So frail, and yet so angry. She was down to 90 lb at 5’4″. I had a cousin with anorexia. It was her way of exerting authority in a life she felt was beyond her control.

It was scary to see her formerly athletic frame hunched and saggy, as she struggled to close jeans over a distended belly that she perceived to be fat.

I get it. When life spins and spins, when everyone is telling you what to do, the one thing you can undeniably control is what you put in your mouth.

When I got to college I became friends with many girls who had formerly suffered from eating disorders, and some guys who still suffered with them. As a parent, I feel for their parents.

When kids feel cornered they want to feel empowered. Even if their parents were acting with the best intentions, even if they were doing everything right, it’s the kid’s perception that matters. The three disorders I saw were anorexia, bulemia, and severe picky eating – literally eating 5 foods total. Not food groups. Foods. Like french fries and not baked potatoes.

I always wanted to be on the lookout for any signs of power struggles and see how we could address them. I figure my job as a parent is to help them make the right decisions for themselves, not make the decisions for them. Sometimes they fail. It sucks. It will affect them for years, but I cannot spoon-feed life to them.

I recently noticed Veronica skipping breakfast. She didn’t like what I serve (startup oatmeal) and knew she wasn’t allowed to just grab a bowl of cereal.

A little backstory on the epic oatmeal

Veronica decided a few months ago that she would no longer eat steel cut oats. She didn’t like them and simply wouldn’t eat. I recognized a power struggle in the making.

So, we made a little deal. She can bake herself scones, muffins whatever to have for breakfast, but she must eat breakfast every day. She cannot, however, skip meals.

She’s been pretty good about it, and generous with baked delectables. This week, she forgot to bake, so she tried to get away with just having yogurt. Her older brother made merciless fun of her. I told him to back off. Boys and dads do not understand the need to give us girls our space.

While I let it go for a couple of days, I didn’t want this to become a habit. She is now making herself smoothies each day if she doesn’t have any baked goods.

I’m not sure what most people consider a smoothie, so here’s what flies in my house:

• banana
• some sort of berries
• plain yogurt or plain yogurt drink
• kale (if I’m the one making it)
• brewers yeast (if I’m the one making it)
• crushed ice

We’ve been making homemade ice cream for over a year. Super delicious and healthy. Ok, maybe not healthy, but I can pronounce all the ingredients.

The downside to homemade ice cream is all the leftover egg whites. Before you read much further, you should know there’s some serious girl talk below.

Each batch of ice cream uses 8 egg yolks. So, Veronica and I decided that we have to make angel food cake for each 1.5 times we make ice cream. Hint: angel food cake uses lots of egg whites.

This week, we also somehow had some leftover yolks and a ton of lemons. Some quick googling determined that we also needed to make lemon curd to pour over our angel food cake.

We had no idea exactly how many egg whites were in the unlabelled tupperware shoved at the back of the fridge. Veronica developed a new scientific method I’ll call egg-white-metrology.

If you don’t whip the egg whites first, you can gloup them into a bowl one at a time. They will slurp out in a clump, one at a time.

“Why are egg whites gloupy?” Cue the biology lesson.

I figured, she’s now 12 and has already had “the talk”. It’s time to talk about ovulation and mucus.

We discussed about how women can know the time of month that they are fertile, and the physical signs of ovulation. In fertility books, it literally says when your mucus is the consistency of egg white that you are most fertile.

We also discussed a bit about the emotional signs of ovulation. “This is the time of month when Momma is most joyful and patient. When everything seems to be going fantastic in the universe. When I’m not bothered as much by the annoying sounds your younger brother makes.”

And then we moved on to the discussion of how science can hide these signs. Artificial birth control evens out the cycle a bit. The highs and lows of the month are more level. Since she’s already studied a bit of trigonometry, I explained that without birth control, it’s like your emotional roller coaster wave has a higher amplitude. With birth control, there can be a lower amplitude, or worse, similar amplitude, but the whole wave may be translated lower on the axes – meaning both lower lows and lower highs than you would have had naturally.

The physical signs are different as well. Your body doesn’t produce the same mucus. It is biologically tricked into thinking it’s at a different time in the cycle.

Just as quickly, we moved from trigonometry into algebra. It was time to make the lemon curd.

We needed 4 egg yolks and 3 whole eggs. We had 3 eggs yolks and an egg white. So she figured two whole eggs and two egg yolks would get us there. Here is the recipe I used, but with 1/2 cup of sugar, rather than 3/4 cup. We like our food tart.

Tempering your emotions and your eggs.

When making lemon curd, you get to do lots of whisking. Some people look at this as a chore. I choose to view it as the only time my arms get a workout. It’s only my right arm, but I’ll take it.

The lemon curd was fantastic atop the angel food cake, but it was really the talk that made the time valuable.

Next up… combating anorexia through cooking.

It all started out of frustration. She didn’t like me any more. I sure didn’t like her. How did we get to this place?

Veronica and I had been so close. Lately my eldest ginger daughter was clearly annoyed by my existence. I know moms can have that effect on their 11 year olds, but it’s shocking when you receive the eye-roll.

Out of desperation, I started googling every book I could find on how to live under roof and still communicate. Anyone who naively thinks that kids needs less attention as they get older is just ignorant.

If kids don’t trust you, they are going to look someplace else for that trust relationship. Do you know your kids well enough to even know where they’ll turn? It’s not that most of us are untrustworthy as parents. It’s just that they have to feel it in their hearts. They have to want to talk to us at all, let alone spend time with us. Veronica and I seemed to have lost that.

I had read a pretty good book by Danna Gresh on raising boys, so I looked into her programs for girls. Yes, I admit, Amazon immediately got somewhere between $50 and $75 out of me for everything Danna wrote. I was desperate.

The books offered some good insight, as did the 5 Love Languages of a Teenager book by Gary Chapman. But a lot of it just wasn’t us. I couldn’t translate it to our relationship.

I work full time and homeschool. It’s like 2 full time jobs. I have 7 kids, each with their own emotional and physical needs.

The Love Languages book helped me to feel empathy, and ride out some of the emotional rollercoasters with more patience. But the conduct permitted in his examples just wouldn’t ever fly in my home.

I’m not in a financial position to give my kid money to go to the mall. I started working at 12, as did my husband, as have my kids. If they want to buy something, they usually have to pay for it themselves and find a way to get to the store. And the amount of backtalk he allowed made me cringe.

The Danna Gresh books are really helpful, but I constantly felt myself letting Veronica down. We talked about these 8 Great Mom-Daughter dates, but Veronica eventually asked me to be more realistic. With my schedule, I just don’t have time to spend 2-3 hours with her alone outside the house, much as I may want to.

Also, the mp3s included with the book are just not my daughter’s style. They’re fun and girly, but in a different way than she likes.

So, the wall between us remained up for a while, with me feeling guilty, although Veronica really liked that I was trying. We did the first date, but I never was able to schedule in the second.

Then my daughter had a brilliant suggestion. “I love to cook and bake. You love to cook and bake, and know how to do a lot of it better than I do. Can we bake together for a couple of hours of week and you can teach me?”

She’s a genius.

Truth be told, she’s a far better baker than me. I never bother sifting or bringing eggs to room temperature. She has a natural gift. She makes up recipes from scratch and they come out perfect. I was never able to do that.

But together we endeavor to learn from each other, and create yum yums for everyone else. Much like her Momma, she doesn’t really like to eat the baked goods. We both enjoy the challenge of making them. So any recipes you find here have usually been altered to have far less sugar. We like the savory kind of life.

I’ll keep you posted on our savory and sweet concoctions. Next post will be lemon curd with a side of mathematics and birth control.