Raisin Bagel

Yesterday I found myself craving and eating a lot of carby food in the middle of the day. A big bowl of popcorn. A raisin bagel. Pretzels. Not sure why. It was a deviation from my “healthful way of eating” that I’ve been on since January (although I did take a break during our trip to the UK and basically made a habit of afternoon tea with a fruit scone and butter or clotted cream. Mmmm.) This healthful eating follows our weight gain during the fall after Sarah died when we stuffed our faces. See my post “Staging My Grief” for more about that.

As you know I tend to overanalyze everything, and drive myself nuts in the process, and I’m not sure what was worse, the carb-loading or my perseveration and excruciating overanalysis of it. I encountered Max in the house post-bagel and I announced “I just ate a raisin bagel!” as if I were Ethel Rosenberg and I guess I expected him to be Roy Cohn. He calmly remarked “You wanted a raisin bagel, and so you ate one.” Yeah, that about sums up my transgression.

My relationship with food has always been screwed up (like so many American women), and I was afraid of passing that on to Sarah. Either by giving her weight issues in her youth, like I had, or an eating disorder in her adolescence and young adulthood, like I had, or by just not knowing what and how much to feed her, ever.

Max took over Sarah’s feeding once she started solids at eight months or so and it was a huge relief to me. He said he took on the responsibility because I breastfed her for 19 months and he considered it “his turn” but I was terrified to feed her solid food. I felt like I had no idea how to accomplish it, as if Sarah weren’t human at all but some unknown species. Max and our nanny Alba started her on solids, and around Age One it seemed to me Sarah ate as much as a longshoreman or truckdriver. For dinner, she would eat a jarred baby food meat or some kind of stew, plus several vegetables, followed by fruit, and also pudding, and then wash it all down with either a full bottle of milk or by breastfeeding. I was astounded.

Then as Sarah grew into toddlerhood she began having more and more issues with swallowing and couldn’t handle any foods like sandwiches, chewy meat, or hard cookies. Her feeding sessions took longer and longer, up to two hours sometimes, until Max determined she’d consumed enough calories, and sometimes there would be tears and a struggle, the mirror opposite of the weight and food battles I experienced when I was a child at home.

Sarah benefitted from kindergarten through third grade from the fact that her schools qualified for a free breakfast from the county, so Max would feed her one breakfast at home and then a couple of hours later she would have a second breakfast at school fed to her by her aide, which buffed up her calorie count. Her physical therapist Becky Leonard also developed a protocol for us to feed Sarah and showed us how to position her head and neck for optimal tongue and muscle placement, which was immensely helpful. But eventually we made the decision as a family to go with tube feeding. Sarah was a hundred percent for it and it was absolutely the right choice for us. She gained weight immediately and it took so much pressure off her.

I wish I could take some pressure off myself too, and not beat myself up so badly for having a few carby snacks. I was a little sad yesterday, after reviewing a lot of Sarah’s writing. There was a piece she wrote about balloons, where she went through each month of the year and explained what days should be celebrated and with what kind of balloons, and in the piece she also talked about having balloons on her 17th and 18th birthdays, and I thought ‘Oh my love, you will never be 17 or 18.’ It’s just so hard sometimes. Maybe I ate a raisin bagel because what I really wanted was my Tootsie Bagel.