Gluten Guilt Trips

October 25th, 2008 by admin

Jamie has been on a gluten free diet for four months now. My kitchen is as ‘gluten kosher’ as possible: I check labels continually, I haven’t used ‘normal flour’ since the summer and I make every effort to make sure he has a completely gluten free diet.

But sometimes he still gets stomach aches.

Not as semi-permenantly as he did before. They used to be daily and now they are unusual, but he does get them and sometimes they’re really bad. And often I haven’t a clue why it has happened and how he could possibly have had gluten. It is so easy as a Mom to go on a guilt trip when it happens, and feel that I have failed him by allowing him to be ‘contaminated’. Did I use the wrong tub of margarine for his lunch? Was there a label I didn’t read properly? Should I have let him go out for tea?

In actual fact, I’ve done my best and I am learning slowly that it’s not always my fault.

Someone very kindly baked a ‘gluten free’ pudding for Jamie when he went for tea the other day but he was in agony the day after. I suspect that although she probably used gluten free flour in the pudding, the utensils she’d used, or the pan it was baked in had been used for gluten-baking before.

So what do I do? Not allow him out? Not trust the people who are being kind? As the dietician at the paediatric hospital said when we started, ‘Mistakes will happen. Don’t beat yourself up over it.’

So I do everything I can do as carefully as I can do it. I trust the people I need to trust him to when he is out of my immediate care. I take risks in giving him some independance and trusting him to make sensible choices.

Sounds like the whole parenting deal really.