When I became a parent, I thought I had things under control: I would wake in the morning, bathe the baby, go to the market to buy ingredients for dinner before her morning nap, put her down when I got home and then work on my dissertation for two or three hours before my angel woke with a smile, ready to play and make those little baby noises that, well, babies make. The problem with this vision was simple: it wasn't really my vision. It wasn't about my child. I was participating in a kind of collective dream vision about what new motherhood should be like, according to People Who Know. These people included some of the most unlikely characters: scholarly mentors who didn't have children, future colleagues (who claimed that caring for cats was the same as raising children), well-meaning relatives with incredibly (implausibly?) positive attitudes.
From these acquaintances I learned that it was possible to breastfeed my baby with one arm and type on my computer with the other. I learned that if everything went according to schedule--a schedule that I alone had control over--I would succeed as though nothing in my life had ever changed. I also found out that continuing to breastfeeding would prevent (or fix) every bad thing that could befall my baby: warts, low IQ, gross obesity, picky eating habits, allergies and general ugliness. But what happens when baby doesn't have any tolerance for other people's opinions...including her own mother's?
My first daughter, Rina, helped me figure this out. She never slept. Ever. She despised diaper changes. Screams filled our apartment from dawn to dusk and beyond. Her body stubbornly refused any nourishment from my breast milk and quickly plummeted into the frightening depths of hypoglycemia. I was learning one of the most important and humbling lessons I had ever learned in my life. It wasn't about me anymore. My ideas of motherhood and childhood, formed on the models I had seen around me and the advice that people freely gave, no longer counted. The new love of my life was experiencing the world in her own way and she quickly formed her own ideas about how things should go. My apparently ridiculous ideas about things like sleep, cooperation while being dressed and bathed, and breastfeeding quickly got smashed into itty, bitty, teeny-tiny, little molecules. My copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (the one that sat on my bedside table and that I had been studying for nine months) was immediately donated to Someone Who Still Had Ideals.
You could say that I was liberated from the prison of my own ideas. Or you could say that I was living inside total panic. What if I couldn't even feed my own child? My husband took the practical approach: he drove to the store, bought bottles and formula, mixed up a batch and solved that problem right away. My relief was short-lived. Somehow, what goes into a baby's body is regarded as the sole province of the mother, but her choices about nourishment become public property. Once again, everyone had an opinion. Strangers standing behind us in line at the store would look at my daughter's round face (ignoring her long, overly lean body) and say, "My, she's fat! I'll bet she's bottle-fed."
And that's where it began. Right then. The battle lines about food were already being drawn in my mind. At the time, the field looked like this: Me v. Them. When my second child, my son Ciccio, was born three-and-a-half years later (and then again when little sister, Ea, joined us another 3 years after that), the battlefield morphed into a multi-dimensional war zone that came alive every night at the dinner table.
I naively approached these childhoods with supreme confidence, as if I hadn't learned my lesson. Besides, there were qualified people out there who could tell me what to do about children who won't eat anything. Why, just the other day, I was delighted to find that new mother and chef extraordinaire Giada di Laurentiis (may she live a thousand years) has a new show focusing on how to cook so that children will eat. What could Ciccio and Ea possibly dish that I hadn't already lived through or that Giada and an entire industry that has sprung up around difficult eaters couldn't fix?
Well, my friends, you are about to find out. Actually, we are about to find out, together. After reading special publications, buying cute "kid-friendly" cookbooks, attempting fanciful plating--including the famous "hiding the vegetables" tactic that seems to work for everybody else--I'm ready to conclude that there are just some children who defy everything. But not just yet. I'm an analytical person and I like to experiment. So this is the plan: to try out as many dishes labeled "kid-friendly" or touted as being "able to fool children into eating things they don't like" as I can on Ea and Ciccio (Rina might as well be the control, since she pretty much eats everything, despite being ruined by bottle-feeding). I will include the recipes I use, the sources they come from, pictures of our dinners (before and after) and whether or not certain persons went to bed hungry. Think of it as a culinary version of "MythBusters."
And the point of all this? Perhaps I just want to comfort myself by knowing there really are people out there with good advice. But really, I'd be content to win some of those battles.
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