Cooking with love, part 2

It has been a difficult week for us.  My daughter has had a cold for over 7 days.  She started going to nursery school in the mornings, but that of course entails comoing home with runny noses.  Naturally, she is more clingy, more whiney, more prone to cry.  She is also outright rejecting what I deem to be healthy food.  It’s really frustrating for me that she will happily eat white bread and cow’s milk cheese, but refuse vegetable soups.  She will repeatedly demand industrial juice, and reject without even a sip the homemade juices I try to give her.

Now, I realise that this situation is of my own making:when I met my partner -Italian, remember – I fell under the spell that I could also indulge in pasta and bread and cheese without paying the price.  I mean, our diet remained high in vegetables and other grains, so it’s ok, right? Wrong.  The noxious effects of eating wheat are insidious:  someone like me, with strong digestion and no history of candida will not immediately feel ill. But after a year or two, everything comes to the surface.  While I was in Italy, I gained an enormous amount of weight.  I was terribly tired and emotionally fragile.  Perhaps some of this is due to new motherhood, but I don’t think that as a species we would have survived long if every new mother became physically weak and emotionally fragile.  I think that this change in me was due to my diet:  the lovely, killer plates of pasta served up by la nonna.

Naturally, my daughter was exposed to this fare and her little chip has been programmed from within the womb and then during breastfeeding to having the products of wheat (in)digestion in the bloodstream.  In short, I have unwittingly produced a food addict because of my lack of attention at such a crucial stage in her development.

Accepting this fact is difficult for me.  I feel like I have finally found my feet again, since going high-raw.  I feel light and full of energy, emotionally calm and much, much happier.  Although I admit to irritation this week due to above cold and due to trying to change my daughter’s eating habits.  She asks for juice and I say water.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Cry.  she asks for bread and I give her quinoa.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Cry.  `It’s tough.  And so I decided yesterday morning that whatever my dietary beliefs, I am acheiving nothing if they produce conflict in my home.  I adore my child and without spoiling her and giving in to her every whim, I have decided not to let it get to me.  After all, we cannot change the situation, we can only change our reaction to it.  Having taken delivery of my raw chocolate fromn Shazzie, and awating my blender (hurrah ‘express’ delivery in Spain),  I will begin to whip up nutritious, delicious treats for my girl that beat any barra gallega (a kind of ciabatta-like white bread) hands down. Om shanti peace in the home.