Am I a Brown Rice Mom?

Are you a brown rice parent? Or do your kids eat old French fries off the car floor?

Hi Friends,

Can you do more than one hard thing at once?

For example:

Can you save money and lose weight? Write a book and keep a clean house? Raise happy, occupied, reasonably normal children and never feed them red dye no. 5?

Today, let’s stick with the last example. We all want healthy kids. Those of us bent toward perfectionism can be tempted to pursue eternal life through clean eating, for ourselves or our kids or both. This is practically and theologically impossible, obviously. But, still, don’t you want to try?

Christianity proffers an opposite path. Not toward gluttony. Toward grace. We do our best nourishing our kids, but at the end of the day we have to lay down our labors and accept the perfection of Christ. We give up earning favor and receive grace. When things go wrong, when people get sick, we don’t have to assume the blame. We can look for grace in the trouble. We can seek Christ who suffers alongside us.

We’re tempted to assume the blame though. Just as we want credit when things go well. Grace pertains to brown rice, artificial dyes, and chicken nuggets. Because grace pertains to everything.

In this chapter I’ll share some of the baggage surrounding food I carried into motherhood.

Love,

Chelsea

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Chapter 19: How to Feed a Baby

Jubilee’s cabbage doubles as a hat.

Brown Rice Mom

“You’re gonna be one of those brown rice moms,” Kayla tells me. We’re sitting at her mother’s breakfast bar, slicing strawberries for jam. We’re teenagers and best friends. We’re being raised in happy families. But no part of our life is as happy as this part of our life—the part where we dream about the future.

Her rice-declaration puzzles me. When she says, “You’re gonna be one of those brown rice moms,” I ask, “I am?” Kayla, ENFJ to my ENFP, tends toward precise and swift judgment while I meander in a universe of endless possibilities. I can’t even identify constellations—because, couldn’t you draw any shape between any two or three stars?Because of this difference, I grow up to be a writer and Kayla grows up to be a nurse. And she tends know more about me than I know about myself.

“You joke about macaroni being 95 cents a box,” she says, topping off a bowlful of berries with a definitive final slice. “But you’re going to feed your kids brown rice.”

My heart swells. My best friend believes in my future. She believes a) that I’ll find a man and get married, b) that I’ll have kids, c) that I’ll have the discipline and diligence and good sense to feed them nutritiously.

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A Gospel of Health

And nutrition was serious business for me as a teenager. I even went to Herbalist School.

It all started when my family carried vials of our own spit into the office of a naturopathic doctor. The office was a room in her house. Her costly hourlong analysis of my stocky Independent Baptist family of four offered the kind of magic that attracts nonconformists. Because it felt conspiratorial. Because it stuck it to the man. Because no one else was doing it. Because everyone else was still eating burgers and Rice-a-roni.

When this doctor studied my spit, she looked at my mother in real shock and said, “Has she been . . . exposed to anything?” The doctor said the spit indicated my body held an unseemly quantity of heavy metals. Mainly mercury, I think.

We came to believe that the mercury in my blood came from years of weekly allergy shots, which had seemingly not diminished my allergies or my “sinus headaches,” the most troubling ailment I had. (It was after I had my first baby a decade later that a well-named, avid allergist with the last name Hare told me that I appeared to have no allergy problems, only migraines. With that epiphany Hare changed my life forever and for the good.)

But this first appointment with the holistic doctor marked the beginning of my family’s endless salads, our eschewing of white bread (which my father used to stress eat by the loaf with a large glass of milk). We crunched Ezekiel bread instead and drank giant bottles of water tinted with green chlorophyll. Our prayer became, From McDonald’s hashbrowns and Kraft mac and cheese and from Grandma B.’s peerless cinnamon rolls on Christmas, Good Lord deliver us.

I attended Nature’s Sunshine herbal school sometime, I think, in middle school or early high school. We sat at tables in a sunny room on Saturday mornings in Geneva, New York. There we learned the systems of the body—adrenal, lymphatic, endocrine, etc.—and precisely what herbal remedies to apply for each. I left with the overwhelming feeling I did not deserve the certificate they gave me, but I had a firm fixation on healing, on dietary purity, on cleaning out the insides, on undoing the damage of a lifetime of lies we had encountered in the American grocery store.

Besides this, I attended an herbal seminar where a lady in short black hair narrated to the hotel lobby her experience with beet juice. The beet juice gave her so much energy, she explained, that she had to be careful. Her heart raced. That’s how much power there was in a beet! “When I feel a cold coming on, I don’t lay down in a blanket,” she added. “I jump on my rebounder and sweat those toxins out!”

The herbalists had a costly herb for everything: Focus Attention Powder for my brother’s ADD. Garlic pills for oncoming colds. Thyroid pills for the sluggish, colloidal silver for those with weak immunity, progesterone cream for irregular periods. A doctor might disbelieve the efficacy or safety of these many little bottles. But that was because doctors didn’t study nutrition in medical school and whether they knew it or not they were beholden to Big Pharma.

Anyway, the fact that cements itself changelessly is that our holistic doctor died of cancer. This admittedly curtailed our herbal career. Not just because our doctor was gone but because her going had eroded our faith in the power of herbalism. “Physician, heal thyself!” I wanted to cry. I didn’t need to cry it, though, because we were all thinking it. My mother answered this unspoken thought: “Yeah, but imagine how much sooner she would have died if she hadn’t been so healthy.”

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There’s the Good Life, and then There’s Your Life

All this is background. Gravy. The point is, it took me years to shake off my nutritional obsessions. I insisted on stainless steel pans for my wedding registry because I believed aluminum caused memory loss. I would look at wet, white flour and say, “Look how sticky that is. Imagine it inside you being undigestible.” I would read Michael Pollan and get nervous about corn. I would get irked when my husband wouldn’t take a garlic pill.

Eventually and slowly I realized that my health mania did me more harm than good, causing more anxiety than health. It dawned on me that I was trying to earn health through good deeds. And little by little, I snapped away from paranoia. I like to think I’m floating toward moderation.

A couple years ago I read a book by a lady who, upon becoming a mother, decided to seek the transcendent and try several of the world’s wilder religions. What really fascinated me about her journey was what happened when she explored witchcraft. If I remember right, she liked the communal nature of witchcraft but was ultimately stymied by its legalism. Too many rules. Too many things you had to get exactly right if you wanted results. Just like me and herbalism.

I don’t want to teach my children to think that way about food and nutrition, ever. It’s paralyzing.

All this leads up to some moments that occurred a couple weeks ago while I was on vacation with my husband and kids and our college friends and their kids in the mountains of West Virginia:

Everyone’s packing, emptying out the vacation house fridge. I take the huge brick of cheddar cheese and stuff it in the glove compartment. (“Lady on a budget,” I explain to my friends. “I’ll eat this cheese all the way home.” Even though I’ve been told by 1 million social media influencers and more than one naturopath to cut out dairy.)

I consult a note I drafted in my phone last night.

Ideas for healthy-eating kids:

farmers market fruit each week

veg and fruit before dinner

hummus and dip

charcuterie

tea with honey

It’s not too extreme, right? It’s not Ezekiel bread or bean sprouts or cholorophyll.

I look for my kids so I can load them in the car. There’s Jubilee, wandering around the kitchen, eating a waffle cone for breakfast. No ice cream, just the cone. In the other fist she clutches the remnants of a huge bag of Sour Patch Kids. I look at her in dismay and ask, “Where is your mother?”

Eventually we maneuver down the mountain in our car, sharing a bag of gummy bears. A six hour drive lies ahead.

By the time we hit the very last gas station before home for a potty break, Jubilee is wailing through the aisles, “I WANT MY MOUTH TO TASTE LIKE CANDY!”

So. On this day I am not a brown rice mom. Mortified, yes. Brown rice, no. To my credit, I do not buy her the candy.

It seems obvious to say that the secret to health lies in a median between excess and deficit. Not in extremism. In consistency and moderation. This is not clear to teenagers, which is what I was during herbal school. It is also often not clear to guilty mothers, which is what I am today, carrying a child out of a gas station screaming because she wants her mouth to taste like candy.

You can aspire. But then real life arrives and reminds you of your clay feet. This is a good thing.

By the time we hit Hickory, North Carolina, we all want nothing more than a little protein and fiber. (Except Jubilee, who still wants her mouth to taste like candy.) “Part of the point of vacation is that you can glut out on junk food so you’re excited to come back and eat healthy,” says Jonathan behind the wheel. “Ahh, my protein powder and vegetables.”

We swing into Aldi, pick up a pack of chicken and watermelon, and start over. Oh, and we buy a bag of rice. Not brown. White.

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🍼Thanks for reading How to Have a Baby: From Bravery to Jubilee. This post is public. Feel free to share it. And come back next time for a post about an undetermined subject. Accepting ideas.

⁉️A Question for You:

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💌 More from Chelsea

📖 A book that has helped me think about health: Pursuing Health in an Anxious Age by Bob Cutillo.

🥔Yummy fall dinner I love that you can make for $7.17: Balsamic Roasted Mushrooms with Herby Kale Mashed Potatoes.

✏️ As a summer gift to myself, I bought six weeks of drawing lessons. They are so hard I have to laugh. The same part of me that can’t see constellations can’t understand how shading and perspective can be objective. I can feel myself growing, but it’s a little embarrassing. I’m pretty sure all the retired ladies in the class draw better than I do.