Feeling Like My Kids

James Vander-Cry

Before yesterday, I hadn't given much much thought to what must be going through my kids heads with this new diet.

It was the birthday of one of the staff members at the church where I work, and we went out to eat lunch at Fish City Grill.  It's a pretty good restaurant, but about 60% of the menu was off-limits for me because it had either some kind of milk batter or a milk/butter-based sauce slathered on it.  I ended up with raw oysters and red beans and rice for lunch.  It was very good, but as I sat there, looking around the table, I felt very out of place.

Here they were, all these people around me that I see and spend time with every day, and yet, for the first time ever, I felt like I totally didn't belong.  I saw the appetizers they ordered, the food that they had brought to them, steaming and sizzling with butter and sauce everywhere, and I genuinely felt jealous. Then, we got to dessert and it all went to hell in a hand basket. EVERY SINGLE ITEM on the menu was butter/milk-based.

I went from feeling out of place, to downright dejected.  I finally went next door to the gelato place and got a really incredible blood orange ice.  But, my lunch isn't really the point of the story, just a jumping off point.

A little later, I was thinking when it just hit me.  If that's what that lunch was like for me just this once, what must my children be feeling EVERY SINGLE DAY that they go to school with their different lunches and their no-milk mindset that we are working so hard to ingrain in them.  It's like God hit me with this sympathy bolt and it was all I could do to keep from crying just thinking about it.  I was truly heartbroken for my children.

No child (or adult, for that matter) wants to feel like they are a weirdo, or an outcast, especially for something that they can't control.  And yet, there my children sit, watching and listening to everyone and everything around them say how wonderful milk is for you.  How you should have so much of it in your diet.

Well, no more weirdos.  I'm going to do everything in my power to empower my children in making life-choices that they can not only live with, but be incredibly proud of.  I'm going to make circumstantial  superheroes out of my kids and give them the tools they need to not feel like outcasts, but like someone who has been given super-special powers to bring exciting foods to the table, so that when they look around at the other kids, they'll wonder why their lunches aren't as cool.

Wonder Twin powers ACTIVATE... shape of a lunchbox... form of a dairy-less cow!