I am the Julieta Madrigal of my house. After my daughter struggled to gain weight, I focused all my energy on cooking for her.
- My daughter was diagnosed with failure to thrive because she wasn't gaining weight appropriately.
- I researched and cooked recipes that would help her gain weight in a healthy way.
During the opening scene of the Disney movie "Encanto," Mirabel Madrigal, the protagonist, introduces her magical family to a trio of wide-eyed children: first Tia Pepa, whose mood affects the weather, and then Tio Bruno, whose visions led to his disappearance. As I watched with my teenage daughter, Sammi, she paused the movie and said, "Julieta's next, and that's you!"
When Sammi pressed play, Mirabel described her mother, Julieta Madrigal. With a kind face, big eyes, and a messy bun, Julieta is a mom with curves and graying hair just like mine, finally an accurate representation from Disney. As Mirabel sings, Julieta stands in the marketplace handing out arepas con queso, a cornmeal hand pie filled with cheese.
I blinked away tears. Julieta, my animated counterpoint, was everything I'd ever hoped to be. Years ago, I struggled to get my daughter to gain weight and put all my energy into creating recipes that would help her with that. My food wasn't magical, but it did help her with her health condition.
The official health diagnosis
As we watched the movie, I remembered the years when Sammi's most prominent diagnosis was failure to thrive. She wasn't gaining weight at an appropriate rate for her age. She'd led me on a years-long search for a magic arepa that would fix everything.
At 6, with blond pageboy hair sticking out in back, Sammi would hold a spoonful of lentils near her mouth forever before we'd remind her to take the bite. An hour later, everyone else would be done. She'd sit at the kitchen counter, her food cold in front of her as we did the dishes. Soon enough, it would be time for bed. I'd scrape the last of her bowl into the trash.
"I guess she doesn't like lentils anymore," I'd grumble to my husband afterward. "I'll have to find something else."
I'd bury myself in piles of recipes, always hunting for the mystical food that would make Sammi eat. For eight years, we followed medically prescribed diets, hoping to resolve her slow growth and poor appetite. She ate without acid, without dairy, soy, eggs, nuts, or wheat, and even without fat. Every time, my goal was to find a food she would eat with gusto no matter what.
Sometimes, I was successful with my 'magic' food
When she was 1, I discovered a chickpea soup that she ate enthusiastically. Sneaking extra-virgin coconut oil into it saved her from needing a feeding tube. When she was 5, I discovered refried black beans stuffed in a fried corn tortilla, a favorite lunch that worked with her latest diet. And when she was 8, and even air-popped popcorn was too fatty for her fat-free diet, I crumbled rice cakes and sprayed them with fake butter spray for her to eat at the movies.
Nothing cured her like Julieta's arepas, but eight years after the surgery that finally allowed Sammi to eat well — in which a surgeon untangled her aorta from where it was compressing her esophagus and sewed it to her rib cage to keep it out of the way, thereby removing the "kinks" in her esophagus that had made it so hard for her to swallow — she's come to see me as a version of Julieta: always ready in the kitchen with just what she needs.
These days, she gravitates toward my cinnamon-chocolate cookies, blueberry-raspberry muffins, and bowls of steaming matzo-ball soup, but there are many dishes I make now I can see make her feel loved.
In the kitchen, we chat until I can't wait anymore, reach over, and – just like Julieta – grab her face in my hands, pulling her close for a kiss on the cheek.
Debi Lewis' book "Kitchen Medicine: How I Fed My Daughter out of Failure to Thrive" is available for pre-sale now wherever books are sold.