Day 3 - Picky

A month-long writing challenge exploring the theme of "Being Myself"

This is the latest instalment of the 21 day writing challenge I’m doing with Megan Macedo. In this challenge the aim is to write every week day in February, catching up at weekends if you miss any. One of the directives is to avoid perfectionism and publish your pieces to your audience, so here we are. I hope the series provides food for thought. Thank you for being here.

There’s a page in my 40-year old copy of "Topsy and Tim Go To The Doctor" where mum makes a lovely hot breakfast for everyone, which neither Topsy or Tim eat any of. "“Oh you are miseries!” said mummy crossly. Daddy was not cross, but then he had not made the breakfast."

I feel completely sure that sentence was written by a parent familiar with the specifically agonising experience of a child rejecting the food you have put time and energy into preparing.

Years ago I read about Ellen Satter’s division of responsibility in feeding, which explains that your role as a parent/food-provider is to decide what, when and where meals take place, and to make mealtimes pleasant. It’s your child’s job to decide what they eat out of what you offer and whether they want to eat it. Sounds simple, but in practice I find it very difficult not to all the stuff you’re not supposed to do: to plead, cajole or bribe my picky eaters to ingest something, to comment on which things they’ve eaten and how they’ve eaten it (eating only the pastry in a pie, the rice on the plate or peeling bits of the tops of crackers - what?). I find it really hard to not care when they refuse or ignore food, to remain relaxed or look like I am. 

One of the things I find most difficult and most transformative about parenting is how the parts of yourself you consider ugly, petty, pathetic, childish and rigid are dragged out into the light. Sometimes I think the kind of mother I wish I was - freewheeling, happy to change plans to suit others, accepting invitations to exciting but routine-destroying or exhausting opportunities - is not the kind of mother I am able to be. I need some kind of rhythm and sense of control, even if it’s an illusion: to make this attempt at a stable foundation so that when chaos reigns on top of it, we have something to hold on to. 

Feeding is one of those areas of parenting where we are expected to provide structure and support but also be flexible enough, to be relaxed about things that feel so fundamental - health, happy family dynamics, feeling like a success as a parent. I find it hard to embody the right amount of malleability, to be able to make boring, adult decisions for their own good and also be able to drop all that to take up the opportunities offered by breaking the rules. 

The places where we attach value to are interesting; I feel some vague internalised shame about my desire for control and also its opposite, the places where I feel I’m too relaxed (letting them eat too many biscuits, watch too much TV and so on). I wonder if the “real” me cares about my kids eating lentil bolognese or ramen or chicken soup as much as the me who has internalised the ideas that a good mother provides this kind of healthy, contemporary, varied food and a good child (aka proof that I have succeeded as a parent) will actually eat it. Baggage I’m carrying around about our collective success that was never true anyway.

Another hard thing about parenting: saying goodbye to the perfection I honestly thought I could attain. The idea that I wouldn’t fuck them up by my being human, by the times I truly fail. I still feel genuinely sad about that sometimes. But deep down I am entirely certain that it’s good enough, which just means: they are loved and happy and secure, they are really nice kids, our home life is pretty happy, we are doing the best we could feasibly do as fallible, imperfect creatures. That doesn’t mean what I do won’t cause them challenges now or later on, sadly, but of course I hope they are relatively minor. Will I ever really learn from the times I’m too rigid or too inconsistent? I don’t know. I don’t know how much we actually change, with all these fumbled attempts, this messy practice. I really hope so, at least a little.

My kids know that “just one more” biscuit is actually two. But it isn’t ten. The boundary is secure and porous to hold all of us ok, I think.