Two Cakes It Is!

I wasn’t planning to make “birthday cakes” for LittleM and LittleR this year. Last years cakes took countless hours to make. This year we had really hoped to have some sort of cake like recipe that the kids could eat. Over the summer things were going so well that it looked like that might have been a possibility, but the backward momentum of this fall proved otherwise.

Somewhere along the line I realized that I was entertaining some “thinking errors.” Many in the FPIES community have heard my take on the impact of FPIES on a mother, and some have even quoted me. I believe that God revealed it to me in a moment when I really needed to understand why the reality of FPIES cut so much deeper into my being than it did my husband (not that he didn’t care – it was just different).

A mother’s created role is to nurture and NOURISH while a father’s created role is to provide and protect.

I have come to realize that as a mother, the inability to feed (nourish) my children, when left unaddressed in my emotional/spiritual self, is an injury to my perceived ability to be a mom. I am not saying that this actually does in some way impact my ability to be a good mom. I don’t believe that for a moment. What I am saying though, is that somewhere in the deepest and most vulnerable places of my soul – I FEAR that it does.

At some points this perception has pushed me into a cycle of trying to “make-up” for the kids’ condition. I have found myself overcompensating – trying to give LittleM and LittleR what they “deserve” in the absence of food. To that end, last year I planned the birthday party of birthday parties. This 2 year old bash was much more than a birthday party – it was an EVENT. It was wonderful and I am so glad that the kids had a great day, but I realized recently that THEY didn’t need all of it – I needed to give it to them. I realized that they were happy little people who really had no idea they were missing out on anything.

SO….this year I decided that we were not going to have a big, expensive, difficult to execute party. We planned to take LittleM and LittleR to Hershey Chocolate World with their cousin and best bud, LittleK. This would be low key, fun and free! It was all set until the beginning of the week when LittleR told me that he was going to have a cake.

Uh-oh! I didn’t even think the kids knew/remembered what a cake was – I was shocked that they remembered last year’s cakes. Then I remembered that we just had them out in December to have a professional photo taken of them before we took them apart.