As my (max 12) readers know, this blog started out as a place to vent my frustrations and share my experiences navigating the world as a parent of a kid with multiple food allergies. “Crying Over Spilt Milk” felt like a clever and convenient pun because the bane of our allergy world existence is the dairy allergy. It’s pervasive and a pain the ass.
But in the last few months, the meaning of the blog title has shifted for my family and I. Shit has gone down. The world has toppled over sideways and we find ourselves in a parallel dimension that overlaps our previous life from time to time, but will never really run the same course again.
I debated about keeping the blog alive. I’d already gotten a little lazy about posting, but had heaps of ideas to discuss: I wanted to write about life in a zombie apocalypse with food allergies (pros and cons). I wanted to lament the fact that my daughter will have to bring her own snack bag when she gets drunk with her friends as a teenager (no late night poutine for you…cooler bags are cool at the club, right?). I wanted to humble brag about all my work-arounds as she moved into the world of kindergarten, and bitch about the false solutions that are offered to allergy kids in the public school world (clearly I have some anxiety building up about this).
I might still do those things, but for the time being, it all seems pretty frivolous and fluffy, which isn’t bad…just not where we are at the moment.
At the end of March, my daughter, then 2.5 years old, seemed to come down with a bug that got worse over a week or so. She threw up one morning, then she was fine for the rest of the day, just a little lethargic. Then she was tired and head-achey and whiney. Then she got wobbly. Then her hand began to shake. A trip to the ER and an assumption that I’d be sent home as a paranoid mom later, and we were on a wild, no fun roller coaster that included the diagnosis of a sizeable brain tumor, debulking surgery (to identify and remove as much of the “mass” as possible), a post-surgery stroke, paralysis on her right side, a permanent shunt to treat hydrocephalus, and now, the start of a long but pretty remarkable rehabilitation crusade. Plus…multiple food allergies. Like I said…world toppled over…parallel dimension…all that.
Clearly, I’ve over simplified things there, but that’s the trailer. We’re still living the series.
“Crying Over Spilt Milk” has come to mean something different to me in the last few months. It’s not a clever pun. It’s an idiom that sums up how our family is trying to cope with the way our lives have changed as a result of all this. Shit happens. Shit happens to good people. Shit happens to little kids. Shit happens that you cannot prepare for and for which you cannot assign blame. Crying over spilt milk is not only OK, it’s necessary. It doesn’t change anything, but you should definitely NOT not cry over it. Crying over spilt milk helps you accept what has happened and let go of what was in that glass. It’s gone…you’re not going to fill it up with the same milk (because who knows what was on that counter…that shit is messy). You just have to figure out what you’re going to refill it with.
This blog, from this point on, is about that.
Crying Over Spilt Milk 
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