By the Seat of My Pants

Any of you out there adopt older children who you struggled to get to eat anything that didn’t come handed out a drive-through window in a greasy bag?

I had a multitude of challenges when my daughter finally moved in with me—her anger at leaving her beloved foster parents powering most of them—but the fact that she was used to microwaving piles of leftover chicken nuggets and french fries for snack was one of them.  And, faced with acting out behaviors like pulling the dog around the backyard by the tail and flying into screaming rages several times a day, her diet was one of the easier things for me to tackle.

I needed to get control of something. I barely managed to survive her daily rages by locking myself in the bathroom and ignoring her screams and door pounding. I couldn’t handle the frightening depth of my own anger at my situation. Food seemed a much better focus. Feeding my child healthy food helped me feel like I was taking care of her a little bit. I was claiming my motherhood tiny piece by tiny piece.

I started by tackling the unhealthy snack thing. I emptied out one vegetable drawer in the fridge and told her she could eat anything she wanted out of it at any time. I filled it with a variety of healthy things: graham cracker and peanut butter sandwiches, carrot sticks, apples, cheese sticks, kid-sized yogurts. Every morning I threw in three hard candies to make it seem worth it to her to check the drawer at all.

Next I started talking about all the nutrients in food and what they did for her body. Soon she could recite a list; vitamin C is in oranges and makes you not get colds as much; vitamin A is in carrots and it makes you see better; calcium is in milk and yogurt and gives you strong bones. Apparently she gave her kindergarten classmates a lecture on nutrition one day when they were chowing down hamburgers for lunch.

Then I started working on sneaking healthy things into meals she would eat. This had the added benefit of a) sending me to Wegmans every other day, where I could drop her in their free childcare room for an hour while I shopped and pieced together my sanity; and b) giving me something to focus on after she came home from school and I was counting the hours until she went to bed. (Judge me if you will, but those fantasy stories where mothers fall in love with their children immediately are just that in my experience: fantasies.)

Within a few months several things happened:

• I’d come up with a treasure trove of kid friendly recipes;
• My daughter sprouted upward, got thinner, and could now walk around the block without stopping to rest; and
• I could now stand to speak with her while I was making dinner.

All progress, don’t you think?

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek essay I wrote about it at the time.

I’ll post a few recipes in the coming days.

Photo Credit, Chicken Nuggets

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Parenting Adopted Children