What I Do Now:
Allergymares: Did a mommy blogger want a ‘wittle more attention?
Last week, Laura Bennett used childhood food allergies as human bait to increase traffic to her Daily Beast Column (I contemplated whether I should even provide the link.) Laura Bennett believes that some mothers may be falsifying food allergies to keep their children on a tighter leash and torture innocent mothers (like Laura Bennett!) when she generously bakes cookies for her kid's class.
Laura Bennett suggests that the statistical rise in childhood food allergies is due to over-diagnosis and over-active imaginations. After she "fully acknowledges" that there are some percentage of children for whom nut allergies are a serious life threatening condition" she questions, "Where were these children when I was growing up?"
Hmmm. Where was AIDS when her parents were growing up?
Now my son might be one of the legitimate cases (I'd have to check with Laura Bennett first...maybe email her a copy of his medical files?) and I think I do a pretty good job of keeping my anxiety to myself. Jeeze, I try to educate him to make the right food choices, to articulate his condition and to stay calm during accidental reactions.
And...I've had deep sleep nightmares. They go like this: My husband gives Eden something like peanut butter and then acts like it was perfectly normal. Or...
Some stranger tells me Eden just ate an allergic food and can't breathe and I'm looking and looking but I can't find him. Or...
Eden needs his meds and I'm running to get to him but my legs are frozen.
Fun stuff. Hives and panting aside, ever picture an allergic reaction from the inside of a child? I'm guessing Laura Bennett hasn't. (Too busy digging up isolated examples of unhealthy parenting and pinning it us donkeys.) Well, here's my graphic of the inner landscape:
Eden is always filled with allergic antibodies that perch on his intestinal walls, line pink nostril and lung tissue. They anticipate rendezvous, wait patiently on top of their mast cells.
"Oooh. Which will it be?" They wonder, smacking, drooling, poised for the arrival of a familiar protein, programmed into their memory from their very first encounter.
Maybe it will be Casein with its flexible structure and amorphous shape - beautiful thermoplastic Casein, that flows upon heating. Or perhaps egg white protein, Albumen, slinks teasingly into my son's small intestine, flirting and swinging its chain of globular units, enticing the antibodies and offering them ample opportunity to thrust into masts cell and consummate their relationship.
Together now, protein binding them, the antibody and mast cell release their naughty children, histamines that swim away to dilate Eden's blood vessels, smooth his small muscle tissues, release mucus, havoc, ravage his body with in their frenzy, his internal orgy, a feeding frenzy of biological occurrences.
Laura Bennet, listen up - I don't care about some mothers. For most of us - we wish it was just a dream.