There's this thing that happens to girls around the age of thirteen, wherein life starts to hurt. Noises are too loud (especially your mother's laugh, especially in public), lights are too bright (especially at school, where they make it easier for everyone to see your red, exploding forehead), and silences seem too deep ("where is everyone? why isn't the phone ringing? are all my friends somewhere without me? yes."). This phase hit me particularly hard right around seventh grade, and I spent the next two years walking around like some sort of person-sized open wound, having screaming fights with my friends and my mother (especially my mother) over mostly imagined slights. When I think of this period now, I associate it mostly with slammed doors and missed meals. Up to that point, I'd never been a picky kid. I ate everything, as much of it as I could, as often as I could. Suddenly I could taste food in parts, first as its texture-fatty, dry, salty, grainy, slimy or cakey--then temperature, then flavor. I felt assaulted by everything I ate, so I limited by diet to pancakes, scrambled eggs and breakfast potatoes for far longer than was probably healthy. Although most of this chaos is behind me now, two of the foods I'd liked perfectly well until I was in middle school remain my mortal enemies to this day. One is mayonnaise--I can't even type the word without choking a little bit--and the other is shredded coconut. Something about those dangling strands, and their affiliation with oozy, sticky wedges of German Chocolate Cake.... A few years ago I found out that my mom feels the same way. "I can eat fresh coconut fine," she told me. "And the flavor's not the problem. It's just...the way it feels." I hadn't known this about her, and finding it out thrilled me a little bit. It seems fated, somehow, that even in those years when I was trying to get as far away from my mother as I could, I was still drawing her close.