you politely insist that the doctor give your child an age-appropriate dose of epinephrine.)
I have recently learned that if your primary care doctor's office staff, who are normally quite competent, call the wrong phone number to tell you the results of a key blood test indicating the possible severity of your son's brand new peanut allergy, even though you had called the office just one hour prior to confirm with the staff which number they could reach you at to give you the results, and then they leave a useless message on your answering machine saying that the results have come in without actually telling you what those results are, even though you've officially authorized the doctor's office to leave a message with the actual test results if you don't answer the phone, and then they close their office phones ten minutes early on a Friday, so that even when you miraculously manage to arrive home and hear the useless misdirected message just in time to call the doctor's office staff back according to their publicly stated phone hours, you still can't get a hold of anyone to give you the damn blood test results, and you realize you won't be able reach anyone at the doctor's office at all until Monday, and so you track down the number of the blood lab that did the test to call the lab yourself, by God — when that happens, some really nice guy at the blood lab named Pete, when he hears you trying not to cry with frustration as you relate this story to him on the phone, will totally bend protocol and fax you a fast-tracked application form so you can get the test results faxed straight to your house from the lab. (Thank you, Nice Blood Test Lab Guy Named Pete.)
I have recently learned that all those parents of kids with serious food allergies were totally right when they told me about so many people, smart people, good people, even medically trained people, not taking food allergies at all as seriously as they take other serious, potentially life-threatening health problems.
That it's really difficult even for me to wrap my mind around the idea that my child could theoretically now be as seriously endangered by a large bag of peanuts as a loaded unlocked gun, because that idea just feels so patently absurd.
That many people will ask you what medical steps you are taking to deal with a brand new food allergy, and many people will try to help you find information about food allergies, and many people will tell you all about how happy hearing about your experience makes them that their kids don't have food allergies, and many people will remind you how lucky you are because "it could be worse!"
But only a few very kind and thoughtful people will think to ask you how you feel about having just a few days ago watched your child narrowly escape death by cookie. By a #&@!& @!*&%!!! cookie!
I have recently learned that I feel pretty awful about that whole experience of holding my kid's hand in a speeding car and feeling totally helpless while he flushed redder and redder and his lips swelled and he coughed uncontrollably and I tried to stay totally calm and comfort him by talking to him about innocuous things in a cheerful voice all while wondering whether he might stop breathing at any moment, and what I would do if he did, all because he had taken two bites of a cookie.
That if I think too hard about it now, I can relive it in excruciating detail. That the whole watching your child have a bad allergic reaction thing is wretched, actually. That it sucks. That I really don't recommend panicked trips to the hospital as a regular family excursion.
I have recently learned that those really thoughtful people I mentioned, those people who take the time to ask a parent who has just experienced her child having a serious allergic reaction how she feels about what just happened, can make that parent feel a whole lot better.
I have learned that I am lucky, that it could have been worse.
I have learned that my five-year-old does not cry when I tell him he can't eat the fries at his favorite restaurant, or when I say he can't always have the same treats other children are having school. That when he sees other children eating what he no longer can. right in front of him, he does not scowl at them or mutter about how life isn't fair.
That he did not throw a fit when I took the bag of candy his grandmother sent him, and gave it away to the kids next door.
That instead of getting angry or upset about the long, long list of restrictions he now suddenly faces due to his allergy, he will instead (usually) tell me that chips are just as nice as fries, that he doesn't mind asking his teacher first before trying a cookie, that we can always buy more candy, that EpiPens aren't quite as scary as vaccine shots, that he doesn't want me to worry about him.
I have recently learned that my son is braver than I am.
That stylish, durable, comfortable, affordable, boyish medical alert bracelets for brave little boys that are not made of mystery metal or mystery plastic or some cheap nickel alloy are nearly impossible to find locally in St. Louis, but are available on the internet.
That your friend with a daughter with diabetes will not only answer your middle-of-the-night emails about where to find nice kids' medical bracelets, but ask her Twitter friends to help you out.
That I find having to wait several days for my kid's medical ID bracelet to arrive in the mail really, really, really annoying. Like, annoying enough to consider buying myself an engraving machine and making my own.
That my son's favorite kind of candy, that he wanted to give out on Valentine's Day, plain M&Ms, are now totally forbidden to him, because Mars does not segregate its production lines and Peanut M&Ms sometimes slip into the plain M&M package.
That I can order nut-free candy-coated chocolate pieces that theoretically also melt in your mouth and not in your hand on the internet. At double the price of the regular kind. Plus shipping.
That I am willing to pay double the price of the regular kind plus shipping. Not just for my kid, but, if necessary, for his whole elementary school class. Just so he can feel normal on Valentine's Day.
That Chipotle and Cici's Pizza and Burger King are peanut-free restaurants. That Chick-fil-A and Chili's are not.
That I am channeling so much ridiculous energy into things like getting my kid a decent ID bracelet and finding some nut-safe candy before Valentine's Day and making spreadsheets of restaurant nutrition information because those are problems I can fix. I can fix those things. I need to do things I can fix right now.
Because I can't fix him.
I can't fix the peanut allergy.
Not right now.
Maybe not ever.
***
Bonus Thing I Have Recently Learned:
That, according to the long-awaited results of his allergy blood test, my son, who has been begging me for a pet cat almost every day since the day he spoke his second word (which was "Kit-tee-cat!" which later changed, adorably, to the inventive Spanglish hybrid,"Gato-ki!" a joyous cry I heard sung out daily, for years, to real cats toy cats and pictures of cats and shadows that sorta looked like cats, with more enthusiasm than "Mama," until he was somehow suddenly old enough to hand me written explanations of Why We Should Have Cats instead) is apparently not only suddenly allergic to peanuts but also suddenly allergic to cats.
Nice one, universe. Nice.
*sigh*
I have recently learned that yes, despite his eventual total recovery from his allergic reaction after a double dose of Benadryl, my son did in fact show several bright waving red flags indicating anaphylaxis during his allergy attack, and the emergency room doctor who treated him should have given him a child-sized shot of epinephrine immediately instead of a second dose of Benadryl, and in fact took a big fat unnecessary risk by not doing so.
(So, if your small child ever eats something and then immediately complains of an itchy tongue, breaks out in hives, develops facial swelling, flushes red all over, complains of stomach cramps, and then starts coughing without cease, and you take him to the hospital and some stonefaced overtired ER doctor who seems irked at having to even speak to you tells you to just give your kid a little more Children's Benadryl,
I have recently learned that if your primary care doctor's office staff, who are normally quite competent, call the wrong phone number to tell you the results of a key blood test indicating the possible severity of your son's brand new peanut allergy, even though you had called the office just one hour prior to confirm with the staff which number they could reach you at to give you the results, and then they leave a useless message on your answering machine saying that the results have come in without actually telling you what those results are, even though you've officially authorized the doctor's office to leave a message with the actual test results if you don't answer the phone, and then they close their office phones ten minutes early on a Friday, so that even when you miraculously manage to arrive home and hear the useless misdirected message just in time to call the doctor's office staff back according to their publicly stated phone hours, you still can't get a hold of anyone to give you the damn blood test results, and you realize you won't be able reach anyone at the doctor's office at all until Monday, and so you track down the number of the blood lab that did the test to call the lab yourself, by God — when that happens, some really nice guy at the blood lab named Pete, when he hears you trying not to cry with frustration as you relate this story to him on the phone, will totally bend protocol and fax you a fast-tracked application form so you can get the test results faxed straight to your house from the lab. (Thank you, Nice Blood Test Lab Guy Named Pete.)
I have recently learned that all those parents of kids with serious food allergies were totally right when they told me about so many people, smart people, good people, even medically trained people, not taking food allergies at all as seriously as they take other serious, potentially life-threatening health problems.
That it's really difficult even for me to wrap my mind around the idea that my child could theoretically now be as seriously endangered by a large bag of peanuts as a loaded unlocked gun, because that idea just feels so patently absurd.
That many people will ask you what medical steps you are taking to deal with a brand new food allergy, and many people will try to help you find information about food allergies, and many people will tell you all about how happy hearing about your experience makes them that their kids don't have food allergies, and many people will remind you how lucky you are because "it could be worse!"
But only a few very kind and thoughtful people will think to ask you how you feel about having just a few days ago watched your child narrowly escape death by cookie. By a #&@!& @!*&%!!! cookie!
I have recently learned that I feel pretty awful about that whole experience of holding my kid's hand in a speeding car and feeling totally helpless while he flushed redder and redder and his lips swelled and he coughed uncontrollably and I tried to stay totally calm and comfort him by talking to him about innocuous things in a cheerful voice all while wondering whether he might stop breathing at any moment, and what I would do if he did, all because he had taken two bites of a cookie.
That if I think too hard about it now, I can relive it in excruciating detail. That the whole watching your child have a bad allergic reaction thing is wretched, actually. That it sucks. That I really don't recommend panicked trips to the hospital as a regular family excursion.
I have recently learned that those really thoughtful people I mentioned, those people who take the time to ask a parent who has just experienced her child having a serious allergic reaction how she feels about what just happened, can make that parent feel a whole lot better.
I have learned that I am lucky, that it could have been worse.
I have learned that my five-year-old does not cry when I tell him he can't eat the fries at his favorite restaurant, or when I say he can't always have the same treats other children are having school. That when he sees other children eating what he no longer can. right in front of him, he does not scowl at them or mutter about how life isn't fair.
That he did not throw a fit when I took the bag of candy his grandmother sent him, and gave it away to the kids next door.
That instead of getting angry or upset about the long, long list of restrictions he now suddenly faces due to his allergy, he will instead (usually) tell me that chips are just as nice as fries, that he doesn't mind asking his teacher first before trying a cookie, that we can always buy more candy, that EpiPens aren't quite as scary as vaccine shots, that he doesn't want me to worry about him.
I have recently learned that my son is braver than I am.
That stylish, durable, comfortable, affordable, boyish medical alert bracelets for brave little boys that are not made of mystery metal or mystery plastic or some cheap nickel alloy are nearly impossible to find locally in St. Louis, but are available on the internet.
That your friend with a daughter with diabetes will not only answer your middle-of-the-night emails about where to find nice kids' medical bracelets, but ask her Twitter friends to help you out.
That I find having to wait several days for my kid's medical ID bracelet to arrive in the mail really, really, really annoying. Like, annoying enough to consider buying myself an engraving machine and making my own.
That my son's favorite kind of candy, that he wanted to give out on Valentine's Day, plain M&Ms, are now totally forbidden to him, because Mars does not segregate its production lines and Peanut M&Ms sometimes slip into the plain M&M package.
That I can order nut-free candy-coated chocolate pieces that theoretically also melt in your mouth and not in your hand on the internet. At double the price of the regular kind. Plus shipping.
That I am willing to pay double the price of the regular kind plus shipping. Not just for my kid, but, if necessary, for his whole elementary school class. Just so he can feel normal on Valentine's Day.
That Chipotle and Cici's Pizza and Burger King are peanut-free restaurants. That Chick-fil-A and Chili's are not.
That I am channeling so much ridiculous energy into things like getting my kid a decent ID bracelet and finding some nut-safe candy before Valentine's Day and making spreadsheets of restaurant nutrition information because those are problems I can fix. I can fix those things. I need to do things I can fix right now.
Because I can't fix him.
I can't fix the peanut allergy.
Not right now.
Maybe not ever.
***
Bonus Thing I Have Recently Learned:
That, according to the long-awaited results of his allergy blood test, my son, who has been begging me for a pet cat almost every day since the day he spoke his second word (which was "Kit-tee-cat!" which later changed, adorably, to the inventive Spanglish hybrid,"Gato-ki!" a joyous cry I heard sung out daily, for years, to real cats toy cats and pictures of cats and shadows that sorta looked like cats, with more enthusiasm than "Mama," until he was somehow suddenly old enough to hand me written explanations of Why We Should Have Cats instead) is apparently not only suddenly allergic to peanuts but also suddenly allergic to cats.
Nice one, universe. Nice.
*sigh*
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Things I Need To Know
How do I transition from, "I know your sensory disorder sometimes makes trying new things harder for you than for other people, but remember, new foods are not going to actually hurt you. If something tastes bad you can just spit it out. It won't kill you. Please try new foods. Try everything!" to "Always ask an adult before you take a bite out of anything you haven't had before. Read labels on food packages. Don't eat or even touch anything that says PEANUTS or PEANUT BUTTER or PEANUT FLAVOR or MAY CONTAIN NUTS or MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF NUTS. Don't allow other kids to share food with you. Don't eat at a restaurant, ever, unless I am there with you and I've brought your Epi-Pen."?
How do I do this? How do I tell a child who once spent an entire year of his life starving himself nearly to the point of mandatory feeding tube insertion because he was afraid of eating food that certain foods he could eat without trouble a week ago can now, suddenly, KILL HIM, without sending four years' worth of constant effort to get him to eat well careening back to square one?
How do I convince a child for whom certain shirt tags feel like little knives constantly stabbing his back, a child who can feel a tiny crease in his sock as though it were a rock in his shoe, a child who is terrified of needles, that he must now carry an Epi-Pen with him at all times, and practice repeatedly with a dummy pen to learn how to inject himself with it, and that if he feels a severe reaction coming on and there is no one around to help, he must use it, he must stab himself with a needle, and he must hold it there on his leg, and he must hold still and let the medicine flow, no matter how much it hurts him, no matter how scared he is?
How do I protect a child who was already quirky, skinny, short, bookish, nerdy, dreamy, uncoordinated, red-haired, and dangerously smart from getting teased by children or excluded by adults even more than he already was before, because he now has an allergy that many people seem to find so inconvenient to deal with that they'd like to isolate the children who have it entirely from other kids at school?
How do I convince not-so-medically-savvy family friends and relatives who have seen my kid eat peanuts before without trouble that no, he can't have just a little, and yes, in fact, three bites of a peanut butter cookie could actually, now, kill my son?
How do I make myself really believe the words of our brand new allergist, that my child probably won't die from this, that he may even outgrow it, that there are treatments down the line that could help him overcome this entirely in five years, or ten, that this won't change his life to terribly, that really, truly, everything will be okay?
How do I do this? How do I tell a child who once spent an entire year of his life starving himself nearly to the point of mandatory feeding tube insertion because he was afraid of eating food that certain foods he could eat without trouble a week ago can now, suddenly, KILL HIM, without sending four years' worth of constant effort to get him to eat well careening back to square one?
How do I convince a child for whom certain shirt tags feel like little knives constantly stabbing his back, a child who can feel a tiny crease in his sock as though it were a rock in his shoe, a child who is terrified of needles, that he must now carry an Epi-Pen with him at all times, and practice repeatedly with a dummy pen to learn how to inject himself with it, and that if he feels a severe reaction coming on and there is no one around to help, he must use it, he must stab himself with a needle, and he must hold it there on his leg, and he must hold still and let the medicine flow, no matter how much it hurts him, no matter how scared he is?
How do I protect a child who was already quirky, skinny, short, bookish, nerdy, dreamy, uncoordinated, red-haired, and dangerously smart from getting teased by children or excluded by adults even more than he already was before, because he now has an allergy that many people seem to find so inconvenient to deal with that they'd like to isolate the children who have it entirely from other kids at school?
How do I convince not-so-medically-savvy family friends and relatives who have seen my kid eat peanuts before without trouble that no, he can't have just a little, and yes, in fact, three bites of a peanut butter cookie could actually, now, kill my son?
How do I make myself really believe the words of our brand new allergist, that my child probably won't die from this, that he may even outgrow it, that there are treatments down the line that could help him overcome this entirely in five years, or ten, that this won't change his life to terribly, that really, truly, everything will be okay?
Friday, January 29, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
The Reaction
When Isaac was eight months old, he had emergency surgery to remove a periorbital dermoid cyst — a sort of benign tumor on his skull, next to his eye — after a CT scan had determined it was less than a millimeter away from infiltrating his brain.
After the surgery, my son, who had already proven himself quite a finicky eater in my early attempts at introducing table foods, became extremely orally defensive, and began to refuse solid food almost entirely. I did not know, at the time, that he had sensory processing disorder, and had no idea what was causing him to refuse food, or what sort of therapy might help him.
In the months that followed, his weight dropped lower and lower on the growth chart, and his growth slowed, until he finally met the criteria of failure to thrive. We took him to see several pediatric medical specialists without a successful diagnosis. During our months-long search for answers and help, we had him tested for common food allergies with a simple blood test, but the test came back negative.
We were advised at one point by a pediatric dietician to introduce peanut butter into his diet, because of its high nutrient and calorie content. (It is, after all, what doctors feed starving children.)
I was skeptical of this advice. Back then, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that parents delay introduction of peanut products until age 3 to reduce the chance of allergy (this advice has since been shown to be not only totally scientifically inaccurate but in fact detrimental — think the "All those doctors who have been telling parents for decades to put babies to sleep on their stomachs to prevent SIDS have just been scientifically proven to be totally talking out of their posteriors! Because they've been actually CAUSING SIDS with that unscientific, unproven advice! Who knew?"sort of wrong and detrimental — but of course I did not know that in 2005).
Plus, having seen his strong gag reaction to other really sticky foods, I wasn't optimistic that he would appreciate the finer points of peanut butter. But at this point I was desperate. And we had already had him tested for allergies once, hadn't we? So I took the dietician's advice. And at the age of 14 months, I fed my son a spoonful of peanut butter for the first time.
He promptly spit it out. And gagged. And made a face. And cried. And refused to eat or even touch anything else on his plate, apparently on the grounds that it might have been tainted with the Horror That Was Peanut Butter.
Fifteen minutes later, his eyelids puffed, and his cheeks swelled to twice their normal size.
And. I. freaked. out.
I was home alone with him, without a car. My husband was at work several minutes away. I called 911. Two burly EMTs from the fire department down the street showed up with the fire ambulance.
And they laughed at me.
"I don't see anything wrong with that baby," one said. "You're overreacting, I'm sure he's fine," said the other. "I don't see this swelling you're talking about."
I realized with horror that because my son was so thin for a toddler — he was in the third percentile for weight — the EMTs could not tell his face was swollen at all. They thought he looked like a normal baby. He did look like a normal baby. But not my baby.
They took my child's temperature and then left, refusing to take me to the hospital. I gave my son a dose of liquid Benadryl, scooped him up, and ran to our family doctor's office, which, thankfully, only was a mile and a half down the street. As soon as I walked in the door the receptionist, who had seen my son before, could tell there was a problem.
By that time, the swelling was already going down, and my annoyed and itchy toddler was returning to his normal cheerful self. But our doctor ordered a series of allergy tests at Children's Hospital just to confirm that peanuts, which seemed the obvious culprit, had truly been the cause.
For days, waiting for the testing appointment, I worried, convinced my child had a peanut allergy. I rounded up all the food in our house that was not clearly labeled peanut-free — including several of my son's few accepted foods — and despaired at the thought of throwing it all away. I already had an underweight child who was afraid of food for no apparent good reason. How many orders of magnitude more difficult would it be to try to help that child overcome his fear of food if he now had a legitimate reason to be afraid?
In those few days I lived the afflicted life of a parent who has just discovered her child has a food allergy. And then came the tests.
And they all came back negative. Every single one. Including the one for peanuts.
"He's not allergic," the allergist said. "There is no way he would have a total lack of reaction to peanut protein in a skin test if he had just had serious a reaction a couple of days before. It's something else in your house. Maybe he put his hands on a counter right after you cleaned it and then rubbed his eyes and got cleaner in his eyes, right before lunch? Kids this age have sensitive skin. We see mysterious reactions like this fairly often. You might never know what it was. Just hope it doesn't happen again."
So I threw out all my synthetic household cleaners. And a few weeks later, I tried peanut butter again. He still didn't like it. But his face didn't swell up.
In the four years since then, he has never taken a liking to peanut butter sandwiches. But he's certainly had the occasional Reese's Peanut Butter cup, and Peanut M&Ms. He's had trail mix with peanuts, and chocolate sundaes with peanuts, and peanuts in granola. He's eaten french fries cooked in peanut oil more times than I can count (Before you judge that junk food list, Judgy McJudger parents: remember — picky eater! Who needs to gain weight).
He certainly doesn't eat peanut products daily, or even weekly. But he has had them at least a couple of times a month for years.
Two days ago, at a school assembly, he tried a peanut butter cookie. And he made a face. And he spit it out.
And he broke out in hives.
And flushed bright red. And developed a blister on his upper lip. And he started itching all over, and complaining that his stomach hurt.
And then he started coughing and he couldn't stop even after a Benadryl Fastmelt and we had to take him to the emergency room. Where a doctor with a bedside manner about as warm and friendly as an avalanche falling on you gave him a double dose of Benadryl, prescribed us an Epi-Pen, terrified my five-year-old by jabbing a dummy demonstration pen into his thigh just to show us how it worked, without explaining to my son what it was first or warning him (and without telling him it had no needle in it) and then charged us $200 for ten minutes of his time.
And now I'm waiting. Waiting for an appointment at the allergist's office. To find out whether my son is allergic to peanuts.
After the surgery, my son, who had already proven himself quite a finicky eater in my early attempts at introducing table foods, became extremely orally defensive, and began to refuse solid food almost entirely. I did not know, at the time, that he had sensory processing disorder, and had no idea what was causing him to refuse food, or what sort of therapy might help him.
In the months that followed, his weight dropped lower and lower on the growth chart, and his growth slowed, until he finally met the criteria of failure to thrive. We took him to see several pediatric medical specialists without a successful diagnosis. During our months-long search for answers and help, we had him tested for common food allergies with a simple blood test, but the test came back negative.
We were advised at one point by a pediatric dietician to introduce peanut butter into his diet, because of its high nutrient and calorie content. (It is, after all, what doctors feed starving children.)
I was skeptical of this advice. Back then, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that parents delay introduction of peanut products until age 3 to reduce the chance of allergy (this advice has since been shown to be not only totally scientifically inaccurate but in fact detrimental — think the "All those doctors who have been telling parents for decades to put babies to sleep on their stomachs to prevent SIDS have just been scientifically proven to be totally talking out of their posteriors! Because they've been actually CAUSING SIDS with that unscientific, unproven advice! Who knew?"sort of wrong and detrimental — but of course I did not know that in 2005).
Plus, having seen his strong gag reaction to other really sticky foods, I wasn't optimistic that he would appreciate the finer points of peanut butter. But at this point I was desperate. And we had already had him tested for allergies once, hadn't we? So I took the dietician's advice. And at the age of 14 months, I fed my son a spoonful of peanut butter for the first time.
He promptly spit it out. And gagged. And made a face. And cried. And refused to eat or even touch anything else on his plate, apparently on the grounds that it might have been tainted with the Horror That Was Peanut Butter.
Fifteen minutes later, his eyelids puffed, and his cheeks swelled to twice their normal size.
And. I. freaked. out.
I was home alone with him, without a car. My husband was at work several minutes away. I called 911. Two burly EMTs from the fire department down the street showed up with the fire ambulance.
And they laughed at me.
"I don't see anything wrong with that baby," one said. "You're overreacting, I'm sure he's fine," said the other. "I don't see this swelling you're talking about."
I realized with horror that because my son was so thin for a toddler — he was in the third percentile for weight — the EMTs could not tell his face was swollen at all. They thought he looked like a normal baby. He did look like a normal baby. But not my baby.
They took my child's temperature and then left, refusing to take me to the hospital. I gave my son a dose of liquid Benadryl, scooped him up, and ran to our family doctor's office, which, thankfully, only was a mile and a half down the street. As soon as I walked in the door the receptionist, who had seen my son before, could tell there was a problem.
By that time, the swelling was already going down, and my annoyed and itchy toddler was returning to his normal cheerful self. But our doctor ordered a series of allergy tests at Children's Hospital just to confirm that peanuts, which seemed the obvious culprit, had truly been the cause.
For days, waiting for the testing appointment, I worried, convinced my child had a peanut allergy. I rounded up all the food in our house that was not clearly labeled peanut-free — including several of my son's few accepted foods — and despaired at the thought of throwing it all away. I already had an underweight child who was afraid of food for no apparent good reason. How many orders of magnitude more difficult would it be to try to help that child overcome his fear of food if he now had a legitimate reason to be afraid?
In those few days I lived the afflicted life of a parent who has just discovered her child has a food allergy. And then came the tests.
And they all came back negative. Every single one. Including the one for peanuts.
"He's not allergic," the allergist said. "There is no way he would have a total lack of reaction to peanut protein in a skin test if he had just had serious a reaction a couple of days before. It's something else in your house. Maybe he put his hands on a counter right after you cleaned it and then rubbed his eyes and got cleaner in his eyes, right before lunch? Kids this age have sensitive skin. We see mysterious reactions like this fairly often. You might never know what it was. Just hope it doesn't happen again."
So I threw out all my synthetic household cleaners. And a few weeks later, I tried peanut butter again. He still didn't like it. But his face didn't swell up.
In the four years since then, he has never taken a liking to peanut butter sandwiches. But he's certainly had the occasional Reese's Peanut Butter cup, and Peanut M&Ms. He's had trail mix with peanuts, and chocolate sundaes with peanuts, and peanuts in granola. He's eaten french fries cooked in peanut oil more times than I can count (Before you judge that junk food list, Judgy McJudger parents: remember — picky eater! Who needs to gain weight).
He certainly doesn't eat peanut products daily, or even weekly. But he has had them at least a couple of times a month for years.
Two days ago, at a school assembly, he tried a peanut butter cookie. And he made a face. And he spit it out.
And he broke out in hives.
And flushed bright red. And developed a blister on his upper lip. And he started itching all over, and complaining that his stomach hurt.
And then he started coughing and he couldn't stop even after a Benadryl Fastmelt and we had to take him to the emergency room. Where a doctor with a bedside manner about as warm and friendly as an avalanche falling on you gave him a double dose of Benadryl, prescribed us an Epi-Pen, terrified my five-year-old by jabbing a dummy demonstration pen into his thigh just to show us how it worked, without explaining to my son what it was first or warning him (and without telling him it had no needle in it) and then charged us $200 for ten minutes of his time.
And now I'm waiting. Waiting for an appointment at the allergist's office. To find out whether my son is allergic to peanuts.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
A St. Louis Charity Helping Out in Haiti
In December of 2008, during a time when food price inflation and natural disaster damage to crops in Haiti had caused a months-long food crisis so severe people were eating cakes made out of mud to avoid feeling hungry, as part of a series of post on global hunger I was writing for MOMocrats.com, I interviewed Dr. Patricia Wolff, the founder of Meds and Food for Kids.
Founded in 2004, Meds and Food for Kids makes an inexpensive, easy-to-store nutritional supplement for children called Medika Mamba. Made from peanuts, which can be grown locally in Haiti, the vitamin-fortified supplement is specially designed to help young malnourished children return to health, and does not require cooking or refrigeration (a key benefit in a country with poor infrastructure and highly unreliable electricity).
Before the earthquake, Meds and Food for Kids was already working to save literally thousands of impoverished Haitian children from illness and death. The organization has also provided a livelihood to many Haitians — though the administrative offices of Meds and Food for Kids are located right here in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, the factory where they produce Medika Mamba is in Haiti, and they purchase Haitian-grown ingredients from Haitian farmers at fair trade prices.
After the Haitian earthquake, I contacted Dr. Wolff to find out how the Meds and Food for Kids facilities in Haiti had fared, and what the organization might need to continue delivering vital food supplies, not only to the hungry kids they were already serving before the earthquake, but also to the thousands of newly homeless and hungry families who will now need food aid.
According to Dr. Wolff, the MFK factory, located in Cap Haitien, about 80 miles away from the devastated capital of Port au Prince, survived the earthquake intact, and can begin increasing production of nutritional supplements right away — if the organization can get enough supplies. And therein lies the problem — the MFK warehouse in Port au Prince was destroyed; a shipment of six months worth of ingredients has gone missing; many of MFK's local suppliers have sustained damage to their own infrastructure, and the transportation bottleneck in the capital has made getting imported ingredients to replace the lost food expensive and difficult.
So, today I am putting a button in my sidebar that links to the Meds and Food for Kids donation page. There are many wonderful aid organizations working to help save lives in Haiti, but I encourage my readers who would like to give to the Haiti relief effort but are unsure about where to give to consider donating to MFK.
They were helping in Haiti before the earthquake, and they will continue to help in Haiti long after the news cameras leave.
Founded in 2004, Meds and Food for Kids makes an inexpensive, easy-to-store nutritional supplement for children called Medika Mamba. Made from peanuts, which can be grown locally in Haiti, the vitamin-fortified supplement is specially designed to help young malnourished children return to health, and does not require cooking or refrigeration (a key benefit in a country with poor infrastructure and highly unreliable electricity).
Before the earthquake, Meds and Food for Kids was already working to save literally thousands of impoverished Haitian children from illness and death. The organization has also provided a livelihood to many Haitians — though the administrative offices of Meds and Food for Kids are located right here in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, the factory where they produce Medika Mamba is in Haiti, and they purchase Haitian-grown ingredients from Haitian farmers at fair trade prices.
After the Haitian earthquake, I contacted Dr. Wolff to find out how the Meds and Food for Kids facilities in Haiti had fared, and what the organization might need to continue delivering vital food supplies, not only to the hungry kids they were already serving before the earthquake, but also to the thousands of newly homeless and hungry families who will now need food aid.
According to Dr. Wolff, the MFK factory, located in Cap Haitien, about 80 miles away from the devastated capital of Port au Prince, survived the earthquake intact, and can begin increasing production of nutritional supplements right away — if the organization can get enough supplies. And therein lies the problem — the MFK warehouse in Port au Prince was destroyed; a shipment of six months worth of ingredients has gone missing; many of MFK's local suppliers have sustained damage to their own infrastructure, and the transportation bottleneck in the capital has made getting imported ingredients to replace the lost food expensive and difficult.
So, today I am putting a button in my sidebar that links to the Meds and Food for Kids donation page. There are many wonderful aid organizations working to help save lives in Haiti, but I encourage my readers who would like to give to the Haiti relief effort but are unsure about where to give to consider donating to MFK.
They were helping in Haiti before the earthquake, and they will continue to help in Haiti long after the news cameras leave.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Questions My Five-Year-Old Asked Me Today
My son is home sick from school today with a cold, an ear infection, and suspected bronchitis. It's his fifth day being sick, and now that the antibiotic our doctor prescribed him is starting to kick in, his energy is returning and he is bored out of his skull. He's tired of TV, he's tired of books and yet he's still not quite well enough to play. So, desperate for conversation, he has been pelting me with questions without cease since his eyes opened this morning (My need to actually get some work done after five solid days of attempting to entertain him notwithstanding). And these aren't questions like "Where is my Slinky?" or "Can you play racecar rescue with me?" or "Do you think vanilla or chocolate ice cream is better?" Oh no. My kid doesn't let me off that easy.
Since I can't actually seem to manage to get the blog post I planned to write today written in between answering my kids' questions, here, in its place is an abridged list of the questions he has asked me so far today:
And my favorite the question of the day:
(He was reading a book on astronomy. With constellations. Including Virgo the Virgin. THANKS SO MUCH, ancient astronomers, ancient religion-makers, and modern writers of children's astronomy books for providing me with the most interesting conversation of my day.)
Since I can't actually seem to manage to get the blog post I planned to write today written in between answering my kids' questions, here, in its place is an abridged list of the questions he has asked me so far today:
What are some things that bad bacteria do to hurt your body when you have an infection?
How do antibiotics help your immune system destroy bacteria?
Why is there momentum?
What do you mean "an outside force"?
What are the forces that make things stop moving?
What makes friction?
Why do light things fly through the air more easily than heavy things do?
How did Isaac Newton discover gravity again?
What is soy milk made of?
Where does chocolate come from?
Is the word cocoa related to the word cacao? Why are they different? Who named the chocolate tree?
Is spinach related to lettuce?
What number comes after a googol?
What is the last number anyone has ever come up with before infinity?
Why is there infinity?
How did people discover the idea of infinity?
What is at the end of forever and forever?
Why did people think the earth was flat thousands of years ago?
Why do people make up constellations?
If stars are moving and orbiting other stars and stuff all the time, why don't we notice the stars moving when we look up at them at night?
Did the Greek and Roman gods really exist?
Why do people make up stories about why things happen?
Why did people used to not use science to explain things?
What does geography mean?
What does geometry mean?
How is geometry related to geography?
And my favorite the question of the day:
What is a virgin?
(He was reading a book on astronomy. With constellations. Including Virgo the Virgin. THANKS SO MUCH, ancient astronomers, ancient religion-makers, and modern writers of children's astronomy books for providing me with the most interesting conversation of my day.)
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Guilt and Gratitude
I was in a relationship once that turned abusive. My fiance at the time, in the midst of a deep depression, started drinking heavily, calling me constantly when I was away from home, jealously interrogating me about friendships with other people, punching walls and throwing dishes when we argued, etc. He shoved me once "by accident" and dislocated my shoulder. I could see where this was going. I had no plans to become a statistic. I got out.
But to get out, I left everything. Everything I owned that wouldn't fit in a helpful friend's car. My books, my clothes, my dishes. My CDs. My TV. An apartment lease that was in my name. My home. My cat. (MY cat. Not his.)
I was in my early twenties. I had just graduated from college. I had no savings. I had no car.
I did have massive student loan debt, crushing medical debt from a near-death experience that my insurance company had decided was not enough of an emergency to warrant emergency surgery, and an underpaying job. And, a few weeks after my well-timed exit, I had a bona fide death threat from the ex, convincing me, firstly, that I'd absolutely done the right thing by leaving, and secondly, that I'd likely never see my material possessions again.
With no family in town in a position to help me, it took me a while to get back on my feet. I stayed with friends for a while, until I overstayed my welcome. I found one temporary sublease, then another. I bummed rides and took buses and sometimes walked several miles to work. One night, unable to get back to a temporary home before my next shift at work, I slept in a friend's car. Or rather, I didn't sleep, but spent the night having seriously uncomfortable flashbacks to a few weeks I once spent homeless as a child.
A few months later, I found myself in a sparsely furnished room, lying on a frameless mattress I had purchased myself, in an apartment that was actually paid for and mine. (With my cat back, and at my feet.) And as I lay on that mattress on the floor in that spartan little room, I felt a flood of gratitude. Overwhelming, profound gratitude of a strength that I had never felt before. Gratitude that I was alive, gratitude that I had a bed to sleep on, gratitude that I had a roof over my head, that next week, that same roof would still be there. And for days, when I would come home from work and find myself in that room in that bed, I felt the same gratitude wash over me in a healing wave. I no longer missed the material things I had left behind. I had what I needed. And that was enough. So much enough that it filled all my empty spaces almost to bursting. I was happier than I could remember, living in gratitude.
But it didn't last. It wore off, that beautiful sense of being grateful for having everything I needed to get by in the world. Before long I was wishing for things I didn't have again. Wanting nicer clothes, wanting nicer food, wanting nicer things again, wanting, wanting. Worrying about money again, complaining about my job again, getting wrapped up again in the petty details of typical American life.
In the years since I have tried often to force myself to recall how I felt, during that brief time of living in gratitude, with limited success. I often get angry at myself for being so seemingly unable to step back and appreciate my own luck at just being alive on Earth, let alone alive and with ample access to food and shelter and medicine and kind companionship and high speed internet and cable television and caffeine. I am painfully aware that there are far too many people in the world who do not have one tenth of what I have. There are people in my own country who do not have a tenth of what I have. But I still so often can't seem to find contentment, let alone gratitude.
I fret over my rusting fence, while in the past year, three houses on my street have gone into foreclosure. I worry about how to pay for my son's medical care and private school, while there are parents on the other side of the globe selling their children into slavery to save their lives because they can't afford to feed them.
What has happened to my gratitude?
Last night, climbing into bed after a day of watching television coverage of the post-earthquake crisis in Haiti, I felt it return. Surrounded in clean sheets, on a soft bed, in a strong house, in a neighborhood that's still standing, with my neighbors alive and well in their homes, I suddenly felt as grateful as I've ever felt for all of it. For my home and my full belly and my slaked thirst and my child sleeping safely in the next room with all his limbs intact. I wanted to kiss my home's standing walls.
And then I found myself trying to reject it. Wanting to feel guilt instead of gratitude. Because this disaster is too, too terrible for me to want to make any sort of selfish, self-centered silver lining out of it. I mean, what a typical privileged American way to react to a crisis, right? A city the size of my own town was completely flattened, and children are dying in the streets, but, hey! I am finally grateful for my own life and home!
I didn't want to feel gratitude in response to someone else's tragedy. To so many someones' tragedies. I had just spent a day seeing terrible pictures, seeing mothers crying next to the bodies of children crushed in their own homes. I didn't want to feel my luck in comparison to them. I wanted to feel some part their pain. As if by feeling some tiny part of it, I could somehow take some of it away.
But as I lay there, fighting unsuccessfully to push away that all-encompassing gratitude I have so often tried to force myself to feel without success, I suddenly realized that our gratitude, the gratitude of the fortunate, the gratitude of the spared, may be exactly what people in Haiti need.
Because we do have what we need here. We do have enough. We do. We in the United States have just spent a year in the worst economic recession in 80 years, and many of us have lost money or jobs or homes. We don't all have what we want right now. We don't even, in many cases, have what we need.
But when we look at what our neighbors in Haiti have just lost -- have lost when they already had so little -- how can we possibly say we are not wealthy?
We have enough, more than enough, and we can share it. And I am grateful that we can share it. I am grateful. And I believe most of my countrypeople are also grateful. Grateful enough to tune out, to drown out, the few selfish, cynical voices telling us not to give.
But to get out, I left everything. Everything I owned that wouldn't fit in a helpful friend's car. My books, my clothes, my dishes. My CDs. My TV. An apartment lease that was in my name. My home. My cat. (MY cat. Not his.)
I was in my early twenties. I had just graduated from college. I had no savings. I had no car.
I did have massive student loan debt, crushing medical debt from a near-death experience that my insurance company had decided was not enough of an emergency to warrant emergency surgery, and an underpaying job. And, a few weeks after my well-timed exit, I had a bona fide death threat from the ex, convincing me, firstly, that I'd absolutely done the right thing by leaving, and secondly, that I'd likely never see my material possessions again.
With no family in town in a position to help me, it took me a while to get back on my feet. I stayed with friends for a while, until I overstayed my welcome. I found one temporary sublease, then another. I bummed rides and took buses and sometimes walked several miles to work. One night, unable to get back to a temporary home before my next shift at work, I slept in a friend's car. Or rather, I didn't sleep, but spent the night having seriously uncomfortable flashbacks to a few weeks I once spent homeless as a child.
A few months later, I found myself in a sparsely furnished room, lying on a frameless mattress I had purchased myself, in an apartment that was actually paid for and mine. (With my cat back, and at my feet.) And as I lay on that mattress on the floor in that spartan little room, I felt a flood of gratitude. Overwhelming, profound gratitude of a strength that I had never felt before. Gratitude that I was alive, gratitude that I had a bed to sleep on, gratitude that I had a roof over my head, that next week, that same roof would still be there. And for days, when I would come home from work and find myself in that room in that bed, I felt the same gratitude wash over me in a healing wave. I no longer missed the material things I had left behind. I had what I needed. And that was enough. So much enough that it filled all my empty spaces almost to bursting. I was happier than I could remember, living in gratitude.
But it didn't last. It wore off, that beautiful sense of being grateful for having everything I needed to get by in the world. Before long I was wishing for things I didn't have again. Wanting nicer clothes, wanting nicer food, wanting nicer things again, wanting, wanting. Worrying about money again, complaining about my job again, getting wrapped up again in the petty details of typical American life.
In the years since I have tried often to force myself to recall how I felt, during that brief time of living in gratitude, with limited success. I often get angry at myself for being so seemingly unable to step back and appreciate my own luck at just being alive on Earth, let alone alive and with ample access to food and shelter and medicine and kind companionship and high speed internet and cable television and caffeine. I am painfully aware that there are far too many people in the world who do not have one tenth of what I have. There are people in my own country who do not have a tenth of what I have. But I still so often can't seem to find contentment, let alone gratitude.
I fret over my rusting fence, while in the past year, three houses on my street have gone into foreclosure. I worry about how to pay for my son's medical care and private school, while there are parents on the other side of the globe selling their children into slavery to save their lives because they can't afford to feed them.
What has happened to my gratitude?
Last night, climbing into bed after a day of watching television coverage of the post-earthquake crisis in Haiti, I felt it return. Surrounded in clean sheets, on a soft bed, in a strong house, in a neighborhood that's still standing, with my neighbors alive and well in their homes, I suddenly felt as grateful as I've ever felt for all of it. For my home and my full belly and my slaked thirst and my child sleeping safely in the next room with all his limbs intact. I wanted to kiss my home's standing walls.
And then I found myself trying to reject it. Wanting to feel guilt instead of gratitude. Because this disaster is too, too terrible for me to want to make any sort of selfish, self-centered silver lining out of it. I mean, what a typical privileged American way to react to a crisis, right? A city the size of my own town was completely flattened, and children are dying in the streets, but, hey! I am finally grateful for my own life and home!
I didn't want to feel gratitude in response to someone else's tragedy. To so many someones' tragedies. I had just spent a day seeing terrible pictures, seeing mothers crying next to the bodies of children crushed in their own homes. I didn't want to feel my luck in comparison to them. I wanted to feel some part their pain. As if by feeling some tiny part of it, I could somehow take some of it away.
But as I lay there, fighting unsuccessfully to push away that all-encompassing gratitude I have so often tried to force myself to feel without success, I suddenly realized that our gratitude, the gratitude of the fortunate, the gratitude of the spared, may be exactly what people in Haiti need.
Because we do have what we need here. We do have enough. We do. We in the United States have just spent a year in the worst economic recession in 80 years, and many of us have lost money or jobs or homes. We don't all have what we want right now. We don't even, in many cases, have what we need.
But when we look at what our neighbors in Haiti have just lost -- have lost when they already had so little -- how can we possibly say we are not wealthy?
We have enough, more than enough, and we can share it. And I am grateful that we can share it. I am grateful. And I believe most of my countrypeople are also grateful. Grateful enough to tune out, to drown out, the few selfish, cynical voices telling us not to give.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Food Karma
A few days ago, I found myself sitting at my dinner table, silently rejoicing because, for the first time ever in his life of five and a half years, my son ate a whole hot dog, complete with bun, without my prompting, wheedling, or bargaining with him to get him to finish it.
A hot dog. And not one of those fancy organic locally processed free range all-natural nitrate-free hot dogs, either. Just a hot dog. From Oscar Meyer. I bought it in a bright plastic package at the grocery store, on sale, plucked from a whole refrigerator case full of processed meat.
All right, it was a turkey-based highly processed, highly packaged, nitrite-filled factory farmed meat hot dog. But still.
I am a vegetarian. I am an environmentalist. I am a gardener. I am a from-scratch baker. I read every book Michael Pollan writes. I am concerned about the health and environmental consequences of our heavily industrialized food system. I feel morally troubled, not so much over human consumption of meat in principle (hunting animals for food is, after all, a thing we apex predators evolved to do), but over the particular treatment of domestic animals in the factory farm system.
When I can afford it, I try to buy locally grown and/or organic food. In the summer, I grow my most of my own vegetables and buy my much of my fruit at the farmer's market. I sneakily swap free-range chicken and beef into my carnivorous husband's diet.
And yet I take my son to Burger King and let him choose a hamburger that has probably been processed with a mechanically rendered beef fat slurry treated with ammonia. I let him eat cheap chicken nuggets sometimes from Tyson (which once plead guilty to 20 violations of the federal Clean Water Act in a town just three hours away from mine, was investigated by the Justice Department for illegally smuggling Mexican undocumented workers into the country to work for little pay in dangerous conditions, and was investigated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for animal cruelty after a shocking video released by PETA).
And I rejoice when he eats a hot dog.
Before my son was born, I, like so many people who do not have children but plan to, held a vision of my future as a parent that was thoroughly colored by idealistic naivete.
Certainly, I had encountered children who were picky eaters before I myself became a parent. I had gone to school with children who would only eat cheese pizza, plain hamburgers, and french fries; I had been a babysitter to a girl who would not eat anything that was green; my own (much) younger brother once went through a month-long phase during which all he would eat willingly was white rice seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.
Outwardly I sympathized with the parents of these children (including my own beleaguered mother), and would never have breathed a word of criticism to their faces, but, secretly, I judged them. By and large, I thought, parents of picky eaters who subsisted on junk food simply hadn't tried hard enough to get their children to eat more wholesome things.
Wasn't my own mother much more lax with my little brother, her youngest child, in every regard than she had been with me, the oldest? Didn't she allow him liberal access, as a toddler, to nutritionally questionable foods like white bread and soda, both of which had been largely forbidden to me in my early years in favor of wheat bread and juice?
Not that I blamed her, exactly, for going a little soft with my kid brother — she was much busier as a mother of three than she had been as a mother of one, after all — but, well.
I was sure I that, whenever I got around to having my own child, I would be capable of preventing any junk food addictions and overcoming any picky tendencies with proper planning and diligence.
My child would learn to prefer fresh fruit to cakes or cookies, because I would limit sweets and provide a wide variety of the tastiest fresh organic produce at all times.
But, at the same time, my child would not develop a secret, deprivation-driven obsession with desserts and confections, because I would not deny them to him altogether; he would have candy at Halloween, and cake at his birthdays; I would be reasonable.
My child would learn to love broccoli and spinach, because I would introduce vegetables at an early age, and eat them at every meal myself in front of him.
My child, if he ate meat, would learn to be ethical in his choices. I would do my best to serve him organic, hormone-free milk, and eggs from free-range chickens. I would offer him sausage from locally hunted wild deer, or hamburgers from ethically raised grass-fed beef. We would not eat at fast food chain restaurants except under serious duress. (Not that I always followed this rule myself, of course. But I would when I was a parent.) When he was old enough to understand, I would tell him why I, as his mother, made these choices about our food.
My child would never develop a taste for highly processed, environmentally hazardous junk foods, like Oscar Meyer hot dogs, because I simply would not have them in my house.
My child would never go on a month-long rice-only jag.
Right.
I had no idea, before my son was born — in fact, I had no idea before I started trying to feed my son solid food — that I would one day find myself praying desperately to a variety of divine beings I don't even necessarily believe in that my son would eat even just one bite of white rice.
That despite my best intentions, despite my most diligent efforts, despite my careful consultation of all the most respected child-rearing manuals (from Sears to Spock), despite advice from family members and friends and pediatricians and dieticians and nutritionists and, later, as the situation grew more obviously dire, a whole host of medical specialists with much longer titles, the goal posts for getting my child to "eat healthily" would move from "Teach him to eat organic vegetables and whole grains!" to "Teach him to eat, um, anything besides breastmilk and three flavors of baby food?" to "Dear God, please get my child to eat ANYTHING AT ALL."
Yet that is where I found myself, just a few years ago: at the table, in a house with a pantry and fridge filled top to bottom with healthy, tasty, natural food, facing an underweight, slowly wasting toddler with failure to thrive, desperately trying to feed a clearly desperately hungry child who would eat almost nothing I offered him.
At his thinnest during this period of self-imposed starvation — at around 12-18 months,when his weight was no longer even present on the growth chart for a child his height and age — Isaac was so thin he looked sick to me. Though he was an energetic, intelligent little boy with bright eyes and a quick smile, when his clothes were off, you could count every rib and see every knob of his spine. He lacked the characteristic pillowy paunch of a toddler. His belly, instead, curved inward. I could not bear to look at his terrible thinness, and yet I could not look away. He looked like a public service poster of a starving child. But he was a real child, in front of me. He was MY child.
These were, without a doubt, the most frustrating, depressing, terrifying few months of my entire life. When I think back on it now, I still shudder. I've been attacked on the street for the last ten dollars in my purse; I've spent nights sleeping hungry and cold in car too young to understand why I'd lost my home and not knowing if I'd see a home again; I've had my heart so utterly broken by a lover's betrayal that I felt it might never beat again. And I would take any of those days over my worst days of fear and helplessness worrying over the health of my son.
I spent thousands of dollars I did not actually have at this time taking my son to expensive medical specialists. An endocrinologist. A pediatric gastroenterologist. A pediatric food allergist. A child psychologist. He was tested for every genetic disease, every bacterial or viral infection, every hormonal imbalance or food intolerance or oral-motor developmental delay or structural intestinal defect these experts could think of that might cause an otherwise healthy and normally developing child to simply refuse to eat. I held my screaming toddler down while phlebotomists with impossibly large needles withdrew vial after vial of his blood from his tiny arms. I strapped him to a table while specialists taped bizarre plastic devices to his private parts to collect urine samples. I restrained him while an allergist pricked his naked back with 40 simultaneous needles. I watched him wheel away, sedated and anesthetized, to a room where a doctor would shove a camera snake down his throat to examine his intestines. Every time I held my child and allowed someone to hurt him in the name of helping him, I wished desperately that they were hurting me instead.
And for months of this, no one could give me an answer.
I was constantly worried that my son might stop eating altogether require surgery to install a feeding tube. I was terrified — cold sweats, nightmares terrified —that someone among this team of experts who could not solve the problem of why my child would not eat would decide that I must be purposefully starving him — that I was abusing him, that I was one of those awful evil Munchausen by proxy parents (which I only even knew existed after watching The Sixth Sense). During my nightly fevered internet searches for things like "failure to thrive" and "post surgical post-traumatic feeding disorder of infancy" and "infantile anorexia" and "Dear Sweet Internet Gods, why the F@#K won't my starving child eat?" I had come across a single message board posting by the friend of a relative of an innocent woman who had supposedly had her failure to thrive child taken away from her by the state under suspicion of abuse, only to have child services discover that the child would not eat in foster care, either, and in fact had a terrible medical condition underlying her self-starving ways, which of course only worsened during the stress of separation from her parents, etc.
Because I hated myself (what mother who can't successfully feed her child doesn't hate herself?), I bookmarked it and reread it from time to time in ritual self-flagellation.
In reality, I spent nearly every waking hour either attempting to get my child to eat, or thinking about how I ought best to attempt to get my child to eat.
I was a terrible bore at playdates and children's birthday parties. "What is going on with you?" the unsuspecting might ask. And I would say, "Oh, my son still isn't eating well at all. I'm very worried. I don't know what to do." And then, compulsively I would relate, in obsessive detail, my latest medically-guided attempt at intervention. A detached part of myself would observe my nervous patter and mentally shout, "Change the subject! Talk about the weather!"
But for me, there was no weather. There were only Days When Isaac Ate Well, and Days When Isaac Did Not Eat.
Friends and family gave me constant well-meaning advice that made me want to punch them in the face. It's not natural, or at least is certainly seems unnatural, for a seemingly healthy, hungry child to refuse all food for months on end, and so naturally most people with casual knowledge of my situation assumed I must be making some simple parenting mistake.
"Don't try so hard to encourage him to eat." "Try harder to encourage him to eat." "Stop breastfeeding him." "Nurse him more often." "Strap him to his high chair and don't let him leave all day until he's finished his whole plate." "Tell him if he doesn't eat one bite of peas you'll make him eat the whole bowl." "Try plainer foods." "Try spicy foods." "Let him see other children eat in front of him." (When he ate with other children, he would, in fact, helpfully give the other children all of his food.) "Get someone else to feed him." (His father, his grandmother, and his aunt had all tried.)
Others assumed I was exaggerating the extent of the problem and advised me he would simply grow out of not eating if I just left him alone.
Every time I spoke in public about my son's eating problems, unintentionally hurtful judgment and well-meaning but uninformed advice surrounded me until I thought I would drown in frustration and self-loathing. And yet I had nothing else to speak about. Because my days were consumed with trying to solve this problem.
When an occupational therapist finally helped my family find a diagnosis — sensory processing disorder — and I finally, finally found therapies that would slowly but surely help my son overcome the severe tactile sensitivity and texture aversions that were driving his fear of solid food, every bite my son took of every new food seemed like a blessing. It didn't matter, to me, whether that new food was a fresh-picked organic locally grown Winesap apple or a hot dog. It was FOOD, damn it, and my son was eating it. My new motto became "If it has calories, and it's not obviously poison? He can eat it."
I know better, now, than to judge the parents I see feeding their children chicken nuggets and fries and soda at McDonald's. Not until I've walked a mile in their shoes. Not until I've taken the beam from my own eye.
But now, with a solid space of four years between me and the worst trauma and fear over my son's initial failure to eat enough to thrive, I am beginning, once again, to judge myself.
Has my gratitude at his graduation from pathologically picky eater to typical picky eater — his transformation from a child who was thisclose to life on a gastric feeding tube to one of "those" picky children, who only (ONLY?!?) reliably eats plain-tasting sweet breakfast cereals (that must be dry), toast, plain, white flour pancakes with plain syrup, plain scrambled eggs, bacon, chicken nuggets, hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, plain quesadillas, plain macaroni and cheese, Swiss (it must be Swiss!) cheese and crackers, french fries, corn chips, potato chips, ketchup, applesauce, sugar-sweetened cooked carrots, mashed sweet potatoes IF they have marshmallows on top, strawberry-flavored fruit leather, the occasional raisin or dried blueberry, vanilla ice cream, and vanilla or banana-flavored yogurt — has my utter, blessed, soul-healing relief that my child finally eats enough of a variety that we can take him to a fast food restaurant and order something he will actually eat off the menu, given me an unjustified feeling of permission to stop trying in the healthy food department?
Have I given up entirely on that dream of a child who blithely eats homegrown tomatoes, organic green vegetables, Indian lentils, and Thai curried tofu?
How do I feel, really, about my weekly purchase of Tyson chicken and nitrite-laden Oscar Meyer hot dogs?
The truth is, there is a little unhappy voice in the back of my brain that still protests every time when I plop factory-farmed meat and preservative-laden snack foods in my grocery cart. Even when I know we can't really afford this week to try the organic grass-fed beef hot dogs, at the very real risk that my son will reject them because they don't "taste right" like the brand he's accustomed to and they will rot and I will have to throw them away.
I struggle regularly with how hard to push my son about the fact that he eats no green vegetables, at all, ever.
As soon as he was old enough to hold a trowel I started involving him intensively in my work in the family garden, hoping that his enthusiastic affection for the bean and pepper plants he so carefully planted and watered himself might translate into some sort of affection for green peppers or green beans, but that hope was in vain. Oh, he's gamely popped fresh homegrown organic baby peas just picked off the plant into his mouth at my insistence, more than once, and screwed up his face in displeasure, and spit them out again. And I let him.
I've tried ordering beautifully presented, perfectly seasoned vegetables for him at restaurants, and he dutifully tries them and spits them out, and I let him. I've tried hiding vegetables in sauces (which he doesn't much care for anyway) and homemade breads, and he tries them and spits them out, and I let him.
After such a long exhausting battle to get him to eat enough solid food at all, I don't want to make his life, or mine, all about his eating now. But when he's grown, if he still hasn't developed a taste for vegetables or fresh fruit — if his limited diet starts once again to affect his health — if he, ever the sensitive soul, always rescuing stranded earthworms after a rain and asking his father to put spiders outside rather than smash them — realizes the impact of his childhood diet on animals and the environment — will he blame me?
Will he think I didn't try hard enough? Will he think I tried too hard?
A hot dog. And not one of those fancy organic locally processed free range all-natural nitrate-free hot dogs, either. Just a hot dog. From Oscar Meyer. I bought it in a bright plastic package at the grocery store, on sale, plucked from a whole refrigerator case full of processed meat.
All right, it was a turkey-based highly processed, highly packaged, nitrite-filled factory farmed meat hot dog. But still.
I am a vegetarian. I am an environmentalist. I am a gardener. I am a from-scratch baker. I read every book Michael Pollan writes. I am concerned about the health and environmental consequences of our heavily industrialized food system. I feel morally troubled, not so much over human consumption of meat in principle (hunting animals for food is, after all, a thing we apex predators evolved to do), but over the particular treatment of domestic animals in the factory farm system.
When I can afford it, I try to buy locally grown and/or organic food. In the summer, I grow my most of my own vegetables and buy my much of my fruit at the farmer's market. I sneakily swap free-range chicken and beef into my carnivorous husband's diet.
And yet I take my son to Burger King and let him choose a hamburger that has probably been processed with a mechanically rendered beef fat slurry treated with ammonia. I let him eat cheap chicken nuggets sometimes from Tyson (which once plead guilty to 20 violations of the federal Clean Water Act in a town just three hours away from mine, was investigated by the Justice Department for illegally smuggling Mexican undocumented workers into the country to work for little pay in dangerous conditions, and was investigated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for animal cruelty after a shocking video released by PETA).
And I rejoice when he eats a hot dog.
Before my son was born, I, like so many people who do not have children but plan to, held a vision of my future as a parent that was thoroughly colored by idealistic naivete.
Certainly, I had encountered children who were picky eaters before I myself became a parent. I had gone to school with children who would only eat cheese pizza, plain hamburgers, and french fries; I had been a babysitter to a girl who would not eat anything that was green; my own (much) younger brother once went through a month-long phase during which all he would eat willingly was white rice seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.
Outwardly I sympathized with the parents of these children (including my own beleaguered mother), and would never have breathed a word of criticism to their faces, but, secretly, I judged them. By and large, I thought, parents of picky eaters who subsisted on junk food simply hadn't tried hard enough to get their children to eat more wholesome things.
Wasn't my own mother much more lax with my little brother, her youngest child, in every regard than she had been with me, the oldest? Didn't she allow him liberal access, as a toddler, to nutritionally questionable foods like white bread and soda, both of which had been largely forbidden to me in my early years in favor of wheat bread and juice?
Not that I blamed her, exactly, for going a little soft with my kid brother — she was much busier as a mother of three than she had been as a mother of one, after all — but, well.
I was sure I that, whenever I got around to having my own child, I would be capable of preventing any junk food addictions and overcoming any picky tendencies with proper planning and diligence.
My child would learn to prefer fresh fruit to cakes or cookies, because I would limit sweets and provide a wide variety of the tastiest fresh organic produce at all times.
But, at the same time, my child would not develop a secret, deprivation-driven obsession with desserts and confections, because I would not deny them to him altogether; he would have candy at Halloween, and cake at his birthdays; I would be reasonable.
My child would learn to love broccoli and spinach, because I would introduce vegetables at an early age, and eat them at every meal myself in front of him.
My child, if he ate meat, would learn to be ethical in his choices. I would do my best to serve him organic, hormone-free milk, and eggs from free-range chickens. I would offer him sausage from locally hunted wild deer, or hamburgers from ethically raised grass-fed beef. We would not eat at fast food chain restaurants except under serious duress. (Not that I always followed this rule myself, of course. But I would when I was a parent.) When he was old enough to understand, I would tell him why I, as his mother, made these choices about our food.
My child would never develop a taste for highly processed, environmentally hazardous junk foods, like Oscar Meyer hot dogs, because I simply would not have them in my house.
My child would never go on a month-long rice-only jag.
Right.
I had no idea, before my son was born — in fact, I had no idea before I started trying to feed my son solid food — that I would one day find myself praying desperately to a variety of divine beings I don't even necessarily believe in that my son would eat even just one bite of white rice.
That despite my best intentions, despite my most diligent efforts, despite my careful consultation of all the most respected child-rearing manuals (from Sears to Spock), despite advice from family members and friends and pediatricians and dieticians and nutritionists and, later, as the situation grew more obviously dire, a whole host of medical specialists with much longer titles, the goal posts for getting my child to "eat healthily" would move from "Teach him to eat organic vegetables and whole grains!" to "Teach him to eat, um, anything besides breastmilk and three flavors of baby food?" to "Dear God, please get my child to eat ANYTHING AT ALL."
Yet that is where I found myself, just a few years ago: at the table, in a house with a pantry and fridge filled top to bottom with healthy, tasty, natural food, facing an underweight, slowly wasting toddler with failure to thrive, desperately trying to feed a clearly desperately hungry child who would eat almost nothing I offered him.
At his thinnest during this period of self-imposed starvation — at around 12-18 months,when his weight was no longer even present on the growth chart for a child his height and age — Isaac was so thin he looked sick to me. Though he was an energetic, intelligent little boy with bright eyes and a quick smile, when his clothes were off, you could count every rib and see every knob of his spine. He lacked the characteristic pillowy paunch of a toddler. His belly, instead, curved inward. I could not bear to look at his terrible thinness, and yet I could not look away. He looked like a public service poster of a starving child. But he was a real child, in front of me. He was MY child.
These were, without a doubt, the most frustrating, depressing, terrifying few months of my entire life. When I think back on it now, I still shudder. I've been attacked on the street for the last ten dollars in my purse; I've spent nights sleeping hungry and cold in car too young to understand why I'd lost my home and not knowing if I'd see a home again; I've had my heart so utterly broken by a lover's betrayal that I felt it might never beat again. And I would take any of those days over my worst days of fear and helplessness worrying over the health of my son.
I spent thousands of dollars I did not actually have at this time taking my son to expensive medical specialists. An endocrinologist. A pediatric gastroenterologist. A pediatric food allergist. A child psychologist. He was tested for every genetic disease, every bacterial or viral infection, every hormonal imbalance or food intolerance or oral-motor developmental delay or structural intestinal defect these experts could think of that might cause an otherwise healthy and normally developing child to simply refuse to eat. I held my screaming toddler down while phlebotomists with impossibly large needles withdrew vial after vial of his blood from his tiny arms. I strapped him to a table while specialists taped bizarre plastic devices to his private parts to collect urine samples. I restrained him while an allergist pricked his naked back with 40 simultaneous needles. I watched him wheel away, sedated and anesthetized, to a room where a doctor would shove a camera snake down his throat to examine his intestines. Every time I held my child and allowed someone to hurt him in the name of helping him, I wished desperately that they were hurting me instead.
And for months of this, no one could give me an answer.
I was constantly worried that my son might stop eating altogether require surgery to install a feeding tube. I was terrified — cold sweats, nightmares terrified —that someone among this team of experts who could not solve the problem of why my child would not eat would decide that I must be purposefully starving him — that I was abusing him, that I was one of those awful evil Munchausen by proxy parents (which I only even knew existed after watching The Sixth Sense). During my nightly fevered internet searches for things like "failure to thrive" and "post surgical post-traumatic feeding disorder of infancy" and "infantile anorexia" and "Dear Sweet Internet Gods, why the F@#K won't my starving child eat?" I had come across a single message board posting by the friend of a relative of an innocent woman who had supposedly had her failure to thrive child taken away from her by the state under suspicion of abuse, only to have child services discover that the child would not eat in foster care, either, and in fact had a terrible medical condition underlying her self-starving ways, which of course only worsened during the stress of separation from her parents, etc.
Because I hated myself (what mother who can't successfully feed her child doesn't hate herself?), I bookmarked it and reread it from time to time in ritual self-flagellation.
In reality, I spent nearly every waking hour either attempting to get my child to eat, or thinking about how I ought best to attempt to get my child to eat.
I was a terrible bore at playdates and children's birthday parties. "What is going on with you?" the unsuspecting might ask. And I would say, "Oh, my son still isn't eating well at all. I'm very worried. I don't know what to do." And then, compulsively I would relate, in obsessive detail, my latest medically-guided attempt at intervention. A detached part of myself would observe my nervous patter and mentally shout, "Change the subject! Talk about the weather!"
But for me, there was no weather. There were only Days When Isaac Ate Well, and Days When Isaac Did Not Eat.
Friends and family gave me constant well-meaning advice that made me want to punch them in the face. It's not natural, or at least is certainly seems unnatural, for a seemingly healthy, hungry child to refuse all food for months on end, and so naturally most people with casual knowledge of my situation assumed I must be making some simple parenting mistake.
"Don't try so hard to encourage him to eat." "Try harder to encourage him to eat." "Stop breastfeeding him." "Nurse him more often." "Strap him to his high chair and don't let him leave all day until he's finished his whole plate." "Tell him if he doesn't eat one bite of peas you'll make him eat the whole bowl." "Try plainer foods." "Try spicy foods." "Let him see other children eat in front of him." (When he ate with other children, he would, in fact, helpfully give the other children all of his food.) "Get someone else to feed him." (His father, his grandmother, and his aunt had all tried.)
Others assumed I was exaggerating the extent of the problem and advised me he would simply grow out of not eating if I just left him alone.
Every time I spoke in public about my son's eating problems, unintentionally hurtful judgment and well-meaning but uninformed advice surrounded me until I thought I would drown in frustration and self-loathing. And yet I had nothing else to speak about. Because my days were consumed with trying to solve this problem.
When an occupational therapist finally helped my family find a diagnosis — sensory processing disorder — and I finally, finally found therapies that would slowly but surely help my son overcome the severe tactile sensitivity and texture aversions that were driving his fear of solid food, every bite my son took of every new food seemed like a blessing. It didn't matter, to me, whether that new food was a fresh-picked organic locally grown Winesap apple or a hot dog. It was FOOD, damn it, and my son was eating it. My new motto became "If it has calories, and it's not obviously poison? He can eat it."
I know better, now, than to judge the parents I see feeding their children chicken nuggets and fries and soda at McDonald's. Not until I've walked a mile in their shoes. Not until I've taken the beam from my own eye.
But now, with a solid space of four years between me and the worst trauma and fear over my son's initial failure to eat enough to thrive, I am beginning, once again, to judge myself.
Has my gratitude at his graduation from pathologically picky eater to typical picky eater — his transformation from a child who was thisclose to life on a gastric feeding tube to one of "those" picky children, who only (ONLY?!?) reliably eats plain-tasting sweet breakfast cereals (that must be dry), toast, plain, white flour pancakes with plain syrup, plain scrambled eggs, bacon, chicken nuggets, hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, plain quesadillas, plain macaroni and cheese, Swiss (it must be Swiss!) cheese and crackers, french fries, corn chips, potato chips, ketchup, applesauce, sugar-sweetened cooked carrots, mashed sweet potatoes IF they have marshmallows on top, strawberry-flavored fruit leather, the occasional raisin or dried blueberry, vanilla ice cream, and vanilla or banana-flavored yogurt — has my utter, blessed, soul-healing relief that my child finally eats enough of a variety that we can take him to a fast food restaurant and order something he will actually eat off the menu, given me an unjustified feeling of permission to stop trying in the healthy food department?
Have I given up entirely on that dream of a child who blithely eats homegrown tomatoes, organic green vegetables, Indian lentils, and Thai curried tofu?
How do I feel, really, about my weekly purchase of Tyson chicken and nitrite-laden Oscar Meyer hot dogs?
The truth is, there is a little unhappy voice in the back of my brain that still protests every time when I plop factory-farmed meat and preservative-laden snack foods in my grocery cart. Even when I know we can't really afford this week to try the organic grass-fed beef hot dogs, at the very real risk that my son will reject them because they don't "taste right" like the brand he's accustomed to and they will rot and I will have to throw them away.
I struggle regularly with how hard to push my son about the fact that he eats no green vegetables, at all, ever.
As soon as he was old enough to hold a trowel I started involving him intensively in my work in the family garden, hoping that his enthusiastic affection for the bean and pepper plants he so carefully planted and watered himself might translate into some sort of affection for green peppers or green beans, but that hope was in vain. Oh, he's gamely popped fresh homegrown organic baby peas just picked off the plant into his mouth at my insistence, more than once, and screwed up his face in displeasure, and spit them out again. And I let him.
I've tried ordering beautifully presented, perfectly seasoned vegetables for him at restaurants, and he dutifully tries them and spits them out, and I let him. I've tried hiding vegetables in sauces (which he doesn't much care for anyway) and homemade breads, and he tries them and spits them out, and I let him.
After such a long exhausting battle to get him to eat enough solid food at all, I don't want to make his life, or mine, all about his eating now. But when he's grown, if he still hasn't developed a taste for vegetables or fresh fruit — if his limited diet starts once again to affect his health — if he, ever the sensitive soul, always rescuing stranded earthworms after a rain and asking his father to put spiders outside rather than smash them — realizes the impact of his childhood diet on animals and the environment — will he blame me?
Will he think I didn't try hard enough? Will he think I tried too hard?
Friday, December 18, 2009
Rage Against the Machine
Isaac has been at his new school for five weeks.
Earlier this school year, while my son was struggling desperately in public kindergarten, coming home every day exhausted and sullen, crying every morning and begging me not to take him to school, I was careful, very careful, about what I wrote here about my struggle to make things right for him there. So careful, in fact, that I nearly stopped writing here altogether out of fear that my emotions might overcome my logic and cause me to write something I might later regret.
My frustration with the bureaucracy standing between my son and the classroom accommodations and occupational therapy he clearly needed; my anger at a few particular school employees' and district officials' ignorance, ineptitude, lack of compassion toward my son, or lack of respect toward me; my righteous political indignation at the glaring cracks in state and local government regulations that my child with both special needs and a gifted intellect kept falling through again and again; my despair at failing, again and again, despite my best efforts, to surmount these difficulties to help my child: all these overwhelmed me and I longed to use this place as an outlet for my emotions. As a podium for my activism on his behalf. But I thought I could not.
Because I felt I had to work with these people. With this school. With this district. In this county in this state. I did not know whether I would be able to find a suitable private school situation; I did not know whether I would be able to afford an appropriate private school if I found one. I did not know how homeschooling, if we chose that route, would work out— I did not know whether I would have enough time to devote to it while also working, or whether my son, who loves people and enjoys the company of other children, would thrive shut up all day most days in the house just with me. I did not want to burn any bridges. I did not want to cause a group of people who seemed suspicious of my intentions from the moment I first questioned their methods and assumptions to become even more hostile toward me.
And I was also careful because I doubted myself and my emotions. I know teaching children is an extremely difficult job. I know that districts are underfunded and understaffed. I know that, as a mother, I am prone to bias in my child's favor. I know that, as a mother, I am very emotionally wrapped up in my child's day-to-day happiness. I was worried that maybe I was wrong about some things, and these professional educators were right. I was worried that my initial reactions toward the school were overly judgmental.
After seeing the drastic change in my son in this new, more understanding environment, I am beginning to think that before, I was not judgmental enough.
And I don't feel like being careful anymore.
One of the things Isaac finds most challenging about the school environment is all the fine motor activity. He has a documented motor skills delay. He has been diagnosed with serious motor planning problems— meaning he has difficulty thinking through motions ahead of time and telling the different parts of his body where to go— and when we had him tested extensively by the school district's own developmental testing team at the age of three, he scored significantly behind his peers. Now, at the age of five, his fine motor skills are about that of a three-year-old.
He grasps a pencil incorrectly, and colors with his whole arm instead of just moving his wrist. When he uses scissors, he has difficulty keeping them perpendicular to the paper, and often forgets to hold what he is cutting with his other hand. With intensive practice at home and with his private occupational therapist, he has learned to write most letters, but he is still slow at it, and his forms are shaky. Sometimes his numbers come out backwards. He struggles to write his own name.
It's not that he doesn't know what the letters are supposed to look like. He knew his alphabet by one and a half. He read his first word at the age of 21 months (and was reading whole phrases, and, ahem, certain proper names, just a few months later). Now he browses through my college intro planetary science textbook at the dinner table, trying to parse the big words, and asks me things like, "Mommy? What's a therm-o-nuclear explosion?"
(You may think I'm making that up to be funny. I'm not. Lock up your smoke detectors, people.)
But there's a disconnect somewhere in between the perfect image of the letters and numbers in his brain and the signals that tell his hand how to form them. He knows when his writing comes out wrong— he can tell you that he's just written a B backwards, or that he left off the silent E on the end of the word. But his slow hands just can't keep up with his quick brain, and so he inevitably winds up incredibly frustrated.
In public kindergarten, his in-class assignments and homework consisted almost entirely of worksheets that required coloring, cutting, and writing.
Letter recognition worksheets, where he had to color the big A and small a, trace the big A and small a, cut out several tiny paper apples, and paste them in neat order on a tree. Number recognition worksheets, where he had to copy this number, circle that number, draw a line from here to there.
These worksheets took him forever. He had to do them several times a day. He hated them.
Not only were they hard for him, but they were boring. Downright tedious. "They're still doing letter recognition for the kids in class who have never learned to read before," he'd tell me, sighing and rolling his eyes. I would explain to him that every kid is good at some things, and every kid struggles with other things. I would remind him that even though reading is easy for him, writing is hard, and he needed to practice, and this was a good way. I would sit with him, sometimes for an hour or more, at the end of each day, and help him push through homework that was meant to take ten minutes.
And in class, it was even worse— not only was he forced to do work that was simultaneously overwhelmingly difficult and mind-numbingly boring, but he also had a time limit, and was surrounded by distractions.
A child as sensitive to sensory stimuli as Isaac cannot not hear a child across the room whispering or rustling a paper. He can't not see the sudden movement of a another child's elbow out of the corner of his eye. Now imagine twenty children whispering and rustling and moving, all around him.
He has to fight constantly to forget the scent of lunch cooking down the hall or stop feeling the draft from the vent on his face or ignore the vibrations caused by the vacuum passing in the hallway.
So when he would color or write or cut in class, he would hum quietly to himself. Trying to drown out the noise so he could concentrate. He would fidget, trying not to feel the rivets in the back of his chair. He would sometimes get up altogether and walk around the room for a minute, trying to calm down get his mind back on his task.
And his teacher would scold him. And tell him to be quiet and sit still and stay in his seat.
And he would fail to finish his work as quickly as the other students. And be punished by having to sit and finish it while the other kids played at center time.
He was scolded, and punished, daily. When he would come home, he would say terrible things. About himself.
"I'm the slowest."
"I'm the worst."
"I was the only one who couldn't."
"I'm bad at writing."
"I didn't finish."
"I was afraid."
His teacher had access to his records— both the records of the school district, and the medical records I had added to his file. She knew he had a diagnosis of Sensory Processing Disorder. She knew he had a motor skills delay.
I asked her if she could take that into consideration when assigning him activities in class. She told me she didn't think his sensory problems could have anything to do with not wanting to write. She told me thought he just didn't want to do the work.
His teacher knew he could read. She knew he'd gotten advanced letter and number recognition scores and a nearly perfect report card in preschool. She knew his preschool teacher considered him gifted. She knew he had taken a standardized developmental test and received a verbal score in the 99th percentile.
I suggested that perhaps if she offered written work that would be more interesting to him, he might be engaged enough to focus on it despite his difficulties with writing. That if he didn't find his homework boring he might be inspired to finish it even if the fine motor aspect of it was hard.
She told me "We don't want him getting too far ahead of the other children."
When I asked if we could have him tested for the school's gifted program, that would have taken him out of class one day a week to a place with smaller class sizes, more one-on-one attention, and more interesting material, she said, "He would fail the drawing test. I could overrule that, but I'm not sure I would. I'm not sure his IQ is high enough."
Isaac has been at his new school for five weeks. The paper above is a sheet of math homework he did this week. First grade math homework.
He did it in ten minutes.
He did it without complaining.
In fact, he has done not one but two math homework worksheets four nights a week for four weeks now.
He almost never makes a mathematical mistake.
I want to mail his old teacher a copy of every damned page. Screw mailing them, actually. I want to march into her classroom carrying a sheaf of them and slap them down on her desk.
In fact, I want to hand-deliver copies of this homework to every damn person at the school and the district who closed ranks around this teacher and dutifully stood in my way when I dared to challenge her evaluation and treatment of my son.
Yesterday my son asked me if, after winter break, I could ask his new teacher for some multiplication problems to add to his homework. He says addition and subtraction are getting old.
His IQ wasn't high enough for the gifted program, Old Kindergarten Teacher? REALLY?
I don't care what I have to do. I don't care if I have to sell a kidney to keep him in private school for the next several years. I don't care if I have to homeschool. I don't care if I have to sell my house and move. As long as people who want to pound "different" children like mine down until they fit into neat little boxes are in charge, MY CHILD IS NEVER GOING BACK TO HIS OLD SCHOOL.
And when he's a astronomer, or a science teacher, or a Senator, or any of the other things he's been telling me lately he wants to be when he grows up— now that he's no longer so stressed by school that he could barely think about the next day of his life, let alone the next few decades— when he's such a successful adult that no one cares anymore that he sometimes fidgets and sometimes hums and has bad handwriting— his first Kindergarten teacher, the one who could not see past the disability to see the child— she will not be the teacher he will thank.
Monday, December 14, 2009
The Isle of Misfit Parents
Two women sit together on a bench in a hallway in a school, chatting animatedly together as they wait for their children to be dismissed from class. With their subtle brown eyeliner and casual lipstick and fashionable-but-not-too-high-for-daytime heels and well-matched jewelry and designer handbags and perfectly highlighted hair they look very much like certain mothers I remember from the exclusive private high school I attended on scholarship, mothers of my friends, who seemed so different from my own mother, my hurried, serious, bespectacled mother in her short hair and khakis and sensible shoes.
I sit apart from them, alone on a chair across the room, like my mother used to sit apart. Despite my own subtle brown eyeliner and fashionable coat and Nine West (on clearance!) purse and cute, if sensible, shoes. All of which I wear like a semi-opaque lacquered sheen that I feel absurdly will crack and fall away the moment I speak.
They are talking about a charity fundraiser; they are talking about their husbands' jobs; and I find myself thinking how suddenly strange it can feel to me, still, after five years, to sit in a room full of mothers and be one of the mothers in that room. How strange it is, still! To think, here I sit, as my mother sat. Past tense.
And there are those mothers, still talking as if no one else were in the room and really, they might as well talk as if no one else were in the room because I am not talking to them, am I? I am instead sitting here alone thinking about how strange I feel sitting here alone thinking. I am a stranger precisely because I am sitting alone feeling strange.
I am sitting frozen in the conviction that if I speak to them I will intrude someplace I am not wanted.
And then one of the other mothers, the well-coiffed, magazine-cover mothers, says, with emotion, "I worry so much about her starting middle school. I mean, how will people treat her? How will she find her way around such a big place? How will she ever play sports? How will she even open her locker?"
And the other nods in sympathy.
And across the room, I do too.
And I realize I fit right in here. We all do.
Everyone raising a Misfit Child is welcome on the Isle of Misfit Parents.
Next time I'll have to say hello.
If you liked this post you'll probably also like Cocoon by Amalah. And no, she didn't pay me to say that.
I sit apart from them, alone on a chair across the room, like my mother used to sit apart. Despite my own subtle brown eyeliner and fashionable coat and Nine West (on clearance!) purse and cute, if sensible, shoes. All of which I wear like a semi-opaque lacquered sheen that I feel absurdly will crack and fall away the moment I speak.
They are talking about a charity fundraiser; they are talking about their husbands' jobs; and I find myself thinking how suddenly strange it can feel to me, still, after five years, to sit in a room full of mothers and be one of the mothers in that room. How strange it is, still! To think, here I sit, as my mother sat. Past tense.
And there are those mothers, still talking as if no one else were in the room and really, they might as well talk as if no one else were in the room because I am not talking to them, am I? I am instead sitting here alone thinking about how strange I feel sitting here alone thinking. I am a stranger precisely because I am sitting alone feeling strange.
I am sitting frozen in the conviction that if I speak to them I will intrude someplace I am not wanted.
And then one of the other mothers, the well-coiffed, magazine-cover mothers, says, with emotion, "I worry so much about her starting middle school. I mean, how will people treat her? How will she find her way around such a big place? How will she ever play sports? How will she even open her locker?"
And the other nods in sympathy.
And across the room, I do too.
And I realize I fit right in here. We all do.
Everyone raising a Misfit Child is welcome on the Isle of Misfit Parents.
Next time I'll have to say hello.
If you liked this post you'll probably also like Cocoon by Amalah. And no, she didn't pay me to say that.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Priceless
Private school tuition: More than some people's yearly salary dollars.
Private school tuition after lovely generous financial aid package from lovely generous foundation that has now earned itself a place in your will should you ever actually become a famous wealthy author: Still only slightly less each month than your mortgage payment.
Knowing that in his new school, no one will accuse your child with a medically documented fine motor skills delay of "just not wanting to do the work" when he struggles with writing, no one will confuse attention issues caused by a medically documented sensory disorder with willful misbehavior, no one will keep him from joining the second-grade reading class just because his delayed handwriting lags behind his advanced reading ability, and no one will call you "hostile" during a teacher meeting for very politely requesting basic accommodations that your child with a medical condition is technically entitled to by law?
Priceless.
There are some things money can buy. And I've realized I'd rather worry about how to afford my son's school than worry about whether my son's school is killing his love of learning. I'd rather swear off restaurants and new clothes for a year and live off of peanut butter sandwiches and live with the draft coming through my cracked basement window than fight daily against the urge to swear at the mechanical representatives of a soulless, broken bureaucracy who cannot ever seem to say anything to me about their continuing failure to effectively do the job my tax dollars pay them for other than endless variations on the phrase "We're sorry, we can't help you."
But have I given up on trying to fix my local public schools? Hell, no. Not every family has even our modest means to sacrifice to pay for private school.
If the public schools think I'm out of their hair for good, they have another thing coming. My goal has never been just to fix things for my kid with special needs. All kids with special needs deserve better treatment than the American school system and medical establishment currently offer. I feel compelled to do something big about this. I'm just not sure yet what.
Private school tuition after lovely generous financial aid package from lovely generous foundation that has now earned itself a place in your will should you ever actually become a famous wealthy author: Still only slightly less each month than your mortgage payment.
Knowing that in his new school, no one will accuse your child with a medically documented fine motor skills delay of "just not wanting to do the work" when he struggles with writing, no one will confuse attention issues caused by a medically documented sensory disorder with willful misbehavior, no one will keep him from joining the second-grade reading class just because his delayed handwriting lags behind his advanced reading ability, and no one will call you "hostile" during a teacher meeting for very politely requesting basic accommodations that your child with a medical condition is technically entitled to by law?
Priceless.
There are some things money can buy. And I've realized I'd rather worry about how to afford my son's school than worry about whether my son's school is killing his love of learning. I'd rather swear off restaurants and new clothes for a year and live off of peanut butter sandwiches and live with the draft coming through my cracked basement window than fight daily against the urge to swear at the mechanical representatives of a soulless, broken bureaucracy who cannot ever seem to say anything to me about their continuing failure to effectively do the job my tax dollars pay them for other than endless variations on the phrase "We're sorry, we can't help you."
But have I given up on trying to fix my local public schools? Hell, no. Not every family has even our modest means to sacrifice to pay for private school.
If the public schools think I'm out of their hair for good, they have another thing coming. My goal has never been just to fix things for my kid with special needs. All kids with special needs deserve better treatment than the American school system and medical establishment currently offer. I feel compelled to do something big about this. I'm just not sure yet what.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
A Pinch of Love
Suppose, hypothetically, that you are visiting your husband's ailing grandmother in the hospital.
Suppose she is in her 90s, frail, and in recovery from a recent heart attack. Suppose she has just been diagnosed, in the hospital, with an advanced form of cancer.
Suppose this lovely, kind-hearted elderly lady -- who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, raised several children, grew her own vegetables, washed cloth diapers by hand, sewed her own babies' clothes, and continued to support a large family after being widowed much too soon -- who yet, now lies helpless and tethered under harsh lights in a hard and unfamiliar bed in a room with no windows -- tells you a story, while you are visiting her, about the near-magical powers of spiritual transportation possessed by her mother's legendary Christmas mincemeat pie, the mystic recipe for which has been tragically lost to time.
What can a granddaughter-in-law, universally known in her spouse's family for reliably producing cheesecakes, brownies, and holiday pies of several flavors do, under such a circumstance, but promise to return to the hospital with a home-baked mincemeat pie?
Even if said granddaughter-in-law has never before, in fact, cooked, or even tasted, mincemeat pie?
Indeed, it seemed such a logical and obvious notion that I hardly knew the words were leaving my mouth before I heard them hanging in the air: "Oh Grandma, I'll bring you a mincemeat pie! I'll make one."
I didn't really feel the pressure of this promise until later that night, when I got home.
A mincemeat pie?
A mincemeat pie?
What, exactly, goes in a mincemeat pie?
Specifically, what goes in to a mincemeat pie so powerfully good that the mere memory of its taste could transport an ailing woman 80 years back in time to a the heavenly aroma of a warm Christmas Eve kitchen?
I did what any Millennial housewife would do under such a circumstance; I consulted Google.
Do you know that there are approximately eleventy frillion different varieties of mincemeat pie?
Well, now you do.
There is mincemeat pie with meat.
There is mincemeat pie without meat.
There is mincemeat pie without meat, but with beef fat.
There is mincemeat pie with nuts. There is mincemeat pie without nuts. There are mincemeat pies made primarily of apples, and mincemeat pies made mostly of pears; there is mincemeat made with brandy or mincemeat with sherry or mincemeat with bourbon whisky. And there are mincemeat pies that are alcohol-free.
Trying to find some signpost that might point me in the direction of the One True Pie, I studied up on regional variations of mincemeat. On the history of mincemeat. The more I read, the more I realized I was chasing a culinary unicorn.
Mincemeat, you see, was essentially a fancy way for the medieval British lady (who was then, after all, still the Hlaf Dy -- the Giver of Loaves) to say, "It's the middle of winter. We're almost out of everything useful. And you're asking me for a holiday pie? Tell you what. Let's take what ever scraps we've got left in the larger, chop them up, douse it all in sugar, spices and enough alcohol to sterilize rot." It was the original Mom's Famous Leftover Casserole.
THERE IS NO ONE TRUE RECIPE FOR MINCEMEAT.
I was going to have to gamble on a random internet recipe, or make it up as I went.
When backed into a corner, do true baking heroes follow, or lead?
I decided to make it up as I went.
The only thing I knew for certain going in was that Grandma preferred nuts to meat, and sure as hell would not want me to omit the alcohol.
I went to the store to shop for ingredients. My husband, ever a hunter-style shopper (plan it grab it and go before you have time to realize you are shopping) , followed me, perplexed and annoyed, as I pulled things off shelves and put them back, squeezed and prodded and smelled fruits and nuts and spices, and considered bottles of bourbon with a critical air. "Can I help you?" he asked. "Can I get something? What's on your list?"
"I don't have a list," I said. "I'm making it up as I go depending on what strikes my fancy, and on what else is here in the store. I'm shopping. For the best stuff. Like a cook does. Don't you ever watch Food Network?"
He was not amused. He paced in a way I have seen fictitious fathers-to-be pace on television outside a hospital delivery room. My husband knew this business of Making The Pie for his grandmother was not to be trifled with, and yet, being, as he is, an utter novice to the mysteries of baking, he could do little but watch anxiously, second-guess me, and annoy me with questions.
I can't tell you exactly what I put in the pie.
Not because it's a secret, but because I really don't know. I didn't measure a damn thing. A pinch of this. A splash of that.
I used a base of prunes, raisins, and a shredded fresh Granny Smith apple my son hand-picked off a tree. I added orange and lemon zest I candied at home. I added nutmeg and cinnamon and cardamom and allspice in nebulous quantities. I soaked these things in a liquid mixture of bourbon, Triple Sec, apple cider and lemon juice for over a day. I poured it all over chopped pecans and wrapped it in a butter-based crust out of a 1950s cookbook. I guessed on the oven temperature and the baking time.
I was half-convinced the pie would overflow, or scorch, or melt, or catch on fire and cause my stove to explode.
But it came out looking like this:
Which is pretty much how a mincemeat pie is supposed to look.
When I bought it to my husband's grandmother to taste, resigned to the fact that, whatever it was, it almost certainly wasn't her mother's pie, she took one bite, and said, "Ah, I see you found the secret ingredient!"
"Copious quantities of bourbon?" I asked?
"No," she said. "A pinch of love.
"It's what my mother always put in her pies. It's what she always put into everything she cooked. That's what she taught me to do with my own cooking. That's what I missed. The food here, it's all right. But no one puts any love into any of it. I can tell you put love into the food you make, though. Who cares if your pie tastes like hers? "
Of course you've heard this cliche of a cooking proverb before -- this adding a pinch of love.
I'd heard it before, too.
But I've never heard someone mean it so much. She looked me in the eye as she said it, with the intensity of a sage trying to impart some sort of sacred knowledge to an untutored acolyte. And as she said it, a flood of taste memories returned to me. The impeccable fresh peach ice cream served shyly to me by a silent girl on a Mennonite farm during a feast made as thanks to a midwife. The wine-soaked, melt-in-your-mouth poached pears I made on a whim in a rusty old oven with my best friend in the world. The wedding cake I baked myself, because we had no money to buy one, that managed somehow to come out soft as velvet despite my mixer having broken. The soup my grandmother taught me to make with fresh vegetables out of her garden on the day I first saw beans on a vine. My great-grandmother's apricot preserves that seemed like captured sunlight in a jar. The first tomato of the season plucked off the vine I raised from seed. One thing tied them together: an ingredient that is never in the recipe.
Cliche or not, I have tasted that pinch of love. But I've tasted it less and less often as I've grown older. The bustle of life has, more and more, habituated me to the life of a hurried, distracted cook and a hurried, distracted eater. Once I used to savor an hour spent over the stove, creating some alchemical reaction in my pot; now more often than not, I pop in and out of the kitchen, watching the clock impatiently. Someone or something else always wants my attention. To grant full mental focus to the food I'm creating seems like an indulgence I no longer have time for. After all, I'm a busy woman. I'm somebody's mother!
Which is all the more reason why I need to remember more often to add that pinch of love.
Suppose she is in her 90s, frail, and in recovery from a recent heart attack. Suppose she has just been diagnosed, in the hospital, with an advanced form of cancer.
Suppose this lovely, kind-hearted elderly lady -- who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, raised several children, grew her own vegetables, washed cloth diapers by hand, sewed her own babies' clothes, and continued to support a large family after being widowed much too soon -- who yet, now lies helpless and tethered under harsh lights in a hard and unfamiliar bed in a room with no windows -- tells you a story, while you are visiting her, about the near-magical powers of spiritual transportation possessed by her mother's legendary Christmas mincemeat pie, the mystic recipe for which has been tragically lost to time.
What can a granddaughter-in-law, universally known in her spouse's family for reliably producing cheesecakes, brownies, and holiday pies of several flavors do, under such a circumstance, but promise to return to the hospital with a home-baked mincemeat pie?
Even if said granddaughter-in-law has never before, in fact, cooked, or even tasted, mincemeat pie?
Indeed, it seemed such a logical and obvious notion that I hardly knew the words were leaving my mouth before I heard them hanging in the air: "Oh Grandma, I'll bring you a mincemeat pie! I'll make one."
I didn't really feel the pressure of this promise until later that night, when I got home.
A mincemeat pie?
A mincemeat pie?
What, exactly, goes in a mincemeat pie?
Specifically, what goes in to a mincemeat pie so powerfully good that the mere memory of its taste could transport an ailing woman 80 years back in time to a the heavenly aroma of a warm Christmas Eve kitchen?
I did what any Millennial housewife would do under such a circumstance; I consulted Google.
Do you know that there are approximately eleventy frillion different varieties of mincemeat pie?
Well, now you do.
There is mincemeat pie with meat.
There is mincemeat pie without meat.
There is mincemeat pie without meat, but with beef fat.
There is mincemeat pie with nuts. There is mincemeat pie without nuts. There are mincemeat pies made primarily of apples, and mincemeat pies made mostly of pears; there is mincemeat made with brandy or mincemeat with sherry or mincemeat with bourbon whisky. And there are mincemeat pies that are alcohol-free.
Trying to find some signpost that might point me in the direction of the One True Pie, I studied up on regional variations of mincemeat. On the history of mincemeat. The more I read, the more I realized I was chasing a culinary unicorn.
Mincemeat, you see, was essentially a fancy way for the medieval British lady (who was then, after all, still the Hlaf Dy -- the Giver of Loaves) to say, "It's the middle of winter. We're almost out of everything useful. And you're asking me for a holiday pie? Tell you what. Let's take what ever scraps we've got left in the larger, chop them up, douse it all in sugar, spices and enough alcohol to sterilize rot." It was the original Mom's Famous Leftover Casserole.
THERE IS NO ONE TRUE RECIPE FOR MINCEMEAT.
I was going to have to gamble on a random internet recipe, or make it up as I went.
When backed into a corner, do true baking heroes follow, or lead?
I decided to make it up as I went.
The only thing I knew for certain going in was that Grandma preferred nuts to meat, and sure as hell would not want me to omit the alcohol.
I went to the store to shop for ingredients. My husband, ever a hunter-style shopper (plan it grab it and go before you have time to realize you are shopping) , followed me, perplexed and annoyed, as I pulled things off shelves and put them back, squeezed and prodded and smelled fruits and nuts and spices, and considered bottles of bourbon with a critical air. "Can I help you?" he asked. "Can I get something? What's on your list?"
"I don't have a list," I said. "I'm making it up as I go depending on what strikes my fancy, and on what else is here in the store. I'm shopping. For the best stuff. Like a cook does. Don't you ever watch Food Network?"
He was not amused. He paced in a way I have seen fictitious fathers-to-be pace on television outside a hospital delivery room. My husband knew this business of Making The Pie for his grandmother was not to be trifled with, and yet, being, as he is, an utter novice to the mysteries of baking, he could do little but watch anxiously, second-guess me, and annoy me with questions.
I can't tell you exactly what I put in the pie.
Not because it's a secret, but because I really don't know. I didn't measure a damn thing. A pinch of this. A splash of that.
I used a base of prunes, raisins, and a shredded fresh Granny Smith apple my son hand-picked off a tree. I added orange and lemon zest I candied at home. I added nutmeg and cinnamon and cardamom and allspice in nebulous quantities. I soaked these things in a liquid mixture of bourbon, Triple Sec, apple cider and lemon juice for over a day. I poured it all over chopped pecans and wrapped it in a butter-based crust out of a 1950s cookbook. I guessed on the oven temperature and the baking time.
I was half-convinced the pie would overflow, or scorch, or melt, or catch on fire and cause my stove to explode.
But it came out looking like this:
Which is pretty much how a mincemeat pie is supposed to look.
When I bought it to my husband's grandmother to taste, resigned to the fact that, whatever it was, it almost certainly wasn't her mother's pie, she took one bite, and said, "Ah, I see you found the secret ingredient!"
"Copious quantities of bourbon?" I asked?
"No," she said. "A pinch of love.
"It's what my mother always put in her pies. It's what she always put into everything she cooked. That's what she taught me to do with my own cooking. That's what I missed. The food here, it's all right. But no one puts any love into any of it. I can tell you put love into the food you make, though. Who cares if your pie tastes like hers? "
Of course you've heard this cliche of a cooking proverb before -- this adding a pinch of love.
I'd heard it before, too.
But I've never heard someone mean it so much. She looked me in the eye as she said it, with the intensity of a sage trying to impart some sort of sacred knowledge to an untutored acolyte. And as she said it, a flood of taste memories returned to me. The impeccable fresh peach ice cream served shyly to me by a silent girl on a Mennonite farm during a feast made as thanks to a midwife. The wine-soaked, melt-in-your-mouth poached pears I made on a whim in a rusty old oven with my best friend in the world. The wedding cake I baked myself, because we had no money to buy one, that managed somehow to come out soft as velvet despite my mixer having broken. The soup my grandmother taught me to make with fresh vegetables out of her garden on the day I first saw beans on a vine. My great-grandmother's apricot preserves that seemed like captured sunlight in a jar. The first tomato of the season plucked off the vine I raised from seed. One thing tied them together: an ingredient that is never in the recipe.
Cliche or not, I have tasted that pinch of love. But I've tasted it less and less often as I've grown older. The bustle of life has, more and more, habituated me to the life of a hurried, distracted cook and a hurried, distracted eater. Once I used to savor an hour spent over the stove, creating some alchemical reaction in my pot; now more often than not, I pop in and out of the kitchen, watching the clock impatiently. Someone or something else always wants my attention. To grant full mental focus to the food I'm creating seems like an indulgence I no longer have time for. After all, I'm a busy woman. I'm somebody's mother!
Which is all the more reason why I need to remember more often to add that pinch of love.
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