We live in a much different world than we used to. This is a world where kids are kept close to home and parents call out other parents and, also, everyone and their dog has a food allergy.
It’s become the cool thing to be a kid with allergy. At least according to my kids and their friends.
I’m not trying to make light of a very real danger. I realize that there are many kids with severe allergies who could die if they sniff peanut butter or eggs or shellfish. I realize this is serious.
It’s just that the other day, my 6-year-old came home and said, “Mama, I found out I’m allergic to tomatoes today.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, knowing better. This kid isn’t allergic to anything. None of our kids are. We’re super fortunate to have escaped the misery of food allergies. “How do you know?”
“Well, this girl was sitting next to me eating tomatoes, and I sneezed,” my boy said. His blue eyes looked up at me expectantly. I looked back at him expectantly, thinking surely this wasn’t the end of that story. Lip swelling? Upset stomach? Skin rash, maybe?
Wait. Just a sneeze?
“Maybe you just needed to sneeze,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I’m allergic.” And then he skipped off to tell all his neighborhood friends that he is allergic to tomatoes, blissfully unaware that we’d had tomatoes in our chicken salad last night and he hadn’t died overnight.
This is the same kid who once told our pediatrician that he had a milk allergy. The pediatrician raised his eyebrow in my direction, and I shook my head, and he smiled a little knowing smile, as if all the kids were saying things like that these days. And I wouldn’t put it past them. Maybe it really has become the cool thing to be a kid with allergies, according to the kids who don’t have them. The cool kids get to sit at their own table. The cool kids get to have special lunches and snacks. The cool kids get to have different treats than all the others at the holiday parties.
The cool kids get a little more attention from their teacher, who has to pay more attention to what they’re eating and what they’re touching and whether they’re having an allergic reaction to the marshmallows they used in today’s science experiment (I think I’ll tell the teachers my kids are allergic to marshmallows. I hate marshmallows. They make my kids CRAZY.). Every kid wants his teacher to pay more attention to just him. Attention is love. I get it.
All that can seem like a luxury to kids on the other side.
As much more logical adults, we know there’s nothing cool about having an allergy. We know it’s dangerous and inconvenient and super scary. The kids, well, they think that having an allergy is some kind of “I’m cool” badge, because, at the depths of their hearts, they’re all just looking to be distinct and unique and set apart from the rest of the herd. Or, at the very least, included in the cool kids group.
My 6-year-old has several classmates who have allergies. I don’t envy their parents at all, trust me. But sometimes I wish allergies didn’t even exist so my first grader didn’t come home every other day to tell me that he’s allergic to something else because his leg went numb after he ate it (pretty sure this is because of the way he sits on his legs at the cafeteria table) or because his nose got itchy or because he lost a hair on the back of his head, and he has the evidence to prove it.
Until our kids start understanding that allergies are something that could actually kill a person and that they’re taken very, very seriously, I think we’re probably going to see more and more of this silly phenomenon. I’ve seen it in more than just my kids. When a neighborhood kid comes over, he’s always got an allergy (even though I always check with parents). One kid is pretty insistent that he doesn’t eat carrots or celery or broccoli or cucumbers or beets or cauliflower, because he’s allergic to them all (guess he’ll go hungry at our house). Right now, to all these kids who don’t have them, allergies seem like a desirable thing—just like having glasses can seem like a desirable thing until you’re the kid who can’t see two feet in front of your face and your parents slap on you some ugly purple frames that reach all the way to your jawline and you have to wear them every day because you just realized the world is full of color and, later, you’ll try to hide all those pictures of your massive purple glasses from the man who’s just asked you to marry you, because, of course, he can never, ever, ever see you like that (I know what it’s like to be the un-cool kid. Thanks, Mom.).
So I’ve tried explaining to my son that having an allergy is no small thing, that it’s actually a really big deal, that we can’t just play around with those words, “I have an allergy,” because there are people who could actually die if they eat what they’re allergic to, but all he said was, “Well, my legs hurt when I eat salad. Maybe I’m allergic to lettuce.”
Well. He’s still young. I’ll wait until he’s old enough to spell “asphyxiation” before I try again.
Which means I might be waiting forever, because spell check just helped me out.
