It’s all about accommodation. My daughter and I avoid eating gluten because it adversely affects our health. At home, after about seven months of this diet, we’ve adapted quite well. My daughter takes her own lunch to school, but she’s always done that, so that wasn’t a big adjustment. But when we travel, all bets are off. Try finding foods in an airport that don’t contain wheat flour, barley malt, or wheat extracts. A salad with no croutons might do it, but the dressing could be a problem. Try adapting to the habits and comfort foods of an extended family of 13 people, when only two are on this diet. Sometimes they make changes for us, but most often, we provide our own alternate dishes to eat. At family-style,”American” restaurants, most often the only gluten-free options are salads and French fries. But we learned the hard way that you always have to ask how food is made–the last place we ordered fries, they came “battered,” which meant they had wheat flour all over them. The waitress brought my daughter cantaloupe and sliced raw carrots, but that didn’t make much of a lunch for a kid.

Sometimes I get discouraged about educating folks around us about our needs, or eating carrots while everyone else is enjoying a full meal. But then this morning, I got a call from the father of one of my daughter’s friends. He’s hosting his son’s birthday party next week, and was calling to let me know that they’re making gluten-free muffins for the party and wanted to know if there was a particular kind of frosting that I could recommend so they could make the muffins more like cupcakes. I told him how much I appreciate his thoughtfulness, and he said his son “wants to be sure we get this right.” That effort to make my daughter comfortable and a full participant in the party has cheered my whole day.

We all have our challenges and struggles in life. Sometimes, they are widely shared (the economic downturn, a big storm, climate change), and sometimes they are personal. The ways in which we help each other, from the small gestures to the big sacrifices, remind us of the better side of our shared humanity. Sometimes we make the effort to help others, and sometimes we are able to accept assistance. Here’s hoping I can do both with grace and good cheer.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 11:58 am and is filed under General Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.