Food, etc.

I was a picky eater as a child. Some would say I am still a picky eater, but my parents and I know that I am worlds away from where I used to be. I remember clearly sitting at the dinner table, my plate of food in front of me, while my parents went to the living room to watch the 6 o clock news and snooze on the couch. I was to sit at the table until I was done. I would watch them carefully to make sure they weren’t watching me and then sneak my food into my napkin, into my lap and later, into the toilet. I remember the feeling of food-soaked napkin in my pocket. I remember being infuriated that I couldn’t be done when I said I was done. I remember feeling ashamed of being such a slow eater.

My mother has told me that she regrets a lot about my beginning relationship with food. I was skinny, you see, and I was their only child and they didn’t want me to starve. My father, being Italian, was particularly perturbed by my lack of enthusiasm about food. Perhaps he didn’t make the connection between his thin frame and my own. Perhaps he didn’t consider that I might have inherited his farmer’s metabolism – both of us have traditionally been able to eat a sizable meal, feel full and then be starving again in two hours. But then, I wasn’t eating sizable meals, I was eating like a bird, unlike every other child he had met.

He certainly didn’t account for the stubbornness I inherited from him.

So, the issue was forced. They did all the things today’s books tell parents not to do: “one more bite,” “stay there till your plate is clean,” “it’s delicious, come on, just try it.” I dug in my heels and ate what I wanted and got creative with the rest. By creative, I mean a lot of food was wasted; flushed away, hidden under the bed to mould, left in my backpack, given to kids at school who wanted it. I made faces. I gagged on things. I couldn’t choke down slimy things like cooked onions. I would pick the smallest, stupidest pieces of offending objects out of a bowl of soup or a perfectly blended tomato sauce. I complained fervently about whatever it was we were eating that night. If I had been my parent, I would have been disgusted with me. I have no idea how they did it; two people who have respect for food, for each other, for me, watching me be such a brat. Bless them.

With Trombone, we have been very relaxed about food. He started eating solids at 6 months and he ate like a little pig until he was 2. He ate everything. He ate what we were eating. He ate spicy chili and butter chicken and pungent olives and strong cheese from my dad’s fridge and vegetables, regardless of colour. Whatever you threw at him. This one time, he ate yogurt with applesauce, ketchup and cinnamon.

Yeah. I nearly threw up.

At two, he began to shut down. Slowly he started eliminating things from his diet. The first thing I remember was cheddar cheese. One day he just would not eat it anymore. Only parmesan. To this day, almost TWO YEARS LATER, only parmesan. Unless the other cheese is white and blended into a sauce and then maybe he might give it a try. Only one fruit was acceptable at a time; sometimes kiwi, sometimes banana, never both. He ate peanut butter sandwiches and plain noodles with butter and parmesan. And milk.

And a multivitamin. That was it, for months, I swear.

I wasn’t going to sweat it. Kids do this, I know. Average the diet over a week and you’ll see the kid is getting everything he needs except variety. He’s healthy, growing, in a good mood (ahem, for a toddler) and perfectly normal. Just don’t push, don’t force it, show him lots of variety in your own diet. Whatever you do, don’t let him see how bugged you are.

He’s perfectly normal and he’s my son. This has become all the more evident as I watch him pick the tiniest of tomato skins out of his sauce (at my mom’s house, she who still blends the tomatoes, 35 years later) and find a fleck of dried oregano in the meatball I made. “What is…THIS,” he says, with a disgusted look on his face, holding up his seemingly naked finger for our examination. “That?” says SA, “Oh that’s MARTIAN SALT.” “Hmm,” says Trombone, “I don’t think I want that.”

I remind myself that I was like this, well past the age of 3.5. I remind myself that he is not going to starve, or turn into a peanut, or get scurvy. I offer nutritious choices and hope for the best. But sometimes I get so angry. I watch him picking at something delicious or wrinkling his nose or telling me no, he’s not hungry after all because the bread has seeds in it and I just snap. The little girl I was comes back, inflated with rage. Who do you think you are, she says. We suffered and so will you. You’re not so special. You’re not the boss of us.

Yes, she talks like Gollum.

In a recent moment of which I am not proud,* I presented my child with a single kernel of corn and demanded he put it in his mouth. He refused. I placed his steaming bowl of noodles and butter and parmesan cheese on the table and told him he could have them, after he put the kernel of corn in his mouth. He refused. He sat there for almost an hour, while Fresco ate, while I ate, while SA came home and ate, with this tiny corn kernel on the placemat in front of him. He cried. He ignored it. When he tried making a joke and hiding it under an empty bowl, little girl-me burst out of me, red faced, irrational, mean, “You just need to put it in your mouth. That’s all you need to do!”

The weird thing is, I knew how he felt. I remembered feeling that way. I remembered what I would do next, too: wait it out and win at all costs. So I’m identifying with the kid, but I’m also identifying as the parent. I’ve got revenge, control, empathy, all battling it out in my tiny head. I can’t win! I hate losing!

Crazymaking!

And no, he did not try the corn**. He went to bed without any food that night.

* because I sprang it on him, didn’t give him the warning that kids need that there would be a new food present at the table, didn’t allow him to prepare for the idea of trying something new; there are so many reasons I sucked at the Kernel Of Corn episode.
** in a hilarious turn that I can’t NOT share, he claimed he could not eat the corn because there was a tiny little band inside.

This is not about guilt. I don’t want my parents to feel guilty (mom? STOP IT) – I am now a fairly normal adult who eats a lot of different foods (except white creamy ones, I don’t eat those)(except if they’re sweet, then I eat them)(shut up, YOU’RE crazy) and I am not feeling guilty about the way I’m raising my kids. I am learning as I go. I am making mistakes and apologizing for them. I am trying not to worry.

This is about how much I enjoy this aspect of parenting. Much as it is horrifying to be taken over by my child-self and have my buttons so firmly depressed and to behave like an ass to my kid, after I’ve relaxed a bit, I do love the figuring-out-why part. The part where it relates to me, to my own upbringing, to my own weaknesses. How even though I know where the weaknesses are and I know to avoid jabbing them with a pen, I still end up, trance-like, pen in hand, walking toward them. How I could so firmly say, “I will never lose my shit about food, because I know what happens when you do” and then lose my shit about food, spectacularly, within 3 years.

I like this part because if I understand where I’m coming from, then I can do something about it. I can change my approach so much more easily than I can change my children’s personalities.

And I am hoping that if I am conscious, really conscious, 1500 words – good grief, conscious, of this, that I will remember to treat my kids as themselves, not as me. So that someday, they will be whatever splendid, bizarre people they are meant to be.

(thanks to her bad mother, whose post yesterday about motherhood and worrying inspired me and this post)