How Did We Get to This?

I’m at Chick-Fil-A looking at 4 chicken nuggets and an ice cream dish.  I bought this for Naomi.   I swore I would never be a mother that bought this kind of junk for her kid.  But here I am.  How did we get to this? I didn’t start out this way.  Naomi had never even had a dairy product until she was about 5. We had a pretty clean diet right up to the time of her diagnosis when we immediately started on a gluten free diet;(we were already eating dairy free.)  3 years later, when we didn’t see results, we went to the specific Carbohydrate diet.  She was eating almost nothing but nuts, eggs and fruit.   I was up at all hours of the night making things from what seemed like a very limited list of ingredients.  Still, 7 months later we didn’t see progress.  A friend of mine said.  “If you’re not seeing progress, why don’t you stop?”  I didn’t have a good answer, so we stopped.  At first, we still kept Naomi on a healthy diet.  When she had the never ending impulse to go out, we went to Smoothie Café.   I spent lots of money on smoothies from which she never took more than a few sips. That wasn’t the point.  We were renting space and the food was healthier than average.  And then I guess I got tired.  When there was a pizza party at school, I didn’t want her to miss out.  When she came home saying “chicken nuggets,”  I figured I’d let her experience them first hand.  When the grocery store was selling leftover Easter candy cheaply, I bought some for her and for me, because it had been a long day and chocolate is my drug of choice.  How quickly Naomi took to junk food!  How weak I became at telling her “No!” We still include good food in her diet.  She has asparagus, salad and organic fruit. We manage to stay away from skittles and M&M’s and pop.  The pepperoni on her pizza is free of BHA and BHT.  But she does eat pizza and ice cream and chicken nuggets.  Sometimes, I look at what she is eating and I think “How did we get to this?” and I’m disappointed in myself.  I’m disappointed that I’ve lost my stamina.  I’ve become another mom that buys her kid junk food. I look at another special diet to help kids with autism –grain free, yeast free, free of all processed foods - and I think “This will kill me before it helps her.”  Even if I had the will power to resist her protests, I don’t know how I’d find the time to cook everything from scratch.  In the end, I guess I lost my faith that diets will really work for Naomi since we’ve put a lot of time and energy into a couple with no success.  Although I know it is always better to eat healthy, I don’t see a difference in Naomi’s behavior or progress in relation to her diet.    I feel guilty for not trying harder and I may get the motivation to try another diet some day.  But for right now, I’ll just let Naomi finish the chicken nuggets and ice cream while I swallow the guilt.