Food and the Unintended Consequences of Parenting

When Sam was a toddler, someone told us that the way to cure bad behavior was to put a drop of Tabasco on his tongue. But just at the moment Ralph finally decided to reach for the small bottle with the kick-ass contents, he decided there must be a better way to teach baby Sam a lesson than to mess with his taste buds. He closed the kitchen cabinet, forever leaving Tabasco as a condiment for raw oysters rather than a form of corporal punishment.  

I was thinking about that incident yesterday when I read a story in the New York Times about well-meaning parents who have passed on their obsession with health food to the detriment of their kids. Without meaning to, they have doused the equivalent of Tabasco all over what their children eat:

"We're seeing a lot of anxiety in these kids," said Cynthia Bulik, the director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They go to birthday parties, and if it's not a granola cake they feel like they can't eat it. The culture has led both them and their parents to take the public health messages to an extreme." 

The piece goes on:

 "Lisa Dorfman, a registered dietician . . .  says that she often sees children who are terrified of foods that are deemed 'bad' by their parents. "It's almost a fear of dying, a fear of illness, like a delusional view of foods in general," she said. "I see kids whose parents have hypnotized them. I have 5-year-olds that speak like 40-year-olds. They can't eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans fats." 

Like most things having to do with parenting, the lessons you teach about food are not as straightforward as you'd wish. Even though there seems to be considerable distance between obesity and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, we're just talking about a difference of pounds in terms of the trouble they bring. One doctor has coined the name "orthorexia" for people obsessed with health-conscious eating, the Times says. What we're trying to do, of course, is lay down patterns that will serve our kids well as they grow up and make their own decisions. But how? In terms of sweets, we swing between operating a Hitler youth camp and Candy Land.

In our house, food is not just what we eat, it's what we do. In first grade this year, when he was asked to write his autobiography, "What activity does your family enjoy together," saying, "We cook." As much as it slows dinner prep down, Sam and Julia snap beans (Julia often throws away the beans and puts the snapped ends in the bowl) and cut vegetables with a dull, ivory-handled fish knife. Each time Ralph picks Sam up from school, his first question is always, "Who's coming for dinner?" (When I pick him up, he asks, "Where are we going for dinner?")

It occurred to me in thinking about all this that maybe putting food in the context of family meals rather than talking about the sugar content in a box of Puffins, say, is the way to go. The people I know who have raised successful children put great stock in the family dinner as if some alchemy happens when you sit around a table together. And certainly in my own experience growing up, the profound lessons of my childhood were delivered not from a podium but from behind a place mat. Now that my father is on a feeding tube, those kitchen table lessons seem all the more poignant to me.

Only time will tell whether the right lessons take with Sam and Julia. When I was young, my parents forbade us from going to McDonald's and listening to the Beatles (Burger King and "Winchester Cathedral" were their fast-food and music of choice.) 

All of parenting seems arbitrary, fraught with unintended consequences. My parents were prescient about McDonald's (though not Burger King). As for the Beatles, well, maybe we'll learn one day that they're hazardous to your health.

The End of Journalism--and Civilization

While I'm on the subject of caregivers (see yesterday's post), I'd like to rant for a moment about journalism. I didn't get to see Barack Obama's State of the Union address last night--I was too busy putting Julia to bed again and again, she having decided that she would stay up until Ralph got home at 11 p.m. 

Nonetheless, I'm almost certain from reading today's papers that while the president talked about Wall Street and the Big Three in Detroit, he failed to mention the demise of journalism. We are small potatoes compared to other industries, and we will never get a bail-out. But we are dying all the same. On Monday, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News declared bankruptcy. They join the Seattle-Post Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, which are for sale, and scores of other papers and magazines that have had lay-offs and/or involuntary furloughs. The Christian Science Monitor, of course, has already moved its operations to the Web. Ditto with U.S. News & World Report, where I used to work, which now puts out a magazine only once a month.

But it's not just a question of where we will read our news: we can all get used to reading the newspaper on a computer. It's what will be lost in the translation. I have one very good friend who's a devotee of the obituaries in the local paper, not because she's morose but because of the tidbits of humanity they reveal about the people who died. 

That's exactly what I've been thinking about that New York Times piece on child caregivers that I cited yesterday. If I were reading the paper online, I would scan the headlines about the economy and Iraq and Afghanistan and probably not take the time to read anything I don't have to. And having read the caregiving story, it's not as if I--or anyone else--can do anything to change the grim circumstances it lays out. Those kids will go on giving up their lives for their parents whether it becomes public knowledge or not. 

But journalism is about more than headlines; it's about more than keeping the government honest or being the whistle-blowers for big business. Its equally important role is to hold up a mirror to society; to tell us who we are. It's about the texture of our daily lives.

Few, besides my fellow journalists, seem to think that much will be lost by losing this. Journalists are reviled--lower, I'd bet, than lawyers on the food chain. Sarah Palin spoke for many Americans when she said during the campaign and afterward that we got in the way of telling the story.

But I can't help but think that what's being lost is of larger moment than a Saturn minivan, say. I think it's more a cornerstone of civilization that is crumbling.  

Caregivers Are Too Young for the Job

Yesterday's New York Times has a story about children taking care of their ailing parents. It's not about the sandwich generation; not about people in mid-life like me and my sisters caring for our mom and dad. It's tweens and teens who have to give up soccer practice and seeing friends and, in some cases, school, to dispense insulin and migraine meds and take their charges to doctor's appointments--people, in other words, who should still be receiving the care, not doing the heavy lifting, sometimes literally.

The newspapers are not filled with the cheeriest stories right now, it being a critical time for us both at home and abroad. But of all I've read lately, this was surely the most depressing. 

I felt bad enough last week when I read about Bristol Palin's interview with Greta Van Susteren on FoxNews in which she explains that the mom thing is unexpectedly hard: 

"Well it's not just the baby that's hard. It's just, like, I'm not living for myself anymore. It's, like, for another person, so it's different." 

But at least her situation is the result of a hormonal romp (although based on who the father is there must be mighty slim pickin's up there in Alaska). And at least that baby will grow more independent, not less, as time passes. 

That's why, even though Julia woke up whining this morning and never stopped until she walked out the door except to cry "I'm done being in a bad mood!," it is easier for me to deal with the details of motherhood than those of daughter-hood right now. At least it feels like I'm operating in the light of day.

From my experience, illness is a long, black tunnel. And even though I'm so lucky that I still have both of my parents, I have also lost them to the tunnel.  

Facebook and My Bookshelves: A Shaky Comparison

Yesterday I got a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built in my office (actually, they're Ikea shelves nailed to the wall so they don't fall on my head) so that I can at last unpack the forty cartons of books that have been stored away from three moves ago, in 2001. This morning, as I spent a couple of hours unpacking them, I was hit with so many rushes of memory that it was like attending my own, personal reunion.

In fact, I can't help being struck by the similarities of my dusty piles of books and my new Facebook "friends," though the last time I saw my copy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book I read in college and detested because of the way the professor abused the one African-American in the class, and my inscribed copy of Stefan Kanfer's The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World, written by someone with whom I'm no longer in touch, Facebook didn't exist. 

Having carted around some books for decades that I have never read and likely never will, I'm now wondering, Do I toss Don DeLillo's Underworld in the give-away bin at the Cleveland Park Library or put it on my shelf to take up space of which I now MIRACULOUSLY have too much in order to pretend that I'm more erudite than I really am? Is the point of putting books on a bookshelf to keep the ones you've actually read and treasure, for whatever reason? (I can't part with my Kanfer book, for example, because it reads: "For Linda A lovely lady of talent, true grit, and talent from her secular rabbah," and I'm sure it's the only time my name will ever be in the same sentence with talent x two. Not to mention that when I was just getting started in journalism, I met him in a used bookstore in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and he was incredibly generous to me.) Is it to stockpile the un-reads for the future, which, in my case means I won't need to borrow or buy another book until 3001?

My list of Facebook friends is much the same. There are the friends I talk to every day, anyway, but there's a much longer list of "friends" whom I've spoken to rarely--if ever. And may never. Don't get me wrong: I love being able to be touch with people from high school I didn't get to know back in the day. And as one "friend" of a friend who from elementary school said, we're recreating our Brownie troop on Facebook one person at a time. It's pretty incredible that these people, once lost in time, are now a click away. 

Facebook makes me feel that the world is small and manageable and, as I've blogged about before, I think that there's a kind of circling of the wagons from our youth as our parents age and get sick. It means something to hear from someone who knew my mom and dad when they were in their forties. It's valuable to have the same references to the same stupid songs from 1977. Who else but those in my senior class from The Lovett School in Atlanta would know the significance of "Build Me Up Buttercup" and be able to sing it word for word?

Still, I have to wonder, as with my books, is the point of Facebook to amass sheer numbers? Is the person with 6,035 "friends" a lot cooler than the person with 7 "friends," even if they're both only really in touch with 5 of those people? And like the books I know I'll never read, what's the protocol about un-friending people, though unlike a book, they take up no room in cyber-space.

These are the questions I'm pondering as I put the Anne Tyler books from my twenties on the shelf alongside a copy of a Dorothy Parker book that belonged to my grandmother, Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity, and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. The lesson I'm taking from all this is that I'm used to my life being organized in neat categories. Books are arranged by the Dewey Decimal System. Friends are from college or my first marriage or Sam's daycare class. But now I realize that the old categories don't hold. My shelves are a mish-mash and now, because of Facebook, so are my friends. And I like it that way.

For Renewable Energy, Tap a Mother's Guilt

I was listening to a segment on the Obama administration's plans to create renewable energy sources on The Diane Rehm Show as I was driving downtown this morning when it hit me: if you could bottle up all the mother guilt in the United States, you would never need to drill for oil again. You'd have all the renewable energy you could ever use.

The reason I was stuck in traffic, looking for a parking place near the Verizon Center, instead of (a) walking Mavis with a friend, as scheduled, and (b) getting ready for a doctor's appointment is that Julia's daycare class had a field trip to see "Disney on Ice" and suddenly I was going. 

Back when I was dating, the etiquette was clear about who came first: you did not bail out on a girlfriend to make plans with a guy. Even the doctor/patient relationship leaves no gray. Cancelling an appointment at the last minute as I did means that I will have to pay for it. But child/friend etiquette has never been spelled out to me. Was it okay to leave my walking buddy in the lurch for Julia? 

My guilt about not accompanying Julia on the field trip was fueled by a couple of things. If I had been in town last week, I would have signed up to chaperone and there never would have been any question about where I belonged. But as I watched Julia walk away toward the Metro holding the hand of one of her teachers, I felt horrible, not least because she wanted me to go and if we're lucky enough to win the public school lottery next month, Julia will be in real school next year. How much time I spend with her won't be my decision, it will be strictly regulated by the District of Columbia. 

Also, I find that with my dad sick and every phone call to or from Atlanta one that turns up another unsettling health condition for me to process, I am walking around brimming with tears at all times. I need my mother, but the best I can get right now is the satisfaction of being present for my children. So when the teacher called from the subway platform to say that they found an extra ticket, I hesitated less than half a nano-second. Even that pause seemed too long in response to Miss La Juan's plea, "Julia really wants you to come."

At the show, Julia sat on my lap and we shared a big box of popcorn and there was no question for me about where I should be. But when it ended and I had to go find my car, I again had to leave her. This time, she was bound up in Miss La Juan's arms, crying.

A few days ago when I was about to go to the airport and I was telling my mother goodbye, she hugged me hard and said, "I love you more than you can know." 

"I'm a mother, too," I said, "and so I do have some idea." 

In preparation for Valentine's Day, each child in Julia's class was asked to say how much they love their mothers (maybe the dads get the cards??). Borrowing from one of our favorite picture books, Guess How Much I Love You, Julia answered, "I love my mama to the moon." 

I'm not sure why a mother's love is tinged with guilt, but I know that I've got enough of both to get Julia and me to the moon--and back.

Intensivist Care

In the intermediate intensive care unit of the hospital in Atlanta where my dad is, there's a doctor on call 24/7 known as an intensivist. But I've decided that whether we deal with sick people or not, we're all intensivists. Think about it: when's the last time you went at a project in a relaxed way? Did anything at a leisurely pace? Took something lightly?

When I landed in Washington after an emotional week spent at my dad's bedside, I was, for the briefest time, Sam and Julia's fantasy mom. They were happy to see me and clung to me in baggage claim, full of news about what they'd been doing in my absence: a birthday party at a real fire house, a dinner date with their friend Benjamin and his parents, ballet class that ended with Julia's getting bear stamps on her hands (still visible), breakfast with Ralph, including hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. Time slowed while I took in the sight and substance of my beautiful, healthy family.

It didn't take more than about 1 1/2 hours, though, before I was back in intensivist mode, which is to say back in the trenches of mom-dom. Sam hadn't done his homework while I was away and wasn't in the mood to hear that he still had to, late or not. A skirmish ensued. But the truth is, life has moved on, because there's this week's homework to attend to. Last week is over.

The intensity at which we live is not just about parenting. A friend who is writing a book and trying to finish said she worked so hard yesterday that she didn't have time to eat until she looked up from her computer and it was dinner-time. Why do I do this to myself, she opined. Why do I wait until the last minute?

But we all do. The way our full lives are organized--or disorganized--we can't help but do things on deadline. As one of my sisters said recently, our lives are so based on a 24/7 time clock, we don't ask what day something is due anymore, we ask what time. She was referring to her son, who punched the send button on a college application related something at 11:59 p.m. before it had to be in at midnight.

And even though I bought Valentine's Day cards at the CVS across the street from the hospital days ago in an effort to relieve the tedium of the waiting room, it's not like I also mailed them in advance. No, I will scramble to do that today so that they'll arrive on Feb. 14, if the postal service cooperates. It's not the first instance I've been late. I have solved my latent tardiness before by spending $48 at FedEx on a $2.49 father's day card.

All this rushing makes it hard to stop and put things in context. To enjoy. It wasn't until I was looking at photos of Sam and Julia at my mom and dad's house last week and saw one of Julia at 1, standing diaper-less and defiant in her patent-leather party shoes in the front yard, that I realized I don't even remember that moment--don't remember Julia at 1--which was just 2 years ago. It had the effect of slamming on my interior brakes, just briefly, to luxuriate in the fact that I have a still-small child--in fact, two--to swaddle myself in. And then I had to turn my attention elsewhere.

I'm not sure there's a solution. I'm just musing--intensively. 

Getting By With a Lot of Help From Our Friends

Ralph and I (and Sam and Julia) are incredibly fortunate to have such great friends. On Monday when I had to fly to Atlanta unexpectedly and without telling S and J, and Ralph had to work, our next-of-kin, Katy Kelly, subbed for us. Here's a report that made me laugh. Maybe it will amuse you, too. (Pop is my dad, who probably hasn't eaten a Dunkin Donut in 38 years--if ever.)

"Sam and Julia were excellento. I picked up Sam about 5:15. We got Julia. Drove home. Walked to Arucola for supper. Came back. Took a bath. Julia got a princess hairdo. Made Valentines. Julia made one for Pop. There are many letters on it. Mostly Ps and Bs and Os. She says it says Dunkin Donuts. Perhaps it is a coupon. She says he likes them. Ralph came. Helped Steve re-hang the Fap Anis picture (LR got painted today). Lost socks. Meltdown. Found socks. Home."

Love, Linda

I hadn't planned to be in Atlanta this week, but here I am, having gotten a phone call on Monday that my dad, already in the hospital after his second leg amputation, was having trouble breathing. Now he is on a ventilator in ICU and my mom and two sisters and I are going in two-by-two every few minutes to squeeze his hand. It's like Noah's Ark, but we are not going to save our species--or anyone, for that matter.  

The prognosis is that he will likely be on a feeding tube when he comes home, which the doctor and his ICU nurse are very high on because it will eliminate the pesky step of trying to stuff him with nutrients, which he needs badly in order to heal, via food. 

This is hard stuff, which I have generally avoided blogging about, but now it has filled so much space in my mind that I find I can no longer side-step it. One promise I made to myself when I started Friends Talking in the Night is that I wouldn't necessarily have to say everything, but that everything I do say must be 100 percent honest.

So back to my dad. I am trying to come to terms with his diminishing state. We are not talking here about the abstract problems of diabetes or a Parkinson's-like tremor or our aging population. This is my once 6' 1" father, who, until just a few years ago when his illness got markedly worse, was my very best pal. Before I got married the first time, we sat together in a restaurant and cried. And when that marriage was coming apart, he's the one who came to me and said that he knew something wasn't right and that he would love me no matter what.

We share a sense of humor and a love of history, not to mention a great appreciation for Southern biscuits. Our bond formed when I was in high school--we went to breakfast together every Saturday at a diner called Melvin's. And when I lived in New York, he made sure that I always had at least a dozen Melvin's (by then called Maria's) biscuits in my freezer. Thomas Wolfe was wrong: you can go home again when your favorite childhood foods are involved.

Now I see that what I am really writing is a love letter to my father. Because squeezing his hand and saying I love you covers a lot of territory but not all that is in my breaking heart. 

Tainted Peanut Butter An Extreme of Corporate Greed

Just before she finally gave into sleep a few nights ago, Julia and I had a lengthy recap of her day, which included a circle-time conversation at school about what to do if a stranger approaches you. I was quizzing her on various situations: if someone you don't know says he/she has candy in the car, what do you do? Puppies? Kittens? Trained by her powerhouse teacher Miss Brenda Julia dutifully answered no to each question, though I suspect she would waver if chocolate, a fistful of sugar, or a stick of butter--her three favorite food groups--was the lure.

As a mom, sometimes I feel that these early lessons--how to look before crossing a street and what red, yellow, and green mean--are among the most important I can impart to my kids. Certainly there are more nuanced values about lying, for instance, to pass on as well as other things down the road about drugs and sex (they'll have to teach me about rock 'n' roll). But these first conversations--all bright lines--are like an old-fashioned orange life-preserver: you can't get in the boat without them.

I know that even as a diligent parent I can't protect my kids from everything. When Sam had just turned 1, we were in a car accident caused when a woman too old to be driving ran a red light (she had perhaps forgotten that red means STOP!) and broad-sided me. The car was totaled, but Sam, our family friend/babysitter, Marguerite, and I emerged unbruised. Sam thought the crash was great fun. It was hard to accept that bad things could happen on my watch, but it did make me slightly more forgiving when bad things happened on other people's watch. (Bad is a relative term here, because I'm not talking about anything more major than rug burn or a cut over an eye, thank goodness.)

But even knowing that my ability to shield my kids from danger is limited, I am enraged by the Peanut Corp. of America's behavior. It has been a bad few weeks for Corporate America. 

John Thain's $1.2 million redecorating job came to light as did Wall Street bonuses and news that Citibank, the recipient of federal bailout dollars, is buying a new jet. All of that is inexcusable, but it's not as irresponsible as the peanut people, who knowingly distributed salmonella-laden products, killing at least eight people and sickening 550. That puts them down on a par with kidnappers and pedophiles. Worse, really, because I can't drill my kids on a threat we can't see. 

I had been thinking last week when Barack Obama rapped Wall Street's knuckles that if his plate weren't so full, he should also do the same to the peanut folks, and yesterday on the Today show, he did, suggesting that the Food and Drug Administration needs to do a better job: 

"That's what Sasha eats for lunch probably three times a week. And you know, I don't want to have to worry about whether she's going to get sick as a consequence to having her lunch." 

I have no illusions that the President wakes up and makes the sandwiches every morning, despite the Obamas' exertions to normalize the White House with Pottery Barn furniture and J. Crew clothing, according to the cover of this week's US Weekly. Nonetheless, I am glad to have a dad (a mom would be okay, too!) running the country. Perhaps our everyday concerns might get a little more attention. And though neither I nor anyone else I know personally will ever have the President's secret Blackberry address, it does make me feel that we and the Obamas are having pretty much the same conversations, if not also the same food, come dinner time.