Loving Lasagne
I visited my Nanna a few weeks back. I always try to just ‘pop in and say hello’, I purposely pick a time that doesn’t coincide with a meal because I don’t want her to go to too much trouble. It never works though, this particular time I arranged to get there at 10am so she prepared an ‘early lunch’. Soon after I got there she began apologising, she hadn’t cooked anything, she had an extra tray of lasagna from earlier in the week. She also had three or four other dishes to go with the lasagne as well as snacks beforehand and dessert and coffee after. I couldn’t help but laugh, there was always more than enough food. It was rich, delicious food, every piece of which had been made from scratch and by hand. I ate too much, as always, enjoyed every mouthful and watched the kids devour theirs. As well as olive oil and tomato puree it was infused with love and we could feel it. Mr six must have felt like all of his Christmasses had come at once. He wasn’t being policed, he wasn’t being counselled about good choices, he was eating very tomatoey, saucy lasagne to his heart’s content.
As she washed and I dried the dishes after lunch she told me a story I hadn’t heard before. It must have come to her as I praised her efforts and laughed off her unnecessary apology. She told me about how my Grandfather (her late husband) used to tell friends and family “we don’t have a lot of money but Maria just has to kick the wall and food appears”. As I listened I smiled and thought ‘that’s a quality I want to have, I want to learn that from my Nanna’. No matter what she has, or doesn’t have she can put together a beautiful, loved filled meal.
Food has become such a stressor in my life. The more I learn the more sure I am that we are what we eat. It’s not just about weight, its mood, energy, behaviour, hormonal and emotional regulation too. The way we fuel our bodies determines how we feel and how we live. The gap between the way I want my kids to eat and how they want to eat is so big. The foods that they are surrounded by in the world are foods that do more harm than good. The effort it takes to steer them back towards the foods their bodies actually need to grow and thrive is huge. It’s exhausting and constant and at times it steals from me the joy that food can and should bring.
I still remember the look on my Nanna’s face when I tried to explain to her that my little boy couldn’t eat tomatoes. I knew it sounded crazy but we were at a point where the healthy/unhealthy food battle was being compounded by sensitivities to ‘healthy foods’. There were days when I literally didn’t know what to feed my child. I would delay and avoid snacks, hoping three meals could sustain us all because I couldn’t figure out more than three meals a day. It never worked, toddlers like to pick and graze so every day as I tipped expensive food into the rubbish while he screamed for tiny teddies felt like a failure. The anxiety is still with me today even though things have improved considerably. Every time he asks for honey on his toast or the strawberry favoured yoghurt my immediate reaction is “NO!!!”. It’s a guttural reaction, I feel it- It could make him sick, I don’t know where his threshold is, what else has he had today/this week, how close are we to tipping point, what will tipping point look like this time around? What can I offer him instead…that he will actually eat?
It’s a thought pattern that developed over years and I guess I will have to unlearn it over years too. His sensitivities seem to have improved dramatically with the work we have done on his gut and deficiencies this year. It has made a huge difference to our daily lives. We won’t be going back to any of the junk food or additives but slowly we are reintroducing the fruits and vegetables and other plant products he used to react to. I’m pushing past the reaction in my mind, one food at a time, one day at a time, so that we can simply eat a real/whole food diet. So that we can concentrate on foods that nourish and fuel us and keep our guts happy and healthy. I want to, like my Nanna, make delicious food with real ingredients and share it with my family without worrying about the potential consequences of each ingredient. I want to start putting love and joy into food instead of control, anxiety and worry and I think we might have reached the point where I can start to do that.
