The past few months, I have been watching as Mia's diet slowly narrows to a certain few foods. Scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, and hot dogs. I would make pasta, chicken and dumplings, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, lasagna, chicken tenders...she would look at the food presented to her and tap it away with her finger. I tried to wait her out, I won once. I wrote about it. All the other times she waited and I would eventually give up. I was working off the philosphy that she will eventually get hungry and eat.
That philosophy sounds good, but what happens when your kid is interacting with others on an empty stomach. She lashes out, in frustation her hitting became more frequent. Therefore, she is given snacks to satisfy her. Goldfish crackers, popcorn, and cookies became a staple of her diet. I could only watch for so long before I felt the need to take action and improve her diet.
The other night, I made chicken parmigiana. Breaded chicken toppped with marinara and mozzarella cheese. I was determined that Mia would eat this. I waited with her at the table for 15 minutes. When she made no action towards the food, I decided to step in. I forked a piece of chicken. "Come on Mia, eat it" I said. She hit my hand away. "Mia, don't hit me. Eat it" She leered up at me. I moved the fork towards her face, she opened her mouth wide to scream and in that instant i put the food in her mouth. She cried and started hitting me in the head. I held her hands down to restrain her, she lunged forward headutting me in the arch of my nose. She spit out her bite. I skewered it on the fork and fed her again. She cried and proceeded to chew accompanied by large gagging swallows.
There were six or seven chicken pieces total. We continued the "force feeding" until the last piece was chewed. At one point she took her shirt off as a last ditch effort to show me her anger. Fear and rage were in her eyes for the entirity of the meal. I yelled at her to chew, eat, swallow. Our emotions had reached a tipping point. I knew this couldn't be the best way, but I couldn't think of any other options. She was never going to choose good food for herself, I had to do what was best for her. I have a memory of my parents doing the same with me when I was a child. I hated broccoli and was on the other side of the same fight.
I consoled myself afterwards, trying to take solace that I never did any physical harm to her. Emotional harm on the other hand, I'm sure I did. The ordeal has stayed with me. I have no doubt it has stayed with Mia too. That evening she crawled into my lap and led my arm to hold her. I think she wanted reassurance from me to know I wasn't mad at her anymore. I wasn't mad anymore, I just didn't know what else to do.
I brought up the dinner to Liz at our next therapy session. I saw the expression on her face fall when I described myself forcing her to eat after she spit the food out. I felt ashamed of myself. She did her best to not judge when she said "there are better ways to deal with it and I can help you". We made a plan to start working on eating during each of our Occupational Therapy sessions. Liz told me that we will start familiarizing Mia with different foods and the actual eating will come later. Liz gave me a packet that contained advice and techniques for meal time.
I don't know what the outcome would be if Liz didn't have a solution to our meal time problems. I probably would have just continued and could have really done damage to my relationship with Mia. I am so grateful for Mia's Autism. If she wasn't a Special Needs child, I would never have access to professional help with these typical problems.
