Somewhere along the line, most of you seem to have become convinced that I’m a good mother.
I’m pretty sure that you all see what I don’t and vice versa since our biggest critic are usually ourselves and ever since John Locke sat around thinking too much (and likely hitting the mead a little heavily), those of us that haven’t been beat to death by life think that people are generally good.
So, it’s a bit of a dichotomy we’re facing here, complete with two very different points of view and therefore no tangible basis to form an opinion.
Here’s some reasons I think motherhood and I aren’t exactly soul sisters:
- On a very good day, Zoë still watches at least two hours of movies. You don’t wanna know what a bad day’s like.
- Most dinners are made up of cut-up vegetables, some sort of grain (which might be rice cakes) and some protein, but very rarely involves cooking anymore.
- When she’s hurt and in my face, if she was hurt while doing something that I told her not to do, I admonish her and hand out an I Told You So before a hug. If there even is a hug.
- I probably spend more time telling her to stop climbing on me or touching me than I do making an effort to cuddle with her or hand out extra affection.
- I’ve made my Starbucks love more of a priority than buying organic fruits and vegetables.
- Oh, and I suck at washing fruits and vegetables.
- I yell.
- When she’s pissing me off, I tell her that I want her to leave me alone because I’m getting angry with her for _______.
- When I smoked, I smoked in front of her, while hanging out the window of our apartment, when I was pregnant, while pushing the stroller…just never directly in the apartment.
- I’ve stopped her from seeing family members because I didn’t agree with their morals.
- I don’t have the patience or motivation (or want, really) to sit down and play with her.
I could keep going, really. I’m sure I could think of about 100 things that I think make me a piss-poor mom. Choices I’ve made, things I’ve let fall by the wayside, harsh words and body language.
I’ve hinted and even outright said a lot of these things, but for some reason, I’m not lacking for compliments of my mothering.
I don’t get it.
But, I don’t think I’m a bad mom, either. Her health and physical welfare is always more important to me than my own. The fact that I recognize what I do wrong (in my eyes) and try to change it speaks a lot louder of parenting – to me – than simply accepting that it’s ‘good enough’. I’ve fucked up in a lot of ways, but I’m constantly assessing my current level of fucking up.
Enter junk food. I think this is where part of you got the interpretation that I was a good mom.
Zoë has food allergies, so her diet is fairly healthy. If she was allergic to nuts instead of wheat and dairy, it might be a different story, but the simple fact is that wheat and dairy allergies beget a diet rich in fruits, vegetables and unprocessed foods.
Because the yummy {read: unhealthy} stuff is off limits due to its ingredients.
That doesn’t make me a good mom – it just means I’m terrified of feeding her the wrong thing and her suffering for it. And me suffering because she’s suffering.
So, she doesn’t get junk food very often and I generally only get it myself when we’re dining out or I order something late at night. We never get to have a meal at most diners or family restaurants because of their menus being laden with burgers and breaded things.
When we do eat out, her meals are almost always made up of the same things: eggs (without milk or butter), unmarinated chicken or shrimp or steak (cooked on a cleaned grill, without seasonings), a side of fruit, a side of veggies (without butter), a baked or roasted potato (without butter or other seasonings, and definitely never mashed with garlic, which we both love). To change things up, we sometimes get shawarma or sushi.
I am the asshole that cooks hate, with 50,000 customizations. I honestly wonder if any of the dishes we get have been spit in.
So, yeah, pretty healthy eatin’ going on around here.
I felt like that had to change, so I took us to Fatburger yesterday. I stood at the counter and I asked, completely point-blank, “Do you have access to your food’s ingredients? I need to know if your turkey burger’s patties have any wheat in them.”
The guy behind the counter said they didn’t. I said “Really?! Because she’s allergic to wheat and dairy, so I need to know that they’re not in there, for sure.” He confirmed it after looking in the back at the package (I’m assuming): the sole ingredient listed was turkey.
{Yes, I know it’s a pretty weird concept that a burger patty might be made of only the animal it’s named for, but hey, maybe that’s how they roll. I thought.}
And I did a mental jump for joy. Junk Food! I even texted her dad, to let him know the happy news.
Zoë loved her burger. She ate the lettuce and tomato that came with it. She asked for another ‘booger’ for lunch today. Seems like it was pretty win-win. Except for a few things.
One, dinner was so close to bedtime, there was no allowance for me to witness any sort of reaction in her. If she’d been up later, I would have noticed that the bags under her eyes became a darkish purple colour – which is how she woke up. Early.
By 11am, she’d had no less than eight tantrums. Three time outs. Had scratched herself, hit me a few times, and spontaneously tripped, kicked or hit something, bruising herself.
By noon, the beginning of a tantrum led to me having to restrain her for 20 minutes. Why? Because she’d started hitting me, and then when I put her in her room for hitting me, she started banging her head on the wall. I was seriously concerned that she was going to knock herself out, or at least give herself an concussion.
By 5:30, I wanted out, man.
I was losing my shit (inside my head) because she couldn’t hold her shit together for long enough to put on her fricking underwear. She went back in her room for another 10 minutes, until she calmed down. Thankfully she wasn’t violent that time.
I made dinner – scrambled eggs, pasta with tomato sauce and slices of avocado – and then we went for a walk to get smoothies and some fresh air. By 7:30, she was asking to be put to bed.
She was asking to go to bed.
By eight o’clock, I stopped craving a cigarette, a half-dozen drinks and to ream out the staff at Fatburger.
See, the rest of the food she’d eaten were tried, tested, true: fresh fruits and veggies, gluten-free cereal with soymilk, brown rice pasta with 100% tomato sauce, eggs scrambled only with gluten-free seasonings. The only odd-man out was the turkey burger, and by 5:30 I was sure of it.
Why? Because I did something that maybe their employee should have considered, before he told me that their patties were complete devoid of wheat: I check their online allergens guide.
Yup. They have a link, right there on their site! That tells you every item on their menu and which, if any, of the top eight allergens are in them. In a nice little chart. With writing underneath, cautioning that seasonings might contain gluten, and other such interesting, usually-reserved-for-fine-print information.
It took me two minutes, and I could have checked before walking into the restaurant, and I could have saved the two of us from a day of hell. Or, their employee could have informed me if there was wheat in the burger. Like I’d asked so clearly.
I don’t know how it’s acceptable for an employee to either not know the ingredients of the food he’s serving, or not have access to that information. I would think it would be law, and if it weren’t, that at least it would be company policy for Fatburger, given that their website contains the information.
Not many food manufacturers will do that – provide an allergen listing for every item on their menu on their website for any one to check out, anytime. It’s especially hard to come by when you’re talking about fast-food. Not many will even provide you with nutritional information unless you request it politely within a gold fricking flocked letter, sealed with centuries-old wax, containing the deed to your property and the rights to your first born.
Fatburger, you’ve made me lose my appetite for burgers. Especially yours.
