Category Archives: eating

Drenched and Beautiful

cloudy

One morning, I went out for a run. I had a busy, chaotic week ahead of me, with puzzles to solve and a full range of emotion to experience, and I wanted to clear my head, to shake out some anxiety, and to take an uninterrupted look at the world around me.

When I looked outside, the ground was wet and the sky was grey. Would it rain? I checked the weather on my phone, and it forecast no rain at all. I left my sunglasses dangling over my back door knob, turned on some music in my headphones, and headed out.

The rain overnight had left everything glistening with droplets of water, and the grey skies made every color seem brighter and more saturated. As I’ve done for the five years I’ve been running, I stopped whenever I saw something particularly beautiful, looked closely, and snapped a photo.

Not two blocks from my house, a father and son living in a row of townhouses have taken over their building’s street-facing garden. The flowers there are spectacular, and careful planning means that new blossoms are always greeting me as the seasons pass. That week, it was their pink hibiscus that was most prominent. I stopped, paused the music in my headphones, and took a photo:

hibiscus Continue Reading…

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No Way Through It But to Do It

kids-and-homework

She is at the kitchen counter, tongue jutted out over her top lip, pencil in an awkward grip, tears rolling down her face.

“There’s so much of this!” she says, between strangled sobs.

I chop carrots, a profile at a counter perpendicular to the one where her science book, notebook, tablet, and half-eaten bowl of cheese crackers are scattered. Her hair is in her eyes, and she keeps angrily tucking it behind her ear. I put down the knife, rinse my hands, wipe them on the back pockets of my jeans, and walk gently and slowly around the edges of the counter. I pull her hair back and wrap it into a quick ponytail, and then I kiss the top of her warm, slightly-sweaty head.

“No way through it but to do it,” I tell her.

She falls forward, her head in her arms, and cries, still gripping the pencil. I rub her back, softly, and rest my cheek on her neck to whisper in her ear, little useless things about getting a drink of water, taking a five minute break, finishing her snack. She growls and rises, determined through tears to get it done.

I straighten and make my way back toward the carrots, noting that her sister is on the couch in the next room, laptop propped on her knees, papers everywhere, water bottle cuddled against her side. She’s absentmindedly eating a package of dried seaweed, listening to music, and occasionally holding her phone up at just the right angle for a photo containing only half her face. She looks up, and I blow her a kiss. She smiles, waves, and catches it.

The battle rages on at the counter.

I wonder what made my two daughters so different: the older one go-with-the-flow, flexible, arched toward satisfaction; and the younger one frustrated, questioning, mourning, her happiness easily won but equally easily lost. Continue Reading…

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How to Feed the People You Host

holiday-table

I’ve spent some holiday dinners eating dry bread and salad.

In front of me on the table were platters piled high with other food, but because of a combination of my vegetarianism and allergies, only the bread and salad were real options for me. In those moments, I harbored no ill will toward my hosts; having hosted holidays before, I knew that it took a lot of work to accommodate the preferences and allergies of a complicated group of guests. It’s not a job for an inexperienced or inexact home chef. I knew all this as I sat and ate my undressed salad, nibbling on my plain bread, and I wasn’t bitter.

Still, I’ve tried never to do that to a guest in my own home unless I had no other choice. Over the years, I’ve had guests for Jewish holiday meals who ate no carbohydrates, no grains, no gluten, no dairy, no beans, no soy, no tomatoes, no nuts, no broccoli, no cinnamon — not to mention the years when my own child was on the six-food-elimination-diet or the chylothorax diet. I’ve managed, in most cases, to offer at least two tasty options to each person — even options that others at the table would enjoy, too. It takes planning, but it’s not impossible.

Here’s how I’ve done it: Continue Reading…

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Padding

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She’s ok, I thought, looking at her on the couch with her water bottle and her picked-at bowl of green jello. She’s ok and she will be ok. She’s ok and she will be ok. She’s-ok-and-she-will-be-ok, she-will-be-ok, she-will-be-ok, she-will-be-ok…

Parents like me, whose children have been through medical scares or ongoing health-related issues, often talk about the long-term anxiety that follows. Certainly in the immediate aftermath — even once the drama is months behind us — the expectation that we’ll worry more about our children is palpable. After my daughter Sammi’s last major surgery, the teachers and administrators in her school were incredibly kind and as careful as they could be to accommodate her healing, even in ways that might have been fussier than necessary for her but were utterly crucial for me and my comfort level. On major milestones — when she was allowed to return to recess, when she ate her first sandwich after years of a damaged esophagus, and on the anniversaries of the surgery that healed her, friends have cheered and celebrated with me, remembered and sighed in relief at my side.

But now it has been three-and-a-half years since the biggest legitimate worries subsided. There can be no mistaking her vitality. While there were years when even strangers could look at my daughter and suspect something was not quite right, now the most they might notice is that she’s slightly shorter than her classmates. I have little on which to base my worry these days, except for history and, I must admit, mild post-traumatic stress. Continue Reading…

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At Twelve

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It’s August, and I can’t believe she’s twelve.

I remember the August twelve years ago, after I finished a July of laying on the floor of my office, the door closed, my feet on the back of a chair, trying to turn my stubborn breech baby. I placed earbuds at my pelvic bones and played fiddle music in the direction I wished her head would face. When she turned finally, one night in late July, I felt every organ in my torso shift, roll and right itself again in one nauseatingly relieving motion.

In retrospect, it was a sign: with enough work, everything would eventually be repaired, over and over again. My girl, who always kept me on my back with legs in the air, directing my world from the floor, has now turned twelve, reaching down to offer a hand and pull me up. When I rise, she stands next to me and steps to one side to rest her cheek in the hollow between my shoulder and neck.

She’s grown. Improbably, in defiance, literally right under my nose now. Continue Reading…

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