Hungry (6 page)

I took the plates and bowls part seriously. In our cupboards, small plastic dishes stacked up as if we were Tupperware magnates, but Jacob didn’t much care. His eating was erratic at best.

We bought every kind of baby food, even those little hot dogs that look like fingers in water. We’d try anything, if only our fussy firstborn would eat it.

Jacob grew, but very slowly, to sixteen pounds by his first birthday. His arms were so thin that he had to get immunizations in his thigh. He had blood tests, even a test for cystic fibrosis. He was fine. We were nuts. I bought more plates. Another pediatrician had suggested using adult-size plates, so the food looked small.

Restaurants were a breeze at first. But once Jacob reached toddler stage, he dropped plates to the floor and preferred to talk at the table, anything but take in food. Just like at home.

Jacob was a chatty but runty two-year-old when I became pregnant again, and our pediatrician said the presence of a competitor at the table might stimulate his appetite. We’d ruled out all the terrible diseases, and she wanted us to calm down. “Some kids eat just enough,” she said. Just like adults, some eat to live and others, like Ned and I, live to eat.

In Jacob’s baby book, under the heading Baby’s Difficulties, we have this entry at the top:

Lisa’s baby book didn’t have a Difficulties page, and if it had, eating would never have been mentioned. She took to nursing right away, went easily to solid foods, and rarely did the dog benefit from hanging around her highchair, like she did with Jacob. Lisa was one of us; she loved to eat.

What you worry about is rarely what happens, right? The point of worrying is not to plan or take action, particularly, but just to single out a catastrophe and by naming it ensure that it doesn’t happen. Before our wedding, a wise friend suggested I make a list of Catastrophic Expectations, possibly to stop me from talking about them so much. It’s a strategy used in business today, as in this advice for jobseekers from GoodPeople, a Baton Rouge-based executive search firm:

In the Himmels’ early years of raising a family, our Catastrophic Expectations machine worked perfectly. What we worried about, that Jacob wouldn’t grow, didn’t happen. In fact, those years were blue skies ahead for us. Jacob was so gentle with his much more aggressive little sister that eventually we told him it was okay to hit her back. Maybe he was too kind. We could worry about that later, if he got pushed around at school. We worried a little about Lisa’s mercurial personality, which stood out from the rest of us, who tended to overthink rather than overact. In a family of quiet, shy readers, our incredibly cute daughter quickly became our Sarah Bernhardt, flamboyant star of stage, screen, and opera. Lisa could go from joyful play to pitched combat without any visible means of transport. She regularly woke from naps screaming in sweat, as from a nightmare, and could require half an hour to calm down enough to speak. We named one of her favorite dolls Calm Baby, a squishy toy that lit up when squeezed. Long after Calm Baby’s batteries went dead, hugging the doll still sometimes helped. What kicked off the furies? Often it was hard to tell, or it didn’t matter. She just had to spin out. Still, she always came back from wherever that was, collected herself, and became charming again. For now, basking in the sunshine of a happy family, we expected that if we kept doing things right, we might get some rain but there’d never be a hurricane. We don’t have hurricanes in California.

Much later, I came across the wisdom of the psychotherapist/ author Harriet Lerner, whose book
The Mother Dance: How Children Change Your Life
features chapters realistically titled “Are You Fit to Be a Mother?” and “What Kind of Mother Ever Hates Her Children?” Lerner delivers this stunning news: “In the life cycle of a normal family, something will get terribly screwed up with at least one of your kids. If this doesn’t happen to you, well, you’re just some kind of weird exception to the rule, or very lucky, or in denial, or your time hasn’t come yet.”

Our time was a long way off.

In Lisa’s baby book I wrote on the page titled Special Memories of First Days at Home:

Now
this
is the way parenting should be.

We started to relax. Jacob had suffered the full first-child treatment, constant vigilance, mirror to his sleeping mouth to make sure it showed a little puff of air and he was still breathing. Jacob’s artsy baby book, from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, contains a remnant of his belly button cord, long gone to dust. Only two pages of this book are empty: Baby’s Christening and Baby Eats at the Table. Elsewhere, Ned wrote that taking Jacob to a restaurant was like eating with Helen Keller (as played unsentimentally by Patty Duke in the 1962 movie
The Miracle Worker
, young Helen was a dinnertime terrorist, grabbing food off her parents’ plates).

At birth, our children were the same length and differed by only four ounces in weight. At age nine, when we cut the cord on growth charts, Lisa was half an inch shorter than Jacob had been, but she weighed more than seventeen pounds more.

We neglected to record our second child’s statistics for a couple of years. But, sheesh, there was no need. Lisa was doing fine.

How much of Jacob’s pickiness did we cause by being so frantic, and how much was just him? Maybe he would have been a connoisseur in any case. When given a tangelo at age three, our serious son said, “If you took the seeds out, it would make me much happier.” I remember telling his pediatrician that Jacob liked his apples to be peeled, otherwise he wouldn’t eat them. The beleaguered doctor looked at me, sighed, and said, “Don’t peel apples for him, or you’ll always be peeling apples.” Still, I peeled.

With Lisa, meals were so much easier. She ate joyfully. Even when she was in a rejectionist phase, the introduction of new foods went like this:

“Want some of this (food)?”

“No. What is it?”

And then, more often than not, she would try it.

Lisa’s never-say-never approach to dining became a stream of inputs on her Out of the Mouths of Babes pages of her baby book, such as, at four and a half, when she said, “I feel like I’m going to throw up—after dessert.”

Most likely she didn’t. Throwing up scared her. Even when Lisa was sick with the flu, she would do anything to avoid vomiting, right up until the time she became bulimic.

However, sleep was a big issue for Lisa. While we rejoiced at how easy she was to feed, she rarely went to bed without a fight and often woke up screaming. As with body type, and the need for orthodontics and optometry, Lisa took after Ned’s insomniac side of the family. Later, Lisa’s trouble with sleeping would factor into her worst bout of anorexia.

 

lisa:
I have never been a good sleeper, which I can thank Dad’s genes for. I was also blessed with bad allergies, flat feet, and extreme motion sickness. My brother got Mom’s solid sleeping abilities as well as her lean figure, arched feet, and ability to endure long, bumpy car rides.

Even as a young kid I don’t recall sleeping in late or falling asleep easily. I was especially antsy at slumber parties. If I slept at all, I was the last to fall asleep and the first to wake up. I’ve also never been good at taking naps. My parents claim that as a toddler through about age five, I would rise from naps in a sweat, screaming, crying, and being downright uncomfortable. I suppose that put me off naps.

 

sheila:
Lisa’s right, I am a world-class sleeper. If I get less than eight hours, I have to take a nap. For maximum performance, both are nice. At work, some afternoons I go out to my car, put my feet up on the dashboard, and take a twenty-minute snooze. Put me on a train, a ferry boat, or a long drive, and I will sleep. Ned may be talking in the car and notice that I haven’t said anything in a while, because I’ve fallen asleep. On an old comedy album I had as a child, Bill Cosby riffed on the beauties of rest, “I like sleep like a good steak.” I’m with him.

It became the family scripture that Jacob took after me and Lisa had more of Ned’s genetic gifts. Quiet, thin, serious, judgmental on my side. Fun-loving foodies on Ned’s. As a teenager, Lisa wrote to Ned one Father’s Day: “You know that I think you’re a swell dad; awesome and fun, loving and caring. People tell me that I really am my father’s daughter, and I like it that way.”

As a first-grader, Lisa wrote to me on Mother’s Day: “You are a nice mom but I would like it if you wouldn’t yell at me as much. I don’t mind if you do it sometimes. On the brite [side], you are so nice and I love you very much.”

 

lisa:
I never considered myself a daddy’s or mommy’s girl, but I did have commonalities with each one. Mom and I could easily talk about our feelings and dissect the reasons behind our particular emotions at a certain time. Mom did all the clothing and toy shopping. She took me to get my hair cut, although that sometimes turned out badly, with Dutch-boy bangs or horrible layers. If I was sick, it was usually Mom who stayed home from work with me. My parents provided equal love, nurturing, and education. I felt equally attached and devoted.

When it came to food, however, Dad was The Man. As contradictory as it may sound for a food critic, Mom failed to display much range in her cooking. Only over the past few years has she come out of her bubble of easy meals into actually reading recipes and producing quite impressive results. Mom taught me to scramble an egg, but when we were growing up, Dad always amazed me with his creativity and skill. I developed a rather mature palate at a young age. Had Dad not been so versatile and skilled in the kitchen I probably would have joined in with most other kids who were stuffing their faces with popular junk food and nutritionally deprived packed lunches. I must have been a little bit of a dream child for Dad, who was so delighted in having a daughter with such a bodacious appetite. My brother actually refused food!

I entered Dad’s world as a pleasant surprise and quickly became his kitchen assistant. Dad used to emulate the mannerisms and unique voice of Julia Child as we’d cook together. He’d talk through the steps of the recipe as if filming a cooking show even though his only audience member stood next to him.

Around the age of seven, I felt limited by the children’s menu and proclaimed that I wished to order from the adult selections. At eight I tried, and secretly liked, escargots while on vacation in Montreal. While most kids my age considered seafood “icky” and survived mainly on spaghetti, hamburgers, cereal, and sweets, I enthusiastically accompanied my parents out to dinner. They also frequently entertained their eclectic and lively circle of friends—all with a common adoration for food—and I found myself sharing in the dining experience of goat cheese appetizers and Dad’s famous caramelized pear tarte Tatin. I even shocked strangers with my mature appetite. On an airplane to visit our family in Seattle, I asked for tomato juice and heard the passenger on Mom’s other side whisper, “Your daughter drinks tomato juice?” In fact, I drank a lot of tomato juice and V-8 and took a lot of crap at the lunch table, where sugar-laden Capri Sun was the preferred beverage.

 

sheila:
To get decent tomatoes and stoke the kids’ interest in where food comes from, Ned signed up for a plot in the community garden. City officials had started a demonstration garden to show residents how to grow organic crops and quickly turned it over to a hungry populace. Now there are four community gardens sprinkled throughout Palo Alto.

The summer before Lisa was born, Ned and Jacob picked tomatoes, chard, zucchini, and lemon cucumbers—the kind that don’t make you burp. On the drizzly morning of October 13, 1984, Ned left me and newborn Lisa in the hospital to pick up Jacob, and before visiting us they swung by the farmers’ market. Palo Alto set up a Saturday morning farmers’ market in 1981 to offset the disappearance of grocery stores in the downtown area. Whole Foods has long since moved in, but the Saturday downtown market still buzzes and now there’s one on Sunday as well.

Lisa took more to the market than to farming. At the garden, Jacob liked to wander around and pick wild berries. Lisa preferred the downtown carnival scene. From the comfort of her stroller, she listened to the banjo players and the shouting about “sweet English cucumbers” and accepted tastes of just-picked peas offered by the professional farmers. She took after Ned in appreciation of free samples. Both also loved Costco, despite its cold concrete vastness, because of the sampling opportunities. The store near us initially made it difficult and foolish to bring young children: There was no riding in the industrial carts, and strollers were not allowed. Costco management soon wised up.