Finicky Eating
When people tell you parenting is “the toughest job you’ll ever love” they’re both right, and wrong when looked at on a day to day basis. Being a parent is the most difficult and rewarding job I’ve ever had, but I don’t love every minute of it. And it’s not the gross stuff that bothers me, changing diapers is no big deal. Baby has stomach flu and won’t let you put her down while she wretches, all in a days work. It’s the eating that’s making me crazy.
Babies are notoriously difficult eaters, and yet you have to be either feeding them, cleaning up after feeding them, or preparing to feed them what feels like the vast majority of the time. Now that Jocelyn’s a toddler with a mouth full of teeth, including a lot of molars, more solid foods are on the menu at our house. Deciding on that menu may be giving me ulcers. From one day to the next, there are very few things I can count on her to actually eat. She never seems to refuse a cheese stick, but something she seemed to love and ate tons of one evening, she may turn her nose up at and refuse to even taste the next day. Timing is important, if she’s tired, feeding her becomes a battle of wills, with Jocelyn’s apple-sauce coated hands ripping at her own hair and rubbing her face. I know I should trust that when she’s hungry she’ll eat, but then we’re also told it’s important to keep to schedules and that we should offer meals and snacks at consistent times. She reaches for anything on the table, if it’s not what you’re already trying to feed her, and is so intent on those other things, she refuses to eat. Thus bringing multiple items for a meal is problematic, but running back to the kitchen three or four times during lunch doesn’t really work either. The same principal seems to be at work when she’s drinking her milk; she’ll drink twice as much in the quiet darkness of the bedroom compared to sitting in the living-room or at the table.
She doesn’t really seem to like meat or fish, even soft and chopped into tiny pieces or mixed in with rice or veggies. Potatoes are inexplicably detested; how can you hate potatoes? She won’t touch them. Some days she’ll scarf down eggs, other days she won’t allow them to touch her lips. And suddenly during a meal she’ll go from eating something happily, to using her tongue to push the offending food out of her mouth, making as big a mess as possible in the process.
Fundamentally, feeding our children is one of the most important jobs we have as parents. When a child won’t eat not only is it frustrating, it’s worrying. Last week Jocelyn was sick, and though she had other symptoms, it was the refusal of food for two days that drove me to call the pediatrician. It turned out she had a viral infection which gave her sores in her throat, making her, understandably, reluctant to swallow. But before I knew this I was at my wits’ end, enticing her with her favorites, begging her to try anything and everything I could think of, through any means necessary. When it didn’t work, it was hard to stifle my irritation, I was even wondering how anyone could choose to have multiple children when the initial go round was so aggravating. The sleep deprivation caused by a fever and the refusal of food caused by a sore throat is a recipe for a parental meltdown.
Despite her illness, I swear she got heavier and taller last week, my arms started to feel tired carrying her when they didn’t before. It seems she’s doing fine, growing, healthy, but I can’t stop my worrying about her eating. At its core, I think the problem is with me. I’m afraid of raising a picky eater, of years of fights at meal-times. I’m old enough to remember the constant negotiation between my youngest sibling and my parents at every meal. I’m scarred by the fact that two of my brothers refused to eat at any restaurant but McDonald’s into their teen years. Any battle about food is fraught with peril, so we must tread lightly, but it’s a war we have to wage every day, and it’s wearing me down.




In graduate school, when DVDs started getting cheap, I bought the BBC mini-series, and I watched it, a lot! Whenever I would get depressed about my love life, or lack-there-of, I would pull out the P&P DVDs and lose myself in Jane Austen’s world, usually watching all five hours at one go. This happened more than I would care to admit. Eventually I decided to go ahead and try to read the novel again, this time finishing it easily. It’s been many years now since I’ve felt the need to watch P&P for a romantic escape, but I still watch it from time to time, just for sheer enjoyment. And I’ve seen all the other reiterations, the Kiera Knightly version of P&P, the Bollywood take “Bride and Prejudice,” and “The Jane Austen Book Club” film. I’ve read both Bridget Jones novels and adore the first “Bridget Jones’ Diary” film (in case you didn’t know, Bridget Jones is a blatant, modern-day rip-off of P&P, with both movies even having the same Mr. Darcy). I’ve read novels written by modern day writers trying to explore what happened after P&P. I’ve also read a set of books that are a contemporary writer’s attempt to tell P&P from Mr. Darcy’s perspective (she took three books to do it). The P&P world is a bit of guilty pleasure for me, you see, I generally eschew “romance novels” and P&P is widely considered to be the original.











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