“Expect to do a lot of mourning…..”

Today’s post is by Beck from Frog and Toad Are Still Friends

My youngest child was diagnosed with Celiac Disease at nearly 15 months old. It was a tremendous relief when she was diagnosed, because she had been so sick for so much of her short life and the improvement in her health was almost immediate when she switched to the gluten-free diet.

“Expect to do a lot of mourning,” a wiser mother of older kids with severe allergies told me early on, and indeed I did do a lot of sad moping around, thinking “Oh, she’ll never be able to eat a croissant at some street-side café in Paris!” or “BEER! SHE CAN NEVER HAVE BEER!” But time has given me a different perspective most of the time – there are gluten-free versions of most things (even beer), and having her healthy is much more important than having her able to eat a Tim Horton’s maple dip doughnut. And I’m pretty capable of whipping her up a batch of maple dip doughnuts on my own, come to that.

There are still moments of sadness, though. She misses out on a lot of things, and although we work hard to have her life as normal as we can, there are still far too many occasions where there’s a treat being shared around that she can’t have and she turns away with a look of quiet, heartbroken resignation on her 4-year-old face, her normal feistiness stilled by the knowledge that there’s nothing she can do about it. And that is hard and all of the homemade doughnuts in the world doesn’t quite make up for knowing at 4 that so much of normal life is already shut out to you.

What we work very hard at is to let her know that life is joyous and fun and that there will be many things for her to enjoy in life – maybe there will be a gluten free bakery right near the Eiffel Tower, even – and if there’s not, there is still a delight in all of the things she still can have and a tremendous delight in being able to keep herself healthy and well.

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