Eating

Every morning when I wake up, I have a few beautiful moments free of both hunger and nausea. I rest and listen to see if the baby is awake. (It's a listening of body for body, not of the ear for sound.) She usually is, my wiggle baby wiggling to greet the dawn, which maybe she senses, although she can't tell the room is lightening. Then, suddenly, the hunger comes: I am starving.

And every morning I try to think what I can eat that won't make me nauseous.

With this round of morning sickness, which really is relegated to the mornings, I feel like an anthropologist studying myself and the queasiness. I take a lot of mental notes: Cinnamon Toast Crunch is delicious but seems hard to digest. Blueberry pancakes are perfect for a few days, then out the the question. I baked banana bread two weeks in a row and had that with a glass of milk for awhile. Scrambled eggs are okay but only after I've been up for awhile, so they won't do for Breakfast One, which must occur within 15 minutes of waking. Oatmeal is tolerable, but an ordeal to make so early. Today, thinking the combination of protein and whole grain might be good, I had peanut butter on toast with a cup of milk. So far so good...

The relationship of pregnancy to eating is fascinating; more books should be written about it. There is a hunger that is unique to pregnancy, deep, gnawing, bottomless. There is is the fact that pregnant women often find themselves hating food they normally love, devouring food they wouldn't have touched before they were pregnant. I personally always imagined myself eating a healthy diet of all-organic fruits and veggies when pregnant, and I've eaten more McDonald's cheeseburgers in the past month that I had at least 10 or more years before I was pregnant. Of course, I wasn't eating much meat or at McDonald's as a rule, but still. And I can't tolerate some of my and Dean's favorite pre-pregnancy meals (insert elegy to tofu soft tacos here). There are women who, possibly due to anemia, crave ice, paint chips, clay. And always there is the fact, if not a current prominent worry at least in the back of your mind, that what you eat the baby eats, that your baby is literally being made of the food you just or are about to put into your mouth.

The wiggle baby must be at least 25% Bryer's vanilla ice cream.

The book What to Expect When You're Expecting, which I personally do not like, lays out a whole diet for pregnant women. It's called something like "the best chances diet," and it promotes the diet by saying, "You only have nine months to give your baby the best start possible. Make every single bite count."

That may have been the point at which I put that book aside for good. (I may have been eating Doritos at the time.) Pregnancy, and of course motherhood, involves a certain amount of self-sacrifice, but come on now. Every bite? Follow that advice, and you're setting yourself up for nine months of extreme guilt and worry.

I do wish, though, that I had more options for healthy lunches at work. If I want to follow my doctor's advice to eat more red meat as part of lunch at UMD, my options are, literally, McDonald's or the beef and broccoli at the Chinese fast food buffet. It's too bad someone doesn't start a fast food chain with hormone-free, free range beef (and chicken and potatoes and etc. (Gotta have those free range potatoes...)).

If you charted my eating habits by healthiness, the line would go dramatically up and down. Whole grain toast and organic milk--up for healthy! McDonald's value meal number 3--down for NOT so healthy! Organic cherries, plums and blueberries--up! Bag of Doritos--down! Lentils and rice--up! And then of course the last meal of the day, the vanilla ice cream. Here we have some middle ground. I consider the ice cream healthy because of the calcium, and because I need it to fall asleep without getting hungry, but of course there is the sugar.

And finally, there are the random cravings, the urges, the "I must eat this now or else" impulses that take over the mind until the craving is satisfied. Case in point, yesterday at work there was a cake. It was for a very nice woman who is leaving the office. From the moment I saw the cake, I needed to eat it. Luckily this woman working a half-day so we got to have the cake at 11:00 AM. I went in and had my small, office-party-sized slice--and it was DELICIOUS. It was just a regular sheet cake from a Giant grocery store, and I usually think grocery store cakes are a little gross because they have that oily frosting, but this one had real buttercream frosting, complete with pink AND chocolate roses and green leaves.

When the little party was over, about a third of the cake, maybe a bit more, was left. Someone said, "We'll just leave this here, and other people can have some later." And back to our desks we went.

The rest of the day, I was haunted by the presence of the cake. I knew it was just sitting there, waiting for me to come get a fork and eat it all in one sitting. I wanted the cake, the baby wanted the cake, we really, really wanted the cake. But sadly, sadly, in the meantime everyone in the office kept urging the professors to "go get a piece of cake." They are very kind to me at work but I just thought that saying I had to go eat the entire rest of the cake might have been crossing some kind of line.

At lunch, there was still cake and I had another piece. But again, I had to leave it (about an eighth of the whole cake left by then) and go back to my desk.

At about 2:00, I went back for one more sliver. And when I left for the day, the cake was gone.