Food Allergies and Mother Fear

I adore Feeding Eden, the new memoir by Susan Weissman. While I do not have a child with food allergies, I find the topic endlessly fascinating. From the flap copy: "What do you make for dinner when your child has such severe allergies that even one bite of the wrong ingredient could be deadly?"

I have always understood that cheerful mothering is founded upon the ability to banish the suggestion of disaster. Those catalogs stuffed with childproofing gadgets promising: "Finally! A solution to dangerous hard bathtub walls," or touting that mesh thing through which babies are supposed to suck a strawberry without choking. They always made me want to scream. Parenting is tough enough without fate suggesting extra ways to suffer.

Author Susan Weissman was dealt a tricky hand when her infant son Eden became so sick at such a young age. Allergic to a long list of foods, it took years for their family to come to a place where every day didn't seem to promise disaster. In the youngest children, allergies are so very difficult to diagnose. And Eden was born before the latest slew of allergen labeling laws, which made Weissman's road that much tougher.

The allergy details are very interesting, but Weissman really shines when she's describing good old Mother Fear. After a particularly grim (and unexplained) allergic reaction, one emergency room doctor told her not to get crazy: 

"How wouldn't I know Crazy? Let me count the ways. Despite the doctor's counsel, Crazy and I became as intimate as lovers. Crazy became my stalker, my unwelcome houseguest, and even my muse. I see Crazy int he shadows of other parents, the parents with children like Eden. When I try to tout my sanity to teachers and friends--'Oh, I try not to get too crazy'--Crazy laughs its ass off in the corner."

As I write this, one of my kids is at hockey practice and the other one is climbing a tree. A hasty trip to the ER is potentially part of any parent's day. Only willful ignorance of that fact (and carefully fitted helmets and mouth guards) allow me to forget to be afraid. Weissman, forced to acknowledge daily risk so much more often than most, exercises for her reader the delicate balance between fearful and smart.

I predict this book will be around for a long time. It will become required reading for the parents of food allergic children. And for the rest of us, it's a thoughtful conversation with our very own brands of Crazy.

The Great Pretenders: What My Children Have Taught Me About Fiction

I have two little boys, 6 and 8.  When they’re not busy at school, they can spend the whole day playing pretend games.  My husband and I have had many a shared glance over the ridiculousness of their pretend play.  Today, for example, they were half turtle, half man.  This was inspired when one of them threw a towel over the other one, and the pretending didn’t let up for more than thirty minutes.  The low point was when they nearly came to blows over who had the better towel / shell, until one of them remarked “you know, turtles can visit other turtles inside their shells.  It’s like a play date.”

They do this for hours.  None of it makes a lick of sense, and when I have something important to tell them—something like “your lunch is on the table”—I can’t get in a word edgewise.

Meanwhile, on those rare occasions when the house is quiet, I sit fuming at my laptop trying to put out a few hundred words of fiction.  When perfectly formed dialog and drama don’t flow readily through the keyboard, I get twitchy. 

I’ve never transcribed my children before, but I’m guessing they produce several thousand words of fiction an hour.  And I’ve got a couple of birthed-by-fire paragraphs.  So which of us is wiser?

When I hit the biggest roadblocks to producing fiction, it’s always when I’ve misplaced the only writing advice I’ve ever claimed to embrace—Anne Lamotte’s concept of shitty first drafts.  Chapter Three of her classic Bird by Bird is the only text on writing that I’ve ever shoved into anyone’s path.  Not only does Lamotte give you permission to write shitty first drafts, she actually manages to prove that it’s an essential part of the writing process.  Read it and feel better.

This is how it’s supposed to work: sit back down in front of that blank page, and go ahead and write a scene that feels as lively and realistic as a couple of Barbie dolls talking at one another in plastic dolly voices. 

Take several deep breaths and remind yourself that it’s okay. 

Once you shove your characters around like a couple of action figures, you’ll be able to see the scene for what it is.  Slowly and at great personal cost, those bits of dialog and suggestion will be combed and fluffed into a living, breathing moment that will not sound ridiculous. It will be free of half-terrapin-half-kindergartener moments.

But this magic can only happen if you free yourself to sound ridiculous, to spit clichés onto the page like so many cheerios under my younger son’s chair, and clean it up later.

As I type this, I can hear that the game in the other room has changed.  My younger son has just declared “I’m half squid, half dolphin, half jaguar and half horse.”  The fiction is still going strong, but someone should really teach that child about fractions.