Food Phases: How to Deal When Your Teen Goes “Raw”

Last month I was enjoying a rare date night out with my hubby. In the middle of dinner I received this text message from my teenager:

She’d apparently watched a documentary called Fed Up about the food industry and informed me via text that she will no longer be eating any processed foods. No more meat, dairy, eggs, bread, cooked foods, or typical teen snack foods (i.e. candy and chips) for her. Being a professional mom, I played it cool, like it was no big deal. I kept a poker face when my husband inquired if she was OK, and I didn’t let on that her text was anything out of the ordinary. Unbeknownst to the outside world,

8 Ways to Give Your Child a Positive Body Image

Feature photo credit: Lisa Wixed

As parents, we’ve often heard how our approach to health, food, and our body image can indirectly impact our children’s views of themselves.  Children emulate what they see and hear around them and strive to be like the adults they admire.  So how can we, as parents, give our children a healthy body image?  I’ll address this further in a moment, but first, let’s take a peek into what can happen when we don’t consider how our approach to diet and exercise affects our kids.

Cats & Dogs: A Commentary on Marriage

Illustration credit: Trinity Moss

I must admit, it’s been a rough weekend.  Albeit the Facebook album of our kids, standing on the sidewalk smiling and cheering at a parade in the sunshine of a beautiful spring morning, may portray a different image.  Trust me on this though – it was two days filled with constant irritation, frustration, nasty looks, and sarcastic comments between my hubby and me.  As he put it (during one of the many arguments we had in 48 hours), “We are like two gears that should be rotating together to help each other, but instead we are grinding against one another.”  Going to the grocery store, attending the parade, what to feed the children, how to manage the behavior of our firecracker preschooler we call “the baby,” – we just couldn’t agree on anything, no matter how small. 

Fountain of Freedom

 Wildly flying down the street, wind in hair, wheels on fire, 

I knew then that life wouldn’t be easy

with you.

 

Screeching to a sudden stop, tires smoking, mid- construction zone, doors flung wide open,

we laughed as we struggled to shove the heavy, awkward, orange rubber cones

into the white two-door three-cylinder compact car we’d dubbed “the snail.”

 

Water rushing over the bras we left dangling on the fountain statue in the park

declaring our mark of freedom and feminism to the world, 

Jumping the fence to skinny dip under the full moonlight,

holding our breath underwater,

until we felt our lungs would burst,

we waited for the security guard to pass by on his nightly check.

You were the epitome of coolness,

all that I wanted to emulate –

the girl who lived free,

like life wasn’t full of unexpected surprises and bad news waiting around every bend. 

And then you became a statistic.

Teen pregnancy consumed you, swallowed you whole and spit you back out. 

Suddenly you were unrecognizable to me.

Once brazen, emboldened by life

now you seemed humble, meek,

an evening shadow of the girl you used to be.

 

We parted ways, 
you to follow your soul towards the mountains
while I drifted into a community of cult misfits

that would forever change my universe.

 

Much older now, two decades gone by,

I have daughters of my own 

and when I pass by that fountain we adorned with our fiery, unbridled youth, 

I smile and am thankful for those wild days….

Home Phone Etiquette

Everybody is accessible ALL the time now.  Most of the time, this is a wonderful thing.  My car breaks down? No problem! I just call for a tow truck on my cell.  Late for my dinner engagement?  No worries; I’ll just shoot them a text message.  However, there are those moments (and I know you know what I’m talking about here) when I really wish I was unreachable without having to explain why to the world.  I was reminded of this today while huffing and puffing during my workout, sweat pouring down my back,  as I received a non-emergent text message.   When I didn’t respond to the text within a minute,  I received three more calls in 90 seconds from the same individual.  Of course now I am concerned that this may be urgent, so I  rush to stop the rowing machine and clumsily grab the phone, still wearing my weightlifting gloves.  After the call (which was not an emergency after all), I found myself thinking: “Can we just go back to home phone etiquette, please?!?”

Let’s step back in time to the days when we only had two choices if calling someone: landline phones at our homes or businesses and payphones.  Back then, if someone called you three to four times in a row within a two minute timespan, the caller may have been labeled as overzealous, irritating, clingy, rude, and most definitely uncool.  Calling someone took forethought, consideration, and purposeful action.

For instance, take the time I planned a trip to Atlanta to see the first Lollapalooza when my parents thought I was going to the beach with my friend and her family.  The beach was only two hours away from my hometown, while Atlanta was a five hour drive.  It took a lot of plotting and planning for my teenage brain to remember to stop our car full of highschool rebels half-way through our travels to Hot’Lanta, locate a payphone, and have the necessary change to call home, all while smoothly selling my parents the lie that I was safely enjoying the Gulf with responsible adults.

{Sidebar: Listen to Jane’s Addiction’s “Whores” circs 1991 Lollapalooza}

Now let’s think about that scenario in today’s 24/7 age of constant communication – oh wait – my parents would bust me with the GPS tracking app “Find my iphone” as soon as our car merged onto the I-10 ramp headed north – nevermind.

By this example alone, one could argue that landlines encouraged creativity, organization, and independence in teens in ways that smart phones never will, but I digress…

All I’m asking for is a little consideration from the callers of the world.  Think about what the person may doing when placing your call, accept the silence if the party does not respond right away, leave a message, and give them ample time to contact you in return.   I think Lady Gaga says it best in her song:  “Telephone.”

If all else fails, pretend you are on this payphone:

and you just used your last quarter.

*This post also appears on the Mom Bloggers Club.