From the very first time he tried bananas, my son knew he didn’t like them. That 5-month-old ate his first ever bite of food, then closed his mouth to the second bite. We coaxed the sweet, soft fruit in, and he promptly pushed it right back out with his little tongue. He pursed his lips tight as if to say, “That doesn’t belong here! Get it away from me!”
I’d try to sneak bananas into other foods like smoothies or cookies, and convince him to try “just one bite” as if I were some sort of shady fruit peddler hanging around street corners. But he refused again and again. When he learned to speak, he would call out on my sneaky little recipes, “Yucky!” Then it was, “I don’t like bananas, Mom,” when he was a little older.
There are very few fruits I love more than a perfectly ripe banana, so soft and creamy without being mushy. But he knew what he liked and what he didn’t, and in a small way, that broke my heart, because how could we love such different things when we felt like pieces of each other? I housed his tiny body inside of mine for nine months, and then he became an extension of myself, a strong, clingy barnacle that never let go. While it might sound bananas, this fruit taught me a profound lesson—because the same boy who hated bananas would never let us leave the grocery store without bananas.
“Baby, you don’t like bananas,” I’d say, when he said we needed them. “Why do you want to buy them?”
“Because you love bananas, Mom,” he’d say back, while reaching for the yellowest bananas. And so, whether they were on my list or not, bananas wound up in the cart.
The banana shenanigans only took off from there. One evening when he was three, before we started the long commute home from my sister’s house, “whispered” in that loud toddler way that was meant only for me, but the whole room could hear: “Mom, a banana in your purse.”
“What?” we all said as we looked at one another and laughed.
“A banana in your purse,” he insisted.
Sure enough, a quick look in my purse revealed a banana he’d snatched from his aunt’s fruit bowl and hidden in my purse. “In case you get hungry, because you love bananas.”
Even though he didn’t love bananas for himself, he loved them for me and tried to give me a banana at every chance. “Look, Mom, a ‘banana heart,’” he’d say at the grocery store, holding the bananas up in a heart shape, because he knew those bananas meant love on one level or another.
I have two more kids who have their own opinions on bananas. A 2-year-old who can’t get enough of them who also deems bananas a perfect fruit—until he takes a bite and it is “ruined,” then he leaves the “imperfect” banana on the floor to become a squishy trap for unsuspecting feet; and a one-and-a-half-year-old who is happy to eat bananas so long as it is a social thing and someone else is enjoying it with her.
All these babies with the same parents, the same house, but wildly different views on bananas.
They came into this world to be their own people and not little extensions of me. The best I can do is not only to let them become who they want to be but also to help them become the best version of themselves. I’m not going to force bananas on the boy who loves dragonfruit, but I’ll share dragonfruit with him, and my horizons and palette are broader because of him. I’ll go bankrupt buying blueberries for the toddler who can’t get enough of them, even though I don’t like the texture. Add the baby? I’m not entirely sure yet what she’ll love, but I’ll learn to love it too because that’s what parents do: you let your kids become their own people and support them as best you can so they’ll thrive when it’s time to fly.
And if you’re lucky, they’ll appreciate what you love, even if they don’t understand why, just like my boy and bananas.
by Halle Goddard 
by Caroline Murray 
by Suka Nasrallah 
