Did you put onions in that? Every time I am asked this question by one of our girls, I can just feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

While making tuna salad the other day, my daughter asked the question that just curls my hair, so to speak. "Did you put onions in that?" My reply is "Its tuna salad, it's supposed to have onions in it but no, I did not put onions in it. I chopped onions and put them in a side dish so that normal people can add them to their salad." Why do I do this? I'm tired of fighting it. Our children are strange. The eating habits of our girls gets stranger every year they are alive and I'm not sure why.

The oldest girl claims she does not eat cheese. Of course, this is relative. She orders double cheese on pizza and eats macaroni and cheese (from the powder) in the box. She will not eat the kind of macaroni and cheese with Velveeta or any other non-powdered form of macaroni and cheese products. She eats an abnormal amount of Parmesan on spaghetti noodles, often only with butter. However, she does not eat cheese according to her. She also does not eat any kind of fish but has no problem eating up to 5 lbs. of steak at one sitting. When ordering how she wants her steak cooked she proudly declares "just run it through a warm room and put it on a plate." I blame her grandfather for that one. I am vegetarian. She tells us that cheese is just "gross." Eating 5 lbs. of bleeding cow, however, is not. Someone explain this to me please.

The younger daughter eats cheese - all the time to the tune of about 4 lbs. a week, but to make life more exciting she is allergic to dairy so now it must be the more expensive cheese substitute along with medication for lactose intolerance because she sneaks the real stuff whenever she can. She claims I overreact to this problem. I mean after all it only affects her breathing. Who needs to do that? Each time I try to explain that this is a health situation that will not go away; she says with defiance "they have pills for that now." Her exception to the cheese addiction is that she does not eat cheesy soups. She eats cauliflower; she eats cheese on cauliflower, but does not eat cheesy cauliflower soup! As I said previously, she does not eat onions but this too is relative. She eats grilled onions, fried onions, boo coo garlic, onions in Italian sauces, onions in burritos or raw on Mexican food or on a hamburger and just loves onions in fried potatoes. As a matter of fact, if you throw onions in a frying pan she will awaken out of a sound sleep to find out what you are cooking but she does not eat onions. She also loves potatoes too - baked, fried, scalloped, every way but.... mashed! I have never met anyone who did not like mashed potatoes, what's not to like?

Now, I realize that you can't please everyone, but for heaven's sake! Why don't they make sense? My husband clings to the notion that they will grow out of all this. The elder girl is almost 19 and the younger almost 15. I believe my husband has lived in a fantasy world for at least the last six years ever since he met the eldest daughter's first boyfriend. So, I take little stock in his predictions.

For some reason these peculiar-eating habits only affects our girls, the boy is fine; he'll eat just about anything. He is the eldest. We should've stopped with him.

Learn more about this author, Martha Rhodes.
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