Your Eating Habits are Offal

I am the kind of person who will try anything once – when it comes to food. Over the years, I’ve crunched through a course of live grasshoppers, chewed and chewed and chewed steak du cheval (horse steak in case you need help with translating), cured hangovers with menudo, scrambled cactus with my eggs, celebrated at a Burns dinner with haggis, and reveled in the indescribable glory of artfully-prepared sweetbreads.

Now that I live in Montana, many of the more exotic foods that were once a staple of my diet are hard to come by. I certainly can’t stroll down the street from my office and get a bowl of fried baby octopus as I could in Chicago, and I can’t walk a couple of blocks from my house for tongue tacos like I used to while living in New Orleans. In fact, rustling up foie gras, something I could eat every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, involves a four-hour drive ONE WAY. Even getting sashimi takes some real doing and planning these days.

So, my everyday fare has become fairly pedestrian. (Think chicken breasts and lots of salad.) But still, after working in kitchens, traveling around the globe, and experiencing some of the best that the world has to offer in terms of cuisine, I try not to let things get boring. I pore over cookbooks and cooking sites. I cook nearly everything we eat from scratch with the freshest ingredients I can find. I try new recipes, new cuisines, new presentations. And, most of the time, I succeed.

At least I think I succeed. My kids, in particular my eldest, Mike, often react as if I am serving them plates of hot steaming menudo, tongue tacos, steak du cheval, fried baby octopus, or haggis. In fact, if you were to survey Mike, he might tell you that I am a terrible cook or, as he plaintively put it one day, “I just don’t understand why you never ever cook anything good to eat.”

Now please, dear reader, rest assured that I do not expect this child to revel in offerings of offal. I have never once tried to serve the boy chitterlings or trotters, Trippa with tomato sauce or lampredotto with chilies and parsley. Although I can’t begin to tell you just how tempting it is.

And it is tempting simply because Mike is a non-consumer of food. In the simplest of terms, he does not eat. I am consistently amazed at that child’s ability to survive on 33 calories every other day. And, I am most embarrassed to admit that after nearly four years of Mike eating like a bird when the wind is blowing a certain way and if every human being born on the third Tuesday of April holds hands and chants for peace simultaneously, I still cannot let it go.

As a result, family mealtime is likely what will put me in an early grave since I cannot begin to describe to you how incredibly angry I get when Mike refuses to so much as touch the dinner I prepared. Especially if it is something that he eagerly lapped up a month ago. Especially if he is so completely repulsed by what I have made that he gags, always an attractive noise accompaniment to a meal. Especially if he tops off his disapproval of the meal by dismissively saying to me, “I think you need to go in the kitchen and make me something good to eat that I like.”

It makes me so angry that I have had to say to myself, “Put the fork down. Put the fork down. Put the fork down. He is only three and you do not want a child who has been deformed by a fork.”

Yes, mealtimes are often battlegrounds at our house, which is exactly what the experts tell you not to make mealtimes into, no matter how little your child consumes or what they won’t eat today.

Mike has been a terrible eater since, well, birth. So I’ve had four years to think about why this makes me so angry and why I can’t just ignore the fact that my kid is routinely on a hunger strike that rivals anything Mahatma Ghandi ever did. I wish I could say that it’s because I worry about him – that I am concerned he’s not getting enough nutritious foods, that he’s not growing, that he’s too skinny. And yes, I suppose on a day that he has eaten a bite of yogurt, half a banana, and a couple of spoonfuls of squash, I do wonder how it is that he just doesn’t fall right over from malnutrition.

But the reason I get angry has nothing to do with Mike and everything to do with me.

I love food, but it goes way beyond that. I view food not just as life-sustaining, but soul-sustaining. I show people I care about them by cooking for them. My mother still sends me boxes of homemade goodies in the mail, and I swear to you that it brings a little tear to my eye when I open them because I know just how much my mom loves me. There is no greater joy in the world to me than going out for a meal with good friends, and eating and talking for hours. My favorite travel experiences were wine-and-food extravaganzas in Napa Valley, Italy, and France. I can describe my first bite of chocolate mousse, something I ate nearly twenty years ago, in perfect detail. I think of my favorite pizza, the way the crust sometimes is black in spots and bubbly in others, and I tell you – my mouth starts to water. I am passionate about food.

And eating with Mike takes every single bit of my passion away. He ruins food for me. I have given up plenty to have kids. I gave up a promising career. I gave up hopes of great athleticism. I gave up nice clothes and nice cars and travel around the globe. I have given up my time. Sleep. My energy. Peaceful trips to the library or the bookstore. An orderly house. Sunday drives with no one complaining in the back seat. A flat stomach and perky breasts. Sitting down and reading a book when I haven’t already been run ragged all day by children. But I am NOT going to give up food. I don’t even want to push the pause button on food. I am willing to wait for a lot of things, but I am not going to wait until Mike moves out of the house to have an enjoyable dining experience.

Trust Me -- I'm an Expert

I've been up to my elbows in Peter's diarrhea all week and I personally don't see anything wrong with using a garden hose to clean up baby.

I might draw the line at throwing him in the dryer though. Maybe.

Thanks to Mary for sending these along.

See more at:

http://www.makememinimal.com/2008/instrucciones-para-cuidar-un-bebe/

Love Makes the World Go Round and a Mother Go Crazy

As I arrived home from work, my babysitter greeted me at the door.

“Peter said ‘hair’!” she exclaimed, referring to my 13 month-old, whose vocabulary, when I’d left for work just four hours ago consisted of three words not one of which was ‘hair’.

“Hair!?” I asked. “Wow – that’s the first time he’s ever said that!”

“Oh,” she said, realizing the gravity of the situation. “He probably didn’t say ‘hair’. It was probably just something else, something else he’s said before.”

But her retraction of Peter’s first utterance of ‘hair’ didn’t lessen the blow. My baby, who is left with a sitter only a handful of hours a week, said a word for the very first time to someone other than me. I immediately called my husband.

“Peter is a traitor!” I told him. “He said ‘hair’ to the babysitter! He’s never said ‘hair’ to me! And he didn’t even run over to the door to greet me as if he’d spent the afternoon being tortured by the sitter!”

“That’s great,” my husband said. “He’s learning new words and he’s getting used to the babysitter.”

I supposed my husband was right. But it didn’t feel great. What it felt like to me, the guilty working mother, was that my son had chosen to utter one of his first words to someone other than me because he liked her more.

Of course this is completely ridiculous. But every working mother I know has had to balance the guilt she feels at missing some of the “firsts” with her need, whatever the reason, for going to work.

Shortly after I gave birth to my first son, my mother-in-law, who had stayed home full-time with her five children, regaled me with a sad tale about seeing a bunch of very young children from a daycare on a field trip.

“Their eyes looked hollow and sad,” she told me, shaking her head. “Obviously they were depressed about their mothers leaving them in daycare just so they could go to work.”

Obviously. My mother-in-law’s attempt to make me feel bad troubled me not because of sad children with hollow eyes, which didn’t phase me a bit, but because of her flippant dismissal of a modern mother’s need to go to work as selfish.

I work for two reasons. The first is purely financial – without my paycheck, we wouldn’t eat or have a roof over our heads. But the second is because I like working. I like leaving the house every day and having conversations with adults. I like completing a thought. I like using the extensive schooling I paid for and the extensive experience I earned prior to becoming a mother.

Of course there is research that shows that kids of working parents thrive, just as there is research that shows that kids who have a stay-at-home parent thrive. It seems that children, as long as they are in the care of a caring, responsible person, manage to get along just fine. But what about the adults involved? Are they thriving?

When I returned to work after my first son was born, I was wracked with guilt. I was certain that I would return home from work one day and he wouldn’t recognize me. Amazingly, however, my son’s love for me didn’t diminish one bit. That’s not to say there weren’t rough spots. In fact, there was a long period where I literally had to peel my sobbing son off of my leg as I tried to make it out the door every morning. I spent my walk to work trying desperately to regain my composure, sure that I was the most horrible, selfish mother in the world for leaving my son – just to go to work.

It has taken a while, but I have slowly come to realize that loving work doesn’t mean I love my children any less. Yes, I miss out on things – some first words, field trips with the preschool, the occasional lunch or dinner– and I feel guilty about that. To assuage my guilt, I often make myself crazy trying to balance work obligations with my eldest son’s desire to have me be the parent helper at preschool. It isn’t easy, but negotiating my work schedule so that both of my boys’ needs to have me present as much as possible is one way I can show them how important they are to me.

In spite of Peter’s betrayal, I know in my heart that my children don’t love me less because I love going to work. In fact, a couple of nights ago as I sat on the couch with Peter on my lap, he reached up and rubbed my head and exclaimed, “Hair! Mama’s hair!”

He put words together for the first time. And I was there to see it. Obviously he did this on purpose just to show me how much he loves me.

After a Verrrry Looooong Day

Me: Mike, we've had kind of a hard day today, haven't we?

Mike: We have. You made me take a lot of time-outs.

Me: Well, I'm sorry that I lost my patience with you so many times today.

Mike: That's o.k., mom.

Me: Is there anything you're sorry about?

Mike: I'm very sorry that you lost your patience with me so many times today too.

Me: Anything else?

Mike: And I'm very sorry that you made me take so many time-outs.

Me: What could you do differently tomorrow so that we can have a better day?

Me: Well, I'm not sure about me. But maybe you cannot give me so many time-outs. Then we'll have a better day. A much better day.