The baby is on a food strike.

It's not unusual right now for our almost-two-year-old Leo's daily intake to include one cheese stick, a half-cup of yogurt, and the dribble of water he sucks out of the Aqua Doodle pen. That's all he might eat in an entire day, and at least once, the half-cup of yogurt he "consumed" was sort of forced down the hatch. I've worried all week long; I can't help it--even as I know deep down there's really nothing I can do about it. If the child won't eat, I can't make him eat. Still I spend an incalculable amount of my time trying to get myself to believe this little fact.

With my first son, I remember freaking out over the food strikes too--as well as a lot of other stuff. I'm a bit of a control freak (there, I said it), and the powerlessness I felt in the first months of motherhood was mentally debilitating. You can't make babies sleep (not even with the best lullaby), you can't make babies feel content (not even by bouncing and swaying all night long), and you can't make babies eat if they don't want to (no matter how organic, sustainable, and mostly cruelty-free your breast milk). There is no formula. No tried-and-true remedy. There is only surviving any way you can.

I have had to learn to let go a lot as a parent. My once organized house is in a constant state of disarray. I now know and accept that I will be interrupted approximately five million times every hour that I'm working at home with the kids. I'm learning to pick my battles more than anything else and trying really hard to let my boys just be. When Leo stopped eating, since I've been through this before, I waited at least four days before I googled "my kid won't eat." For once, thankfully, the Internet was kind and gently reminded me that food strikes are normal for many healthy children. For a few more days, thankfully, I remained calm and collected and our family went on preparing and consuming mostly healthy, mediocre meals from the contents of our fantastic weekly CSA box.

Except for Leo. Who still wasn't eating.

On good days, I stood over him like a complete basket case, showing Leo his food and tasting it, saying, "Good. Mmmm. It's so good, Leo. Look at Mama. Yummmmm. Mmmmm. Gooood." On bad days, I imagined tying him to a board, prying his mouth open and forcing sweet potatoes down his throat. "And you're going to like it," I'd say before launching the first spoonful into his stuck-open mouth. Fortunately for Leo, I know from experience that strong-arm feeding doesn't work. As a child, I sat countless hours alone at the dinner table in front of a plate of either uneaten tomatoes or uneaten green beans, two foods I'm still trying to make myself like. Occasionally, my parents did find ways to make me eat them, but they could never make me like them.

Control issues rising quickly to the surface by the end of a fairly foodless week, I had to come up with a way to deal with the fact that I am powerless over Leo's anti-food campaign.

"Are you going to eat your pears, Leo?" I ask him.

"They're from the fa-aa-rm," my five-year old Clyde adds, using "farm" the way some kids would say "with sprinkles."

"No!" Leo says loudly and clearly--a word that's still pretty new too and almost still sounds cute coming from his pouty little mouth.

"Fine then," I say before the pangs of frustration begin to fester, and I scoop the pears off his plate and eat them myself.

Yes, this is the motto that is getting me through parental powerlessness these days. I call it the "Save Yourself!" strategy. In the early months of new motherhood, I always felt like I had to do something: fix it, settle it, straighten it out. Even if I couldn't make the baby do what I wanted him to do, I had to take some action in order to feel better about things. I couldn't just sit there and let it be.

Now I understand a little more that all I can really do is try my best, take care of myself (in-line with the long-lived airline mantra about oxygen masks: yours first, or you'll be useless for saving anyone else), and keep up the energy to get back in the ring for the next round of random caretaking requirements.

When I first talked to my husband about my new idea, he rather liked having these bolder, more surefire words to live by. My husband, gifted at birth with being overly obliging, pointed out the way this motto could lift a child up--particularly the kind of child he was: one destined to end up at the back of the line.

"God knows I'd starve if there were suddenly some sort of a food rationing," he said. "I'd let everyone go ahead of me until I just wasted away to nothing."

We agreed this old/new concept could help us all--even our oldest--learn to better care for ourselves so that we might be more useful to others. Clyde, taking cues from his wonderfully considerate father as well as the compulsory responsibility endowed him by his birth order, tends to be a pleaser. We urged him to use the new "Save Yourself!" self-care model when his little brother tries to take a bite out of him.

"At all costs, save yourself," I say to him, knowing "at all costs" still means a fairly timid self-defense move from Clyde. And obviously, more than anything, we believe that our children can continue to employ, along with the "Save Yourself!" mentality, all the other important lessons and characteristics we have taught them. Patience. Politeness. Generosity. They can all work together . . . in a perfect world.

Leo pounds at the door to my office screaming dramatically as I write this. He is shrieking as if his perfectly capable father on the other side of the door is beating him instead of offering him some melon. "Go eat your melon," I say, keeping my eyes on my computer.

He doesn't want to eat. He wants his mom. I sit and ponder the moment in the future when he won't want me anymore, the moment he'll utter "I h-aaa-te you!" with all the bitter resentment of a typical teenager. I think about the ways in which I will implement our motto then. "Save yourself!" I'll flutter as I quickly escape to a movie theater, leaving the madness of badly behaving teens to the badly behaving teens.

"Mo-oo-mmy!" Leo wails, his little face obviously pressed to the floor so he can see me through the tiny crack beneath the door.

I swivel my chair and bolt for the door, "I'll save you, Leo. I'll save you!"

"Can mama feed you some melon, little boy?" I ask, whisking him up into my arms. I let my practice of the new concept slip away as quickly as peas off a fork.

"No-oo-oo!" he drones. And even though I know what's right--letting him be--I still think this time, I can change his mind.

In another weak moment during another fairly foodless meal, both boys' carrots sat uneaten and the new motto once again tumbled away.

"You just don't eat enough fruits or vegetables, and that's my problem!"

"No, mom. Actually, it's only my problem," Clyde said, looking me right in the eye.

Wow, I thought, taking in the manifestation of the motto through my son's simple and truthful response. Of course, I also never meant for it to be used to outsmart me. Still, I was proud. Individually, we might not be able to do this perfectly, but together, I thought, we may have a chance. It's not all up to me.

A few days ago, after we finished our lunches, Clyde and I let loose on Leo's untouched plate.

"Save yourself!" we both said, giggling as we dropped fingertips full of quartered grapes into our mouths.

Suddenly Leo reached for one himself, put it in his mouth, and said, "Goot, Mommy! Goot," another new word and a huge moment for celebration. The boy ate something. And it was his very own idea.