By Jennifer Iannolo

Jennifer Iannolo is the Founder & CEO of Zenfully Delicious, a lifestyle company created to empower women with chronic illness to celebrate a life of indulgent wellness. She is also the co-creator of The Gilded Fork, home to the world's first all-food podcast channel.

When thinking about the legacy I want to leave my Rent-a-Kids (i.e., my nieces and nephews), the most important pieces lie in the realm of life skills. At the end of the trail, when I look back, I want to know the wisdom I’ve gained has not been wasted—that because I lived fearlessly and fully, I provided something to enrich the young people who have become such a part of me.
 
My godson is going in for a very important knee surgery. He’s being worked on by the surgeons for the New York Giants, and this is important because he has the potential to pursue a professional, or at least college-level, football career.
 
He was recruited to his high school’s varsity team as a freshman, and has displayed extraordinary talent both athletically and as a leader. It has been a magnificent ride for us all as a family, shouting from the sidelines and making a spectacle of ourselves. (There are a lot of us—we’re hard to miss).
 
When he received the news about needing the surgery, which stemmed from a malformed bone, he was devastated. Everything looked bleak, blank, and hopeless, and this exciting thing he had dedicated himself to seemed to have disappeared in a puff of smoke.
 
As I know this particular story all too well, the first thing I did was get on the phone with him to talk about it. I know that for a teen, everything is magnified, and there is not the wisdom of decades for them to put things into perspective. Life situations are immediate, dramatic, and earth-shaking.
 
So I started talking to him about my own journey—how after 20 years in food and wine, I suddenly couldn’t eat wheat, dairy, and many other foods. I couldn’t travel without making sure my body could handle it. I painted a picture of the kind of devastation that change had wrought on me and made sure he was in my world with me. As he was there at the beginning, when my diet was very restricted, he had a visual reference.
 
Then I asked him to look at where I was now, just a couple of years later. The Aunt Jen he sees now—the one he can pat on the head because she comes up to his chin—is once again traveling the world. Speaking to crowds of people. Cooking holiday dinners for 25 without missing a beat. He sees that I created an entirely new future for myself, simply because I said so. I told him that when life handed me lemons, I didn’t make lemonade. I made lavender-infused lemon sorbet, because that’s how Aunt Jen rolls.
 
So we took that perspective and looked at his situation again. We talked about other potential career moves he could make if his knee didn’t heal properly or if he got badly hurt (which is always a risk). He saw that there were loads of opportunities within the sport of football itself and that a pro career didn’t have to be the only answer.
 
His parents and I collaborate on these types of conversations and decisions, and I’m so incredibly grateful that I get to be a part of them, because it’s always my goal to bring possibility and an objective point of view to everything he does. It gives his parents the space to express their own fears, and we can get those out of the way to create the next set of steps.
 
So we’re sending him to the operating room, but instead of doing so with a sense of dread and hoping he will mentally be okay, I am proud and confident that he has the inner strength to face any kind of outcome. We’ve given him the skill set to do that, and he has taken it on like a superhero. It will serve him for the rest of his life.

Published: January 16, 2013