Hungry by Sheila Himmel Read Free Book Online Page B

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:
    EATING. Turns his head away, zips up his lips. 10 months. Throws food to Joby (the dog). 12 months.
    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.

four
    Growing Gourmets
    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:
    The next time you feel a Catastrophic Expectation about to take hold, confront it. For example, if you’re worried that you’ll end up sleeping under a bridge if you fail to land a job offer in the next three months, quantify the probability of this happening. You may be amazed and embarrassed by how unlikely it is. Develop some alternatives for what you’d do if you were evicted from your home. Wouldn’t you stay with relatives, rent a room somewhere, or sleep at a homeless shelter first?
    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:
    Lisa is a dream baby. She nurses well (NW as they say in the hospital), is pleasant for