Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (26 page)

S
everal years after our ill-fated Lemon Drop shot at Maarten's, Kristen was still my best friend, her now husband, Bob, was no longer a fireman, and Keira—their daughter—was approaching her first birthday. There was talk of cake. Not any old birthday cake, but a cake in the shape of a ladybug, spiked in pink and brown frosting (more appetizing than red and black), complete with Twizzler legs and antennae, and Hershey's Kisses pressed tip-down into the yellow cake to provide ladybug spots. In fact, make that two cakes. One for the party guests, and one custom-sized for Keira.

On the day of the celebration, I was running late—as always, underestimating the slog of traffic from my downtown D.C. apartment to their house in the suburbs. Every few minutes, I checked the clock, groaned, and patted the bright bag
on the passenger seat. Maybe the set of mirrored, bejangled building blocks I'd bought as a gift would be my ticket to forgiveness.

When I finally walked in, more than an hour into the party, I wasn't surprised to find a full and well-decorated house. Somewhere in between hemming the dresses of her own bridesmaids and remodeling her kitchen from scratch, Kristen had become the Martha Stewart of our group of high school friends. (Not the saccharine Martha, either; the sarcastic, fun, post-penitentiary Martha.) The dining room table was arrayed with homemade punch,
1st Birthday
napkins, sandwiches, and skewers of chicken satay. I smiled, noticing every sauce and dressing was set on the side. Sandra-friendly.

“Hey there,” Kristen said as I put my bags down. I hadn't fully adjusted to viewing Kristen in mom mode. I still saw the fourteen-year-old who painted daisies on her toenails with three different shades of polish. Today her nails were gunmetal silver, a yelp of freedom paired with an otherwise practical gray T-shirt, jeans, and bobbed hairstyle. She was leaning down to catch Keira, who lurched across the living room with the manic gait of a new walker. Keira let out a profound squawk of protest as Kristen scooped her up a few feet shy of reaching her destined play set.

“She's a little overwhelmed,” Kristen said. “She had a low fever all morning. And it's a lot of people.”

Keira's ladybug shoes matched her ladybug cakes. The ladybugs on her T-shirt were so cartoonishly round that they resembled polka dots, and I felt a wave of nostalgia. Just a few days earlier, my mother had reminded me that on my first birthday—the day when, as my mother always notes, I went
in for my first allergy appointment—I had been wearing a pink-polka-dot dress.

Kristen sent one of her in-laws down to round up the men drinking beer in the basement, and I worried with a twinge that she had been waiting on my arrival to cut the cake. That was an exercise in futility, since I could not eat the cake, nor the Neapolitan ice cream, nor the individual chocolate crisps in their pink foil cups. But maybe Kristen knew I'd want to witness the big moment.

“Those are some amazing ladybugs,” I told her.

“The black licorice turned out to be on the stale side,” she said. “So that's for decoration only. Otherwise, so far, so good.”

At every child's birthday party I have attended, the same truth emerges: a cranky one-year-old does not treasure being stuck in a high chair, surrounded by two dozen vaguely recognizable blobs of adulthood. Nor does she want a special hat, decorated with paper fringe, strapped onto her head with an elastic band. Nor does she want to be serenaded with “Happy Birthday.” Yet this is what we did, because it is what is done at birthday parties. The crying erupted. The hat came off. Kristen offered up the ultimate birthday throne of a mama's lap, and finally—with Keira calmed down, and the offending licorice set to the side—we were ready for cake.

As the grown-ups passed around slices of the big ladybug, Keira stared at the tinfoil platter that held her mini version, dotted to scale with chocolate chips instead of Hershey's Kisses, and frosted with two wide eyes and a pink grin. Kristen placed a chunk of cake in the baby's grasp and waited. Instead of eating, Keira brought up the icing-rich fingers of her left hand to her face with a
Why me?
flourish. Gobs of pink soon coated her
cheek, forehead, and hairline. She rubbed at her mouth, leaving behind streaks of what looked like dollar-store lipstick.

“Good thing you took photos beforehand,” one of the guys said.

We kept waiting for Keira's triumphant bite of cake, but it never came. She just played with it. The women ate twice as enthusiastically, trying to make up for the birthday girl's apparent hunger strike. The men drifted back downstairs to where their beers were waiting. Kristen bounced Keira on her knees, then stood up and began pacing as the baby grew increasingly agitated, fussing again and again at her ears with her grimy fists. They went upstairs, we figured for a diaper change. When they came back down, I was surprised that she hadn't wiped the frosting off Keira's face.

“I think she's having an allergic reaction,” Kristen said, looking at me. The pink on Keira's face wasn't frosting; it was hives that had come up underneath the frosting. This had never happened to her before. It wasn't only hives. Leaning in, Kristen had been able to hear her daughter wheezing for breath. One phone-call consult later, Bob and Kristen were getting ready to take Keira to the hospital. They draped her in a coat, rather than taking the time to work her arms through the sleeves, and scooted out into January's cold.

“It'll be fine,” I'd said to them. “You go. We'll clean.” It was a promise I meant but couldn't actually keep. The dining room table was covered in things I couldn't touch without breaking into hives of my own. Melted ice cream pooled on the dirty plates. I did a quick round of cup-and-napkin duty. Then I stood by helplessly as Bob's mother, sponge in hand, directed the clearing off, washing out, and stacking up.

“You're the one with all the allergies,” one of Kristen's friends said to me. “What happened?”

“It had to have been the cake,” I said. “But I know they've tried dairy before.”

“Why does it have to have been the cake?” said Bob's mother. “She tried a lot of things today. It could have been the punch.”

“Oh, I don't think so,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully. “None of the fruits in the punch are common allergens.”

“It had mango in it,” she said.

“No it didn't,” I said. I'd asked Kristen if it was safe, and she'd said it was. If it had had mango, I'd have been on the floor. (Later, she'd confirm: orange, pomegranate, ginger ale. No mango.) “Besides, it wasn't so much her mouth. The hives were on her face, where she'd spread the frosting. Maybe the food dye?”

“I don't know,” Bob's mother said. “Jon had this reaction to shellfish once, and the hives showed up all over.”

“Yeah, but hives in the exact same shape as the frosting? I bet it's the dye.”

I wanted to be right about the icing, but not for the sake of contradicting Bob's mom. Not exclusively. Intolerance to Red Dye #40 seemed better than any of the alternatives of allergy to wheat, milk, or egg. But no matter what, a reaction of such intensity, with primarily topical exposure and at a young age, was a bad sign.

One hour, one IV, one round of Benadryl, one dose of steroids, and one pacifier later, Keira was almost back to normal. But her parents would soon learn that her version of normal
includes an allergy to egg. This diagnosis would eventually broaden to include what their doctor called the “holy trifecta”—allergy, asthma, and eczema. Within a few months of changes in diet and nightly nebulizer treatments, their once often-fussy toddler had transformed into a happy, goofy little girl.

Given the statistics, I knew at least one of the children born to my friends was going to exhibit food allergies. I just wasn't expecting to be on hand for the big debut. On the way home from the party, I had called my mother and rehashed the whole debacle, right down to the polka-dot déjà vu.

“I felt like, somehow, with all my experience, I should have been able to
do
something,” I told her. “There was nothing I could do.”

“It's an awful feeling,” my mother said. “I know.”

At least Keira has come into a world where allergic reactions are recognized within minutes. I try to imagine what it must have been like for my mother, not knowing why I refused her breast, each bottle of milk and then Similac making me sicker. There is no bond that comes easier to mother and child than the act of cradling and feeding, except when what you're feeding your child is actually killing her.

In the weeks after Keira's birthday party, I found myself wondering what would happen when it was my turn. My mother had been unable to get me or my sister to breast-feed for any length of time. Could I convince my child to breast-feed? While there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that the predisposition toward food allergies is inherited, there's no model for specific allergies being passed down a family line. Odds are that my children will not share my allergy to cow's milk. If I can't breast-feed, how do I handle a bottle filled with something that
could put me into anaphylactic shock? Every round of spit-up, every spill, is a recipe for disaster.

Later, when my children advance to solid foods, a whole other set of questions will come to the table. Do I limit my kids to my diet, for the sake of a safer household? How do I prepare them for the inevitable days when they make me sick? “Don't touch Mommy until you've washed up”: that's got to be the prescription for a high-strung child.

One of my favorite movies is
Steel Magnolias
. It came out when I was nine, and I've probably seen it two dozen times, if not more. Part of my love is fueled by its strange caricatures of Southern culture: Drum hacking the ass off the armadillo groom's cake to reveal its bloodred interior, or Annelle solemnly informing Dolly Parton's character, “Miss Truvy, I promise that my personal tragedy will not interfere with my ability to do good hair.”

There's also one scene that haunts me. Shelby, the character with diabetes played by Julia Roberts, collapses on her front porch while alone and caring for her young son, Jackson Jr. She goes to call for help and crumples again. Her husband comes home to find his son wailing, the spaghetti boiling over on the stove, and his wife sprawled on the steps, unconscious, her hand still clutching the phone receiver.

The scene is sentimental Oscar bait, I know. In the real world, tragedy can strike anyone, anytime—aneurysms, strokes—I know. But now, in my thirties, watching those around me begin their families and dreaming of my own, I realize that it's one thing for me to play the odds of this allergic life. It's another to bet the welfare of a child on them.

•  •  •

“You need to talk to my friend Jenny,” Erika says when I confess what has been on my mind. “She's like you.”

Erika isn't kidding. Jennifer Kronovet is only a few years older than me and lives with her husband, Anthony, and her son, Solomon. She is allergic to milk, tree nuts but not peanuts, and sesame seeds—not quite the variety of allergies that I have, but equal in their severity.

“I go into minor anaphylactic shock,” she says with the casual tone I recognize from years of practice. “Even now, having learned to avoid those foods, things happen.”

When her parents sent her to college, they packed a box of infant formula. She liked to eat cereal in the mornings, and before the age of rice-, almond-, and soymilk options, that was all she'd ever used to pour into her bowl. I'm the last person to judge her for this. After all, I was the one they called “fish girl.”

The parallels mount up. When I was getting my birthday hazelnuts, Jennifer was being doled out one of her mother's homemade pumpkin muffins, invariably still frozen rock solid from the elementary school's freezer. She'd have to scrape at it with her teeth until it softened.

“We were trailblazers,” she tells me. Jennifer found comfort, as I did, in having a close group of friends who got to know her allergies. Even today, when she comes over for dinner parties, everything is labeled. “This is the Jenny-safe spoon; this is
not
the Jenny-safe spoon,” her hosts inform her.

“They joke, ‘It's like we're keeping Jenny-kosher,' ” she says.

Her son turned one in April 2010. He is not allergic to milk, and has not yet been tested for nuts or sesame. (Earlier that year, a widespread recall for manufacturing defects effectively cleared child and infant doses of Benadryl, along with Tylenol, Motrin, and Zyrtec, off the U.S. market. That derailed a lot of at-home allergy testing.) But after trying scrambled eggs, he broke out into hives. His oral food challenges with baked egg and egg yolks have gone smoothly, so they're going to try again with egg whites, which are often more allergenic because they contain a higher density of proteins than the yolks. Jennifer is hoping the first reaction will prove to have been a fluke.

“If he's going to have an allergy, it's so frustrating to have it not be the
same
allergy,” she says.

Because her husband, Anthony, is lactose intolerant, their household as a young couple had been virtually dairy free. Then came Solomon.

“I wanted to cut back on our breast-feeding, but kids get used to drinking milk. Soy has issues because of the hormones,” she says; some research indicates the phytoestrogens in soy and tofu may disrupt hormone balance in the body. “Rice milk is so sweet,” she adds. With her options dwindling, Jennifer decided to give cow's milk a try.

She shares my fears about handling the dairy with her bare hands.

“I don't like touching it. But nothing has happened so far.” Besides, there has been an unexpected therapeutic aspect to bringing milk into Sol's life. “Watching him eat dairy is so great for me. It's so much more wide-open for him—he's liberated.”