Entries Tagged 'Diet' ↓

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.

Take a few courses with one of the many offered online law degree programs. With your knowledge and degree you can enforce laws requiring employees to know or have access to the ingredients to the food they are serving. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The first time I tried to kick it, it was a reaction to my father’s violence. Or so I was led to assume. I mean, what eight year old wouldn’t try to die after being being beaten with a stick far more times than her memory can remember good to negate?

When I was pronounced anorexic around 12, it was simply a cry for attention. The drugs no one knew about, the same.

At 15, I was presumed borderline schizophrenic by a doctor that everyone else presumed a quack, since there’s no such thing.

The first time I got pregnant, the first time I had sex, after careful administration of a birth control pill for nearly three months before hand, three pregnancy tests said I wasn’t. It wasn’t until a pill was prescribed to induce my period and that period went on forever and left me feeling rather hollow inside that I was told that I had been pregnant.

19, sitting in the office of my fiancé’s family doctor, I was prescribed my first antidepressant. A prescription I filled and was nearly immediately told that I didn’t need by nearly everyone close to me.

24. In the midst of (my only) manic break, the psychiatrist told me that I’d stop hearing voices, hallucinating and thinking that men on the street were planning to rape and murder me if I just started eating more and cut back on my caffeine. Different doctors called me schizoeffective and also claimed me to have another made up disease, full-spectrum personality disorder.

At 25, knocked up and suicidal, dreaming of losing a baby that I was convinced never would be, a doctor agreed with what my scrupulous notes had told me, I was cyclothymic, with a twist – obsessive compulsive personality disorder and attention deficit disorder.

The gates opened.

Finally, even though the Ex didn’t agree, even though most everyone didn’t, I had a thing and that thing could be dealt with. It wasn’t just in my head anymore and I wasn’t just doing it to myself. I was no longer helpless to the illusion that maybe something was wrong with me, or maybe I was just too weak a person to be able to make it through life without being a royal fuck up who needed a thing to blame it on.

After Isobel was born, when PPD had kicked in and so had colic and I was forced to hold her while she screamed sometimes ten hours a day, when again I fantasized about killing myself, I didn’t question if something was wrong with her. In fact, it took the Ex asking the doctor during her one-month checkup to find out she had colic. I’d thought, hey, babies cry. Mine does a lot. I just can’t handle it.

When that went on until she was nearly six months, something clicked into place with me and I started actually worrying about her. When, at 13 months, she showed a level of violence usually attributed to three-year olds with personality issues, I took her to the doctor and was told she had a severe case of the terrible twos. 13 months old. Severe.

When I’d had at least one black eye and more bruises than I can ever count, she started hurting herself intentionally and I demanded she be referred to a pediatrician. I did my research. I knew going into pregnancy that there was a large chance I’d pass on my…fragile state of mind to my children – I’d like to think that’s part of the reason my father told me to abort when I was three months pregnant, not just because he was a twisted fuck – and I read up in the 18 months between her birth and her first (what’s considered in Canada) appointment with a specialist.

I knew the signs and symptoms of early-onset bipolar disorder, ADD, OCD, autism, Aspergers. I also knew that some of the symptoms of those conditions can be attributed to food allergies – typically wheat and dairy. Coupled with her propensity to get sick roughly every three weeks, having had 14 ear infections within a 12 month period, it seemed, on paper, that allergies were the culprit.

Her blood tests came back clean. No allergies.

I was told to bring her back when she was 3 for reassessment for what the doctor figured was bipolar or ADD. I was scared as fuck, having conversations already with the Ex about how I wouldn’t medicate her, how I refused, until it significantly affected her life or until she was old enough to make an informed decision herself.

Mostly, I was scared that there was actually nothing wrong with her and I was just too fucking weak to be a parent. I couldn’t handle it, so I attributed my failings to her and some phantom condition, I thought. I mean, come on, my whole life’d been made up of people telling me that there wasn’t anything actually wrong with me – it was all in my head.

A year went by, but during it, I decided to throw caution to the wind and remove milk from her diet. There’s a heavily rumoured link between dairy and ear infections, see. She’d still have cheese and yogurt and butter, but just drank rice or soy milk instead. She didn’t get one single infection after that.

But her tolerance to dairy products quickly broke down, so that within two months, she couldn’t digest a few spoons of yogurt any more. In the midst of this, her dad and I were non communicata possibila, basically threatening or screaming at each other whenever we had the chance. And I was still documenting every single thing he did wrong, so as to bring back into court the proof that I might need one day for him to not have more rights to her until he changed himself and his life.

I took her to the doctor when the reactions got particularly severe and he was still giving her just a little bit of dairy products. He referred her to a new pediatrician. Said pediatrician spoke dejectedly about false-negatives on allergy tests. Apparently, they’re common in young children especially. Enter the elimination diet.

Wheat and dairy showed a crystal clear reaction – her mood swings would increase and deepen, the bags under her eyes darken, she’d become sleepy and quite frankly, kind of a bitch. We didn’t go back to the doctor, since the culprits’d been identified.

Then she started getting these rashes. I thought it was berries she’d suddenly become allergic to and prayed that it wasn’t corn. Nothing in our environment had changed, so it didn’t occur to me that she might be getting them as a result of something at home. And well, she had the other two big-players for food allergies. So.

In all honestly, I was a little happy that there was an actual physical manifestation. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that I was making the puzzle piece fit into the wrong hole as a means to correct my lack of abilities. This was the Scarlett letter of not-bad-parenting, to me.

After a little while, she stopped getting as many. Even though she had berries and corn. I couldn’t figure it out. I went to BlogHer, leaving her with one of my best friends and her family, with a side-request that should Isobel become spot-laden, my friend make a note of what she’d eaten.

Not one damn spot in the four days I was gone.

By Monday morning, she had 11.

By Monday afternoon, about 19, if you included the 11 from the morning which had almost disappeared. One wrapped nearly all the way around her wrist, others cluttered around her elbows. They aren’t itchy, or painful, they don’t bother her, and actually, she seems to like the hey, look at me phenomenon that plays out when she announces she has a rash.

We went to the clinic. The doctor took one look and said it was an allergic reaction. I said, to what? And he gave me a form to give to the receptionist. Isobel’s getting a scratch test done.

Tuesday, no call back with an appointment time. Another 10 or so spots.

Wednesday, still nothing, and nearly a quarter of her back is affected with whateverthefuckthisshitis.

Thursday morning, I see on one very tiny forearm, one three years old and still too small to fit into two year old clothes, over 19 spots. All different sizes, all just the same, none indicative of what’s bringing them on.

This afternoon we went back to the doctor to find out what the hold up was with the appointment for the scratch test. We got our appointment time.