Two years ago I celebrated a milestone birthday.  Sadly, not my 21st, but a milestone birthday nonetheless.  I had a big party planned to celebrate with family, friends and loved ones, and was excited and thrilled to see old friends and new.  (My Sister even flew in from Edmonton for the week to surprise me)

Around 0300 that morning, I woke to my youngest son sleepily calling my name and promptly vomiting all down my arm.  Happy Birthday!  So I got him a bucket, got us all changed, stripped and changed the bed (two more times that night) and tried to get back to sleep.

It was flu.  And bad.  My youngest son has a delicate gag reflex, and he was taken down hard by this bug.  I spent my big day doing laundry, refilling the electrolytes and changing buckets.   I called off the party.  There was absolutely NO reason to share this kind of love!  I cancelled all my plans and cleared my week, expecting a long haul.   This was the glamour of motherhood –  taking all the  best laid plans and chucking them out the window when one of the kids goes down with a bug.

Flash forward two years later, and it’s birthday time again for me.  My darling husband had just taken me out for a delicious birthday lunch, and I get the terse call from the school secretary:  the little guy is in the office with a bucket and I need to come and get him.  Now.

We joked that it couldn’t be flu two years later.  We joked that it was the sensitive gag reflex, or the bad sushi, or eating too fast at lunch.

And then we saw the tell-tale chalky complexion, the clammy head, and the dark circles.  And we knew.  Happy Barfday to me!

 

It’s leftover Monday, and a sleepy one with a turn of the weather, and the impending Solstice bringing dark nights.

What to do with leftover bbq chicken  and rice?

Why, a Southern Dirty Rice, of course!

Well, not a  true dirty rice…..not sure how chicken livers would be received. But what better than a traditional Southern mirepoix layered with cayenne and pepper and bbq?

Delish!

It’s been almost a year since we started down this road and our journey to discovery and diagnosis of A’s Celiac disease.  I can’t actually believe it’s been almost a year – it feels as though the time has been so packed with emotion, illness, heightened states and learning as fast as we can, that the time has literally flown by.

A recently had a birthday, and it was a time to turn over a new leaf, and put his last year behind him.  And put it behind, we did.  As a family we came together to quietly celebrate in total gluten-free style, together, reflective and thankful.  A is facing a new year with new possibilities and a new-found sense of balance.  And it feels good.

Which brings me to Stage 5:  The Upward Turn.

It’s impossible to live in a heightened state all the time:  it is exhausting, both physically and mentally.  It is critical to achieve lows with the highs, and conversely highs with the lows.

This summer was a summer of regrouping; taking time to step back, de-gluten, and start getting clean.  A was able to adopt a truly gluten-free diet, post-endoscopy, and you could almost visibly see the weight lifting from his shoulders.  His whole persona got lighter, and with it, ours did too.

I guess this was the “upward turn” part.  And we were all more than ready to move forward, and turn upwards.  Our regrouping over the Summer allowed us to fact the Fall with maybe not a renewed energy, but at least a sense of peace.  I look forward to continuing the Upward Turn, and the start of a new journey as we truly begin to move forward together, positive and healthy.

 

 

It’s Thanksgiving weekend and the tryptophan is in full effect.  Between that and a recent bout of cold, the motivation has been hard to find.  But it’s important to say thank you, and to especially recognize that/who which gets you through.

Having cancelled family plans this weekend due to illness, just us four sat around the dinner table last night, and as is my tradition, went around the room saying what we were thankful for.   The overwhelming response was twofold:  thankful that we were putting months of illness behind us and moving forward with the healing.  The second intrinsically linked part was that we got through it together, as a family.   We all put aside thoughts of school stress, bills, the business, politics, and other strife, and took a moment to be with each other in thanks.  It was a quiet, peaceful moment, and it was beautiful.

We had been out earlier that day, enjoying our beautiful city:  with your head to the grindstone caught up in the routine, it’s easy to forget why the world wants to live here, and will pay millions for the privilege.   We took a simple walk together, soaking up the vitamin D and being together.  It was beautiful.

While I was sad to miss the rest of the family in thanks, I took the moment just to be with my three in gratitude.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Autumn brings back to school, football Sundays, back to soccer, and weeks-ahead defined by routine.

Autumn also brings a tumult of celebration: anniversary, birthday, birthday, birthday, all before Remembrance day.  We generally come up for air mid-November, just in time to rest before the December holiday onslaught.

Which brings me back to birthdays: name the definitive, penultimate image of the birthday celebration?

That’s right, folks.  Cake.

Birthday cake.  Thewheat-filled final act, the time-honoured tradition of wishes and candles and how-many-boy/girlfriends?

It’s the first family celebration, gluten-free.

It’s A’s first GF birthday post-diagnosis, and in my over-compensating way, I want to make it perfect. Or near-perfect. Or at least not like he’s stuck missing cake.

It’s important to be normal: to honour the traditions and rituals. We are finally feeling our feet back under us, and it feels good.

Which brings me back to cake.

Our household is pretty obsessive about angel food cake, which I have perfected thanks to Duncan Hines. Now think GF. No more boxed cheats, no more convenience.

Ten egg whites and two hours later, my first shot at an angel food cake (ever), let alone GF.

Cue the self-high-five.

And let them eat cake.

The seven stages of guilt are a strange thing, and often compressed into five.  According to the original model based on the seven, the fourth stage is a “bargaining” stage;  an attempt by the grieving person to make a deal with a higher power –  a plea made out of desperation.

I was curious how this reflected in the death of gluten in our household.  I could see plainly how outsiders who knew little of the disease would blindly ask if A could handle just a “little”  gluten.   “Can’t you order the burger and just remove the bun at the table?” “Can’t you just pick the croutons off the salad?”  “Why do you need to use all new utensils, wash your hands and your work surface and place a foil barrier down on the grill?”  I parroted back the factoid that even 1/60th of a piece of bread was enough to make him immediately ill.  I felt a choking desperation in those early days while re-learning how to cook for a busy family, and more importantly, how to navigate outside events, (birthday parties, dinner parties, lunches out) and unforeseen circumstances.

If there was a plea-deal to be had, I would have gladly shouldered this burden on behalf of my child.  I think if I could have negotiated it differently, this Mother would have shown her fierce ability to fight.  However it was well beyond me or anyone, and once again, while not terminal, thankfully manageable.

The other side of this coin was the desperation:  I spent too many minutes panicking inside about upcoming events, overthinking grocery items and reading, re-reading and re-re-reading labels to convince myself that it was okay, and that I wasn’t going to add to his already damaged gut.  I exhausted myself in the hamster wheel of panic.  I developed a red haze of headache in my vision 24-7.  My nerves, everyone’s nerves were stretched tight.

A real fun time, right?

Thankfully, the red haze dissipated, the discomfort, the panic, and the sheer desperation dissipated.  I didn’t have to panic every time we wanted to eat outside the house.  We found some safe harbours in a few excellent restaurants around town where the staff truly understood Celiac disease and all its’ implications.   I got more comfortable developing a standard list of questions to ask at restaurants.

I didn’t have to bargain my way out of this one after all.

Forgive me, dear reader, for my silence:  the machinations of back to school have so far consumed me, and now that we have our first ‘real’ week back under our belts, I feel as though I am coming up for air and able to write again.

Saturday mornings I have a bit of a routine:  up until last year, it was a steadfast and regular love of Stuart McLean and the Vinyl Cafe as I puttered around the house.  Sadly now, there are no dulcet tones of Dave and Morley, only the more contemporary “This is my Music/Playlist/Du Jour” from our national broadcaster.

Part of that routine is walking the dog.  Part of it is usually entails baking something toothsome for the boys, and lately, part of that routine is throwing myself an odd ingredient and seeing what I can make of it.  Today I decided to tackle chickpea flour.

When I re-vamped the pantry for A and rendered it totally gluten-free, one of the items I noticed consistently in a lot of baked good recipes was chickpea flour.    It secured a permanent spot in my sometimes alchemical pantry.  But I didn’t use it.  Until now.

I wanted to throw together a morning muffin, and am ever conscious of introducing more fibre into the diet.  After all, it’s all about regularity, and after our journey, it has definitely been a year of becoming intimately acquainted with all of our insides.

Chickpea flour is high in protein, great on fibre, and as part of the legume or pulse family, extolls a variety of health benefits.  And according to Epicurious:

Though just recently gaining popularity as a pantry staple in the States, chickpea flour—also known as gram flour, garbanzo bean flour, or besan—has been used in parts of Asia and Europe for centuries. Perhaps the best known uses come from Italy and France where it’s fried and roasted into a variety of snacks and breads. In Southern France chickpea flour is cooked like polenta, cooled, sliced into logs, then fried for the addictive snack known as panisse. In Italy, they do the same thing and call it panelle. The other way it’s commonly made is as a big (traditionally wood-oven-roasted) unleavened pancake known as farinata in Italy and socca in France, where it’s often cut into wedges and served alongside salad or as a snack all on its own.

Who knew!?

I started slowly, with baby steps and a simple morning muffin:  combining egg, oil, milk sugar, chickpea flour, baking soda/powder, the zest of a lemon and a 1/2 cup of strawberries.

We discovered that chickpea flour is delicious, and lends a density to baked goods that is often missing in GF baking.  The texture of the muffin was virtually interchangeable to a standard wheat flour variety.  Amazing!

I look forward to further experimentation!!!

 

Anthony Bourdain inspires me as both a writer and a chef. Truth be told, I think I like him as a writer more than a chef, but that’s only because I have never actually tasted his food.  He is at times irreverent, political, acerbic and genuinely heartfelt in his storytelling.  He is the high-end chef shooting at El Bulli and the every-man sitting down on a plastic stool to a bowl of noodles in the streets of Hanoi.

Which brings me to tonight.

The kids are away, (the parents will play) and we have been looking to play with a particular dish that is so un-kid, so gastro-daring, that we didn’t dare until tonight.

Truth, dare, or double-dare?

La Zi Ji –  more chili peppers than chicken:  a minefield of prickly ash (Szechuan peppercorns) and chili peppers to navigate your chopsticks around.  Not for the faint of heart or GI, it was surprisingly easy to prepare, and more fun to eat.  (***Editor’s note:  we used fresh Thai green chili peppers in place of dried red as we were cooking out of the fridge).

We controlled our heat.  We nibbled our hot peppers to infuse the chicken, and subsequently sat back while our eyelids broke out in sweat.  We paused.  We went back for more.  This is S&M chicken at it’s best.  It is walking the knife’s edge of pleasure and pain, coming out of it unsure of which side you landed on.  Safe words became innocuous vegetables lightly sauteed and tossed in soy.

I love exploratory cooking.  I love to try the weird, wonderful and audacious.  It is such a deeply-felt guttural reaction, it can’t help but be honest.  It feeds my soul in a bizarre truth-serum, you-can’t-hide=from-the-spice kind of cleansing.  But in a good way.

Or maybe I’m just a foodie-geek:  you be the judge.

Sitting on the deck with a small pile of GF reference books, cookbooks and anecdotal biographies, you would forgive me for (wanting to) forgetting our third phase of grief: Anger.

But the anger came. It came to all of us at different moments, in different intensities, directed and even indirected. 

A got mad and age-appropriately resentful at being blocked at every turn. No, he couldn’t have his favourite California roll. Yes, dim sum was dead to him forever. (Really, forever? …FOREVER)  School parties were rife with cross contamination. He asked the impossible question: “Why me?”  Why indeed.

BG’s anger manifested itself in a non-specific general boil-under-the-surface that would lash out at the slightest provocation.  He was (and is) a champion defender of his son through the process, but the anger pervaded.  Irrational spill-over became commonplace and we would all talk each other off the ledge.

A’s little brother was at turns angry on his brother’s behalf, and typical sibling, acted a little shit and declaring how delicious his non-GF “gluten” tasted.  Totally age-appropriate, and thankfully done with.

I got angry at strangers.  I got angry when whole restaurants immediately became dead to us. I got angry when we explained our new GF status and people didn’t take us seriously.  I got angry at the trend-riding bandwagonners who had fucked it up for the legit celiacs in pursuit of a catchphrase diet.  I spat out “low carb” and “paleo” with derision.  I got angry at people who mistakenly believed “a little gluten” was okay.  It isn’t.

We all  bled energy and precious resources going through this phase-a natural but frustratingly un-constructive one.  I, in turn, got angry at all the anger and fell into a circuitous heap.

It was an emotionally exhauting time, to say the least.

Glad we’re past it.  Mostly.

Now that A is fully gluten free and busy healing his gut while enjoying his summer, and with many thanks to the Grandparents who have offered us parents a moment of reprieve, I find myself in the rather rare position of reflection.

I can actually think.  Clearly.  I can contemplate and reflect.  I forgot how important this simple solitary act was to maintain a clear head and balance.  But I digress.

Early in the year, and early in our journey, after our first knee-jerk reaction to A’s impending diagnosis, we slipped into the second stage of grief:  pain and guilt.  The pain radiated everywhere, and it crippled me as I navigated the grocery aisles, cursing my ineffective bifocals and those teensy ingredients lists.  The pain hurt as I awkwardly approached our first GF play-dates, especially as A came home having been “glutened” or fed full of lactose, and sick, sick sick.  The pain was there as I recounted A’s every reaction to every ingestion, wondering if it was a reaction, lactose, leaky gut or all of the above.  The pain manifested itself in a rosy glow in my vision as I kept a brave face for our son.  It nestled in my brain into the corner of my eyes, and gently pulsated all day, every day.

And the guilt.  Being a parent is never easy, and while I pride myself on standing by my choices and educating myself on best practices for the children and household, (sometimes overbearingly so) there is a back-story to A that has years of post-birth trauma, rehabilitation and recovery.  Our story is not a unique one, and thankfully,  it has a happy ending.  But I am bruised from the experience and scarred inside and out.  So I naturally jump to ridiculous conclusions that A’s celiac diagnosis is somehow related to his birth experience, and that brings the guilt.

There is nothing quite like a mother’s guilt.

To my knowledge, science says that Celiac disease  can come on at any time for any number of reasons – according to the Mayo Clinic:

 “Celiac disease occurs from an interaction between genes, eating foods with gluten and other environmental factors, but the precise cause isn’t known. Infant feeding practices, gastrointestinal infections and gut bacteria might contribute to developing celiac disease.

Sometimes celiac disease is triggered — or becomes active for the first time — after surgery, pregnancy, childbirth, viral infection or severe emotional stress.”

So was my inability to normally deliver a baby somehow related to this?  Was the post-birth history coming back to leave its’ mark permanently on my child’s health?  (I said I experienced guilt.  I didn’t say it was rational. )

Working through the resulting other stages of grief and being a mostly rational human being, I have since resolved the pain and guilt.  Well, sort of.  The pain comes and goes, although I am happy to report that my vision is clear.  I still get slices of pain in my gut when A’s mourning is mirrored in my own eyes, and I know that while I can support,  I can’t take that pain away from him.

The guilt is still there, a little bit.  I guess I still have some unresolved ghosts surrounding his birth that may take still longer to hunt out.  I know rationally that I have done the best I can by him, and if he has somehow developed this as a result of emotional stress, I can only reiterate:  I have done my best.  Perhaps it triggered from a virus?  Perhaps it was always there, and just recently got worse?

Celiac disease seems to pose more questions than answers initially, and it is infuriating when health care providers respond with “do the best you can”, all the while knowing that if you don’t do the best you can, or if you fuck up, that you are damaging your child’s internal organs.  NBD.  Really?  It is really, really easy to fall down the rabbit-hole of over-analysis, second-guessing and irrational knee-jerk responses to otherwise innocent questions.  It sucks to have to re-examine relationships based on how well you trust people to educate themselves and take your child’s diagnosis seriously.

And for an OCD girl like myself, it just makes that whole can of worms worse.

Gah.