Unexpected Redemption

I'm a fairly adventurous eater, as has been established in these posts.  But I do have to "draw the line" when it comes to food in a few places.  If you can draw a line in multiple places and still retain the analogy.  Anyway, one of those places is green gelatin.  And banana-flavored popsicles.  I won't touch them.  I was traumatized as a child by green Jell-O and banana popsicles.  "Oh, do tell," I hear you say.  And thus the woeful tale . . .

I was barely seven years old and visiting my biological father two or more thousand miles away from my home over the summer.  I got a huge pain in my stomach while hanging out with another family at a pool.  It was really hot.  And it hurt a lot.  And then I was in a hospital on the nearby military base.  And then I was stranded there for a week recovering from an emergency appendectomy.

I was a skinny kid, which would come as a shock to anyone who has known me lately.  I ate like a fiend nearly anything put in front of me, other than an odd aversion to creamy things like salad dressing, sour cream, whipped cream, and mayonnaise.  This was in part because my father never liked salad dressing and I mistakenly put all of those foods into one category and marked a large red slash through them until I was in college, when I got over it.  I also wouldn't eat olives.  I never had them as a child because my mother didn't care for them so they were strange to me.  I'm cautious of them to this day.

So picture skinny little seven-year-old me in a hospital bed far from home and on a liquid diet.  Broth.  Ew.   Tea.  Ew.  And green Jell-O and banana-flavored popsicles.  For a week that was all I ate--green Jell-O and banana popsicles.  And when I escaped, I vowed never again would I have to eat either one. 

And I kept that vow.  With a religious fervor.  Until yesterday.

My youngest, the bonus baby, Peter Parker, offered me a taste of the green Jell-O she had made and I couldn't bring myself to disappoint her and not taste it.  So I did.  And it was delicious.  And then she showed me that she had substituted organic limeade for water in the recipe.  Brilliant.  I'm over the aversion. 

Don't try me on the banana popsicles.  That's just not going to happen.