Comparing Blessings

Which one is more full? Can you tell by looking?  Nope.

 

One of the things I found myself doing as a new mom when Lily was born was I compared her to everyone elses' babies.  Her cry was distinctive. She could talk very early. She crawled late, walked a little later, she was gorgeous and funny. Potty trained herself at around 13 months old. Was I happy enough? Was she happy enough? Did she make friends easily (I do not)? Was she eating enough, often enough.....she was a clothes size over her age sometimes 2!

Holly came along and was the quiet one, but she crawled early. She then walked late. She refused to talk until she was two. She refused to potty train. Refused. We cloth diapered. We wore her. We gave her watermelon. Constantly measuring her progress against my peers kids and the child development books. Also a HUGE baby and child. (No one panic, she is now 5 and uses the potty.....) I slowly learned that each kid is their own person, their own timelines apply, and I would just need to roll with that.

Then Isaac was born. I knew from Holly's babyhood that sometimes kids just take their time. As it became more and more apparent that Isaac was falling behind in milestones and growth, he stayed in premie clothes and then in newborn, 3-6 month sized at a year old. He was diagnosed with 22q deletion syndrome at age 5 months. As a baby it is easier to pass at the playground. Everyone we don't know just assumes he's actually a newborn. As he got older, even crawling, the playground introduction is always followed by, "How old is he?" and the answer is greeted with politeness, but the shock or realisation on their faces says enough to make my gut drop out and make me want to throw up. At that point I usually blurt out his dx and start making excuses, explaining hypotonia.....but it makes me feel ill. It does. Random strangers don't have a right to his medical information. His life should not be his mother making excuses for him. Eventually, he'll begin to understand what that means and it isn't good.

Still when my friends were posting pictures of their 9 month olds walking, cheering with joy at these first steps, I held back tears and my own fears as Isaac was still just crawling at 28 months. I would sob at night. I would question the decisions I made for his therapies. It would consume me at times and block out all other joy in my life.

I stopped doing that. Isaac started walking and I've been too busy trying to keep up. That day was so full of wonder and happy that I thought I would have a heart attack and my face would fall off from smiling.

It got me thinking about my own internal dialogue though. Stop comparing to other "healthy" kids. That part was easy, all I had to do was embrace and rejoice in how adorable Isaac is and how amazing each and every milestone and every day is full of love and happy. Isaac IS healthy, he is making progress, he is amazing.

What is harder is to stop comparing to other special needs children. This goes two ways actually. I found my heart reeling with fear when another kid, a full year younger, with a more severe diagnosis was walking when Isaac was just still struggling to crawl.

Then we'd meet a non mobile 14 year old on a ventilator and I would feel relieved about our situation. Then I would feel guilty for feeling better about ours by comparing to someone else's struggles. How horrible of a person could I be? Then I would get whirled up into fundraisers and fanpages of kids with Isaac's diagnosis who were actually very sick. I felt out of place. How could I offer our story to the collective support groups when Isaac, while slow on physical and verbal milestones, has never had a single surgery and never been hospitalised with an illness, not even RSV even though he had it last winter (just an ER visit). I'd do my part offering prayers, all the time guilting myself into sleeplessness because my kid is healthy. Compared. Someone would get another diagnosis or hospitalization that would send me into another guilt spiral. Why them and not us? Why do we keep escaping the symptoms of Isaac's diagnosis?

I'd read books about special needs families, hoping that folks that I don't know in real life might offer me a more objective perspective, a 22q adult narrative, a therapy book. I kept coming back to comparing what we do, what options there are, Isaac's current health state. Comparing statistics, comparing politics.

Compare.

That's the snare. I don't want my joy to be stolen by guilt and every time I compare in either direction I am racked with guilt and horrible feelings.  There will always be kids healthier than Isaac and there will always be kids sicker with greater struggles than us. We will slide between, walking the line and stumbling, slipping like it is wet sloppy mud. Just like Holly and Lily fighting over who has the most orange juice in their lunch cup, the fighting stops when I assure them that if they drink all they have, they will get more as they each need. Their needs will be met to the best that I can provide. They can relax and settle into saying what they are thankful for and eat and play. Their jealousies forgotten. I can meet my families needs and prepare so if they get worse we can be ready, hopefully.

Since being in this much better place in my own mind, I have found a depth of relationship I had never known with other families. I have found my voice.

That doesn't mean our struggle isn't real and it doesn't mean our joy isn't also a blessing. I used to think it was this grey area we fall into, this fog of in between, but that's not it at all. The world is not black and white with shades of grey and no one is promised perfect health always. We all have our own stories and our own struggles and we do the best we can to make the best life we can manage. Isaac is not a fog of grey, he is orange monkeys, and sea glass green, and bright neon pink Dora sock puppets, yellow bananas, melting raspberry Popsicles, summer peaches, and bright sparkling silver trumpets, and delicious blue skies thick with fluffy clouds laughing as he swings too high on the tire swing! This is the life!

Through my children I have learned  to stop comparing and be with them in that sparkling moment, their fleeting childhood, that magical place where their mother's love is enough and then some.

Pictures and Stuff from August

Iowa State Fair, Peaches, Beyonce and Anastasia the peahens, Jessica teaching Isaac about the wonders of the cordless power drill (his is Holly's toy), and Isaac walking up the slide and posing a smile that I think makes him look like Wil Wheaton. I can totally see Isaac saying, "Don't be a dick." It is a good law that more people should embrace, especially online. Sportsmanship, y'all.

Folklore of my Kitchen

I have been reading Marcus Samulesson's book, Yes, Chef and in the first chapter or three he discusses Berber the spice and how it is the spice he connects with his blood heritage. I love the imagery he uses as he describes and uses it to transition into the story of his birth, loss, and adoption.

It got me thinking about my own cooking and my own culinary story and how to tell it to my children.

If I started with a spice, they know it is Swamp Fire a Cajun seasoned salt that I spent a few years perfecting. We use it often lot on a lot of things. Butter and swamp fire in a well seasoned cast iron skillet with a wooden spoon. This is my heritage. I was not taught to cook on a grandmother's apron or at the side of a parent or aunt or even by a friend. I was taught to cook by fire and poisoning.

Unfortunately, I'm not kidding.

For a wedding gift, a neighbour gave me a cook book, a bottle of wine, and a fire extinguisher. I used them all up before our one year anniversary.

In the first few months of our marriage, Chad ended up in the emergency room with food poisoning, throwing up blood and severely dehydrated. So much that the iv backflowed his blood. I sobbed, guilt ridden, calling his parents at 3 am to come to the hospital.

Then I set the kitchen on fire. Twice. Well, twice that required the fire extinguisher and a couple other times that I could handle by shutting off the stove and closing the oven door waiting for it to just burn off.

My pet parrot imitated the smoke alarm whenever she heard me in the kitchen and sometimes the firetruck siren too.

My dishes at the neighbourhood potlucks would go untouched unless I left them in the grocery store wrapper with label still sealed. Even then, folks proceeded with caution.

I thought all food had to be microwaved before serving to make it safe to eat. I worked at a fast food place as a teen and that was protocol with all the burgers. I washed all the garden produce Chad insisted on with dish soap and was still afraid to eat it.

I could be brought to vomiting just thinking about lard, let alone touching it or having it in my kitchen.

I could actually burn water. I ruined more pots than I care to admit forgetting about tea water.

I never gave up though. I kept trying. I read, I tried, I cooked, I burned, I learned. I asked people to cook in front of me and I studied. I picked up on little tricks of the trade. I stopped using elaborate recipes and opted for the 3-4 ingredient ones. Simple is better. I still failed. I still fail. All the time I make mistakes in the kitchen and I ruin dinner.

I still try, seek out more experience and more things to try. I know three things that I use as my rules:

1) use the best ingredients you can, fresh, well sourced quality ingredients. It is more expensive to throw something of low quality out because it is yucky and have to order pizza than it is to go for quality and just eat a little bit less of it and the fewer ingredients the better. Meat is the easiest to follow this rule. Heat, fat, seasoning- add meat. Veggies too: heat, fat, seasoning. Broiler is usually my favourite for both.
2) Use the right pan or pot for the job.
3) Go slow. Pay attention. Measure. Wait. Experience it. Go slow. Even if you only have 10 minutes to cook, be there in those 10 minutes.

Adding children to the mix complicates things for sure, the 2 hours I had to carefully follow America's Test Kitchen recipes bit by bit is now 10-20 minutes with Netflix blasting Phineas and Ferb or Peep's Big Big World. I make due. I make it work.

We still eat take out of frozen pizza more often than I'd like or fried eggs if there is not time. Still, it is less than we used to and no one has been hospitalised in years from my cooking. Ha!

Anything that is worth doing takes time, not everyone is gifted with the magical spoon and pot. I am logging my hours in and I will not let my children out into the world with only the skills to feed themselves of making instant noodles in the coffee pot and making jiffy mix muffins. They cook along side me.

I do have a few random memories of cooking with my grandmother Mel, a very stern woman who delighted in making us snicker doodle cookies. She would chop potatoes into long sticks before boiling for mashed potatoes and allow us to steal them and snack on the raw potatoes. She called us potato gremlins and would set cookies and carrots along the counter edge to ward off the gremlins. She was a fantastic cook and had a very functional and beautiful kitchen, always clean. She favoured real butter on toast and orange juice with pulp. She didn't care for me much as I grew up though, my purple hair and my own opinions were enough to drive her into a rage. That makes me sad, even now.

As I share more of my kitchen memories, hopefully with recipes, I hope to understand and create my own record of culinary heritage. I am writing, not just for me, but for my children to know me and our collective stories better. A unique familial folklore, if you please.

Peaches, an Introduction and Primer

 I hated peaches. I hated them in mixed fruit medleys, I hated them as a candy. I hated peaches.

Peaches can get a type of freezer burn in transport. They are terrible if grown in the wrong soil, picked at the wrong time, or eaten not ripe. Peaches are like a fine wine and there is a difference.Canned peaches are the same, sugar syrup matters, age, care in canning. At 22, I had never encountered a peach I liked.

Chad tried to convince me at a summer farmers' market when we were first married, I was hesitant and not really very enthusiastic. Oh, but then he handed me a summer kissed Missouri grown peach. He'd taken a bite to make sure it was right, and oh my it was. I was in love. Desperately in love. I could not get enough.

Maybe that was the true beginning to my farm longing. We planted a peach tree at our city house, but the neighbor kids vandalized it every summer over and over. The only peaches I could get were at farmers' markets and in July. No grocery store imported peach would do. I longed for a peach tree within reach of my kitchen.

Our peach trees here at the farm are still saplings. I am still waiting. Until our time comes our neighbors country store gets the most amazing Missouri peaches in every year. These peaches are pie worthy, these peaches are like sunshine in a mouthful. These peaches......oh oh oh oh. Oh how I love peaches. We've planted 20 peach trees.

For this year I shall treat you to my peach recipes and interpretations. I have created a pinterest page too. You can find it here: http://pinterest.com/danelle12stamps/millions-of-peaches/

The plan is to can the peaches starting today, take lots of pictures. Monday will also be full of canning and pie making. Now is your chance id you want to request a recipe too!

What's your favourite peach treat?