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 a while, then falls back to sleep. In three-hour intervals.
At night she’s the same—wakes up to nurse and falls right back asleep.
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.
Ned’s downtown Saturday rounds included an old-fashioned, frosted cookie-type bakery that made great wheat bread and hamburger buns, and the twenties-era Peninsula Creamery for milk in glass bottles. When we needed staples, we shopped at the Co-Op, a funky nonprofit from the sixties that did not survive the eighties. We joined a produce co-op as well as the cheese co-op.
“That’s the store we don’t like,” Jacob, age two, informed a visitor as we drove by the Safeway supermarket near our house. Apparently we had badmouthed Safeway in his presence. When we did shop there, we read labels to the kids, noted how it was usually crackers and soft drinks piled high at the ends of aisles, and counted the sugary candies and gum while waiting in the checkout line. “Yeah, I see the Kit Kat bars. We don’t need them, we didn’t come to buy them, but they’re placed right here so we’ll be tempted. Look at all that packaging. You’re paying for that. Does it help the apples to be wrapped in plastic?”
That was one side. The serious Marion Nestle side. Nestle, arguably the most prominent nutritionist in the land, advocates for consumer protection against marketing hype. We taught the kids to make informed food choices, and that new products and packaging are about making a profit, not our well-being. In What to Eat, Nestle follows the money: “What industry or group benefits from public confusion about nutrition and health? Here the list is long and includes the food, restaurant, fast-food, diet, health club, drug, and health-care industries, among many others.”
On the less serious side, our most-quoted food text when the kids were young was Yummers! Writer and illustrator James Marshall is better known for his George and Martha books, about hippopotamus best friends who learn when to tell the absolute truth and when to soften it. Yummers! is about being open to new experiences—foods in this case. That’s what we thought at the time. A less blessed-out interpretation would be that Yummers! is about the hazards of overindulging. It opens with Emily Pig, looking distraught on the bathroom scale: “She was gaining weight and she didn’t know why.” She resolves to live healthier. Her friend Eugene Turtle suggests getting some exercise by going for a walk, but walking makes Emily hungry. On the way she downs two sandwiches, corn on the cob, a platter of scones, and three Eskimo pies. Then Eugene buys a box of Girl Scout cookies, which need a milk chaser. They stop by a drugstore and Eugene sips skim milk while Emily plows through a vanilla malt, a banana split, and a dish of peach ice cream. When Eugene stops by the supermarket to buy a box of tea, Emily finds free pizza and speaks the line that was our mantra: “It’s so important to sample new products.”
Is Eugene an enabler? Emily is certainly a binge eater. We didn’t see it that way at the time, but rereading Yummers! and Yummers Too: The Second Course got me worried. Yummers Too continues the theme, with the addition of Emily’s favorite relative, Uncle Fatty Pig, and Emily eating her way through the inventory of Healthy Harriet’s food store. She has to tell Harriet, “I lost control.” Another interpretation: The Yummers books are about what happens when you panic about your weight.
lisa: Emily is a pig! Is she binge eating or just being a pig? I think it would be different if the Emily character was a person, but she’s just being a hungry pig. A child wouldn’t read that much into it. I loved this book as a kid.
And there is a lesson at the end because Emily gets sick, so there are consequences to her actions. Maybe Eugene, her friend, should have stopped her. But whether or not Yummers! carries a positive message, it is charming.
sheila: How do parents find the right books and messages? First, you reconvene the team of advisers from when you were pregnant, and add knowledgeable friends and relatives with slightly older children. As your children grow and their needs shift, you’ll naturally recruit new advisers, but the early ones may point the working parent to the right daycare center, which itself will be a great source of expertise and comfort. After my six-month maternity leaves, I went back to work and the kids went to the Learning Center, a highly recommended program with the corny acronym TLC. Nearly three decades later, TLC is going strong, with a long waiting list and an outstanding professional staff who get health benefits. The center closes at 5:30 p.m., early for working parents but powerful incentive to get home. Whenever Ned or I arrived, bedraggled from the office and the rush-hour freeway, TLC teachers were still fresh.
The food was fresh, too, and central to the program. It still is, as the center’s website states:We do not serve food or snacks with sugar, and we recommend that you feed your child a breakfast low in sugar. Please do not send your child to TLC with any gum, candy, or sweet food. If you wish to send a treat for snack time or your child’s birthday, a holiday, or your child’s last day at TLC, please consult the director for a list of healthy possibilities.
We became friends with several of the teachers, went to their weddings, and formed a sort of eating club to explore Asian and South American cuisines in restaurants and in our homes. It was a little like the gourmet group my parents had, dabbling mainly in the foods of Europe, except that then the mothers did all the work. I thought their gourmet group was even dumber than bridge, the card game in which the mothers seemed more often to be the “dummy.”
The TLC teachers had a remarkably natural way of talking to young children without patronizing them. It is a place for children with a “whole-child” philosophy, featuring tenets like this:We encourage the children to: show kindness, courtesy, and tolerance, be self-directed, develop their potential as loving human beings, to express their thoughts and feelings.
While Lisa and Jacob were developing their potential, we looked for an elementary school to keep up the good work. Palo Alto children have great choices in the public school system: excellent neighborhood schools and three alternative schools, at no extra expense.
We had heard about Ohlone and Hoover, the two alternative schools open when Jacob was ready for kindergarten: one named for the Native Americans of California’s Central Coast, the other for Hoover, as in Herbert. Hoover’s big contribution to education was to proclaim: “Children are our most valuable resource.” More famously, while campaigning for president in 1928, Hoover predicted, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” That was a few months before the stock market crash.
Hoover Elementary School is about solid academics, fabulous test scores, and “a quiet and orderly environment.” Ohlone is about creativity and “open education,” which jibed nicely with Jacob and Lisa’s training at TLC.
At Ohlone, adults and students go by their first names. Jacob was a popular name, so there might be a Jacob H. and a Jacob R., but by fourth grade Jacob H. had become Jake. In Lisa’s kindergarten class, the teacher was called Teacher Lisa to avoid confusion, but never Miss, Mrs., or Ms. At first the name thing struck us as odd. In the olden days, we didn’t know our element
ary schoolteachers even had first names, and here the principal was just plain Michael. Ohlone gives no grades, only incredibly detailed and helpful written reports from the teachers. Nor is there, remarkably, any homework. Even in an age of test-score anxiety, children work mainly in groups, frequently with students at different grade levels. They learn to work with difficult people. As the manual describes:Ohlone provides a “training ground for real life” so that each student becomes a self-directed, thinking, lifetime learner.
Ohlone has a farm with animals as well as vegetables. Students pick corn, feed goats, and collect eggs. They learn that food comes from the earth, not Costco, Safeway, or even the farmers’ market. At the annual Harvest Festival, they churn butter, peel apples, and toss pumpkins.
At home, food was central from the get-go. Once Jacob and Lisa were unlikely to stick their fingers in the metal grinder, we unwrapped the Marcato pasta machine we had gotten as a wedding present. We kneaded dough, formed a ball, let it rest, cranked the dough through the machine into our chosen noodle shape. The kids could see how much faster this fresh dough cooked than packaged pasta, and how tender and tasty it was.
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