When I married my first husband, I don’t think the wedding band was on my finger 15 minutes before my father asked, “So when am I going to have a grandchild?” Well, 12 years, one divorce and another wedding later, he finally got a grandson. And barely a year later, I started getting from all quarters, “So, when are you going to have another one?”
Huh? Are you kidding me?!?! I’m still adjusting to this one.
My standard reply alternates between “We don’t want to have more kids than we can afford to send through graduate school” and “Well … maybe if we’d started earlier …” Yes, I’m aware that women in their late 50s are having babies, thank you Aleta St. James. Hey, if you wanna be pushing 80 at your kid’s college graduation, go for it … and I hope that in the excitement of watching your progeny receive a diploma, you don’t trip over your walker and break a hip. But, as far as I’m concerned, this factory produced a single model and is hereby closed to business.
Still, every few weeks someone -- someone who’s usually 10 years younger than me -- asks, “Are you ready for number two?” Or “Don’t you want to have another baby?” Or “Wouldn’t it be nice if Fletcher had a sister?”
This last wistful thought came from my nanny as she was reorganizing my cup cabinet. We’re transitioning from sippy cups to cups with straws -- part of our proactive plan to avoid putting a Mercedes worth of orthodontics in Fletcher’s mouth later on. I wanted to ditch the sippy cups altogether or at least pass them on to someone else who could use them.
“No, save them,” my nanny objected. “You could have another baby.” She looked at me slyly. “Maybe a little girl. Think of the pigtails. The freckles.”
Trust me, I have thought of the pigtails and the ribbons and the dresses and the dollies. [See Boy Toys ] Though it would be nice to play dress up with a little girl, I’m still not having another one. Period. This is because --
A) We’ve rolled the genetic dice and were immensely relieved to come up with a healthy kid, and it’s doubtful that as our eggs and sperm age, the fates will smile on us again.
B) I’m basically selfish. Having resigned myself to the fact that I will sleep the rest of my nights with one ear cocked to the sniffled cries of Mommy? Mommy! and abandoned the luxury of ever being able to pee alone, not to mention ceding precious DVR space to Sesame Street and Word World episodes, I’d like half a shot of getting some of my grownup, pre-mommy life back in the form of a work day that isn’t interrupted by changing diapers and picking up children from nursery school and a social life that doesn’t revolve around playgroups …unless said group involves attractive consenting adults, condoms and lube.
Hmm, maybe that sounds a tad defensive. But when did one’s kid count become anyone else’s affair, anyway? I never ask -- in fact make a point of not asking -- other couples with one child if they’re planning more or childless couples for that matter if they’re planning any for the simple reason that you never know if your innocent question will pop open a whole big can of hurt. One of my girlfriends was nearly brought to tears when a casual acquaintance thoughtlessly (callously in my opinion) asked “Is one really enough for you?” The jab was especially sharp because at the time my friend was knocking herself out trying to get knocked up with Number Two... and failing miserably. No, one child wasn’t enough for her …though she didn’t need to be reminded of it by a near-stranger.
You'd think with twin preschool girls, my friend Sonia would be safe from these kinds of nosy inquiries from relative strangers. But nope. She still gets them. Yes, she would like more, but she can't and she's made her peace with that. She's casually considering adoption ... maybe ... sometime in the future ... maybe. Still she shames the askers of inappropriate questions like this by letting tears well up in her beautiful brown eyes and sputtering out, "I'd love to ... but I had had to have an emergency hysterectomy after the girls were born." Most people don't say much after that since they're trying to extricate their feet from their mouths.
So, maybe we could dial down the “Are you going to have another baby? Are you? Are you? ARE YOU? When?” Or at least not challenge our curt “No, we’re done” with “Are you sure? Really sure? You might change your mind later.” George W. might be remembered as a thoughtful, effective president, but I highly doubt it.
This is why I really do know that even though reproductive technology might allow me to have babies well into my fifth decade, we won’t be doing an encore: It took me decades -- decades! -- to come around to the idea of having even one child. I vacillated more than Hamlet on the Have A Baby/Don’t Have A Baby question -- and twice took the bail-out option guaranteed by Roe v Wade … and suspenders-and-belted it on more than one occasion with the “morning after pill.”
Back in my younger years, whenever a friend told me she was pregnant, my hearty Mazel Tov! barely concealed bewilderment that anyone would want to get off the career track just as they were gaining traction. But a decade later -- about the time when Stewart’s best friend and old college roommate called to let us know that he and his wife were having a baby girl -- I was surprised to find my hardcore stance softening. My unguarded heart lurched at our friends’ news. A baby! I want one! suddenly flashed in my brain.
Of course, I wanted a lot of things -- a brownstone in Brooklyn, a collection of Manolo Blahniks, a National Magazine Award, the ability to eat a fudge brownie sundae without it immediately showing up on my butt and thighs. But since babies pretty much come with a no-return policy, I also wanted to tread carefully to be sure I wouldn’t later suffer buyer’s (parent’s?) remorse. So I waited and pondered as Stewart and I tried to figure out whether our relationship would go the distance. Meanwhile, friends continued to pop up periodically with announcements that -- Mazel Tov! -- they were expecting. And though happy for them, my hearty Mazel Tovs barely concealed a tiny quiver of sadness and regret that I didn’t have similar news to report.
Fast forward past that divorce and second wedding, and now it’s nearly two and a half years since Stewart and I finally had our One. I know he is our Only because I recently heard from a girlfriend, who’d similarly been straddling the baby fence. She called to tell me that she was expecting Number Two. And in my hearty Mazel Tov there was no longing … only joy …for her.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Boy Toys
When I was pregnant, I was convinced -- 1000 percent positive, actually -- that we were having a girl. My husband Stewart would refer to my growing belly as “he” … and I’d routinely correct him. “No -- She.” These back-and-forths usually played out when we were in a department store’s baby section, and I was mooning over some ridiculously frilly powder pink dress that no baby could conceivably be comfortable in -- or able to keep clean -- for long. But those baby wear designers know exactly how to hook into a hormonal pregnant woman’s fantasies -- before they’re shattered by the reality that your bundle of joy will really live in the onesies you buy by the dozen because a) they’re comfortable and b) can be tossed without regret once they’re stained beyond repair.
Not that there was any rationale to my insistence that there was a girl baby cradled in there. My thinking ran along the lines that my sister already had two boys, and I figured, with the kind of twisted logic that makes Lotto addicts play the same combinations day after day, convinced their numberswill come up … someday, that it was simply time for our collective family to have a girl. And thus I was carrying her. So certain was I, we’d already picked out her name -- Quinn. I wasn’t even thinking about boy names, because … well, why bother? Obviously, we were having a girl.
And then around about 14 weeks, I had my amniocentesis.
“Do you want to know the sex?” the ultrasound tech asked as she slid the wand over my belly, before the maternal-fetal medicine specialist came in to play pincushion with my expanding waistline.
Now some people swear they don’t want to know their baby’s gender until the doctor joyfully announces “It’s a boy/girl!” in the delivery room. “There are so few surprises left in life,” they sigh wistfully, as if Christmas will never come again, and even if it does, they’re sure to get nothing more exciting than socks. “We want to be surprised when he/she arrives.”
Whatever.
I promise, if you’re newbie parents, there are still plenty of surprises in store for you. Just wait till your toddler is covered in sky-blue paint because you left a paint tray on the floor when you went to answer the phone and he decided to “help” paint while you were gone -- as my oldest nephew Eli did. (“He looked like a Smurf!” my sister still shrieks, now with laughter, but at the time, given that she’d just had her carpets cleaned … well … that’s another story.) Or when your daughter learns how to get her diaper off, discovers that poop is her true medium and finger paints her crib with it -- as my friend Gail’s daughter did. I’d bet hard money they were … surprised to say the least. So trust me on this: whether you find out at 14 weeks or 40 weeks when you give that final push your baby’s gender will still be a surprise. But knowing ahead of time, at least gives you a jump on nursery décor.
“Sure, what is it?” I agreed, confident my girl hunch would at last be confirmed.
“It’s a boy!” the tech said jubilantly, as if she’d somehow had a hand in his creation.
Wait … a boy? I looked at her dumbly. A boy? (What did I tell you about surprises, right?)
“Check again,” I directed, thinking she must have somehow been mistaken.
“Oh, it’s a boy all right,” she said, turning the monitor toward me and pointing to the fuzzy gray image onscreen. “See? That’s his penis, right there.”
It all just looked like a fuzzy gray blur to me. But Stewart, who knows his way around an ultrasound and had spotted the evidence well before the tech’s announcement, confirmed it. We were having a boy.
Later on, my mom called, all concerned. “Are you okay? Are you disappointed? You can tell me,” she said conspiratorially.
Well, on the one hand, I was delighted that the ultrasound showed everything was as it should be, and that I wouldn’t be giving birth to some eight-legged octopus alien out of Men In Black. Girl or boy, a healthy baby was ultimately all that mattered. But, yeah, my heart of hearts sank just a bit. And not just because I’d miss out on the parade of little girl baby fashions. But because the terrifying truth was, I had absolutely no idea how to play with a boy.
Growing up, I was the girliest of girly girls, from the ribbons in my hair to my lace-trimmed ankle socks and black patent leather Mary Janes. I disliked sports, loathed getting dirty, hated to rough-house. I played dolls, I played dress up, wearing so much of my mom’s tacky costume jewelry, I looked like a retirement home granny dolled up to receive visitors. For weeks after seeing my first Nutcracker ballet at age 5, I danced around the house in a pink tutu and cardboard tiara, pretending I was the Sugar Plum Fairy. In other words, I knew what to do with a girl. I could play tea party and house and Barbies all day long. (Sure, I knew how Barbie’s unrealistic dimensions could torpedo a girl’s self-esteem, but I was already prepping a feminist self-actualization speech to deal with that dilemma.)
But a boy? Utterly clueless. I felt like I’d been dropped into unfamiliar territory without interpreter or GPS. How’d the nursery rhyme go? Snips and snails and puppy dog tails? Having a boy meant there’d be no Barbies or princesses. Instead, I’d have trucks and bulldozers, trains, cars, and let’s not forget: -- assorted weaponry. (As I’d long ago learned from observing my nephews, any toy, no matter how innocuous, can instantly be transformed into a sword or a gun.)
My fears were only compounded when I dropped by my sister’s one night and found her hunkered down on her patio with a new Hot Wheels track, racing cars with her boys. I didn’t know how to play cars. Nor did I know how to play Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Rescue Heroes, Avatars or Transformers -- or any of the other things that seemed to captivate my nephews. The closest I’d come to playing with “action figures” was having Barbie make out with G.I. Joe because even as a kid I knew Ken batted for the other team. Even after my sister promised her boys would “bring me up to speed,” my anxiety that I wasn’t up to this task wasn’t entirely allayed.
After the baby formerly known as Quinn now formally called Fletcher was born, I held out as long as I could, studiously avoiding the obviously gender specific toys to see if we could find some middle ground I could relate to. Now there’s an uphill battle against evolutionary hard-wiring that’ll give you glutes of steel. Sure, Fletcher loves playing in the toy kitchen. But then, again, in our household, kitchen duty is hardly “girl” stuff: It’s my husband who mans the stovetop since I’ve been known to burn water, ruin box brownies, and once did actually set a kitchen on fire.
When I visited college friends and watched their daughter deck herself out in plastic beaded necklaces, rings, bracelets and tiaras, I knew I was swimming hard against the gender currents. Fletcher would endure a wicked case of diaper rash before he’d ever reach for that stuff. And as soon as he could make his preferences known and was mobile enough to get to what he wanted, Fletcher headed straight for the toy cars, spy gadgetry and play guns he found in his older cousins’ toy bins. Last Christmas, he instantly commandeered the new spiral racetrack that had been a gift to my nephew Dylan. While the rest of us ate, first, Christmas breakfast and then later moved on to Christmas dinner, Fletcher refused all attempts to engage him in anything else. He stuck with that toy the way a determined slots player sticks with a progressive jackpot.
I knew when I was beaten. I gave up and gave in.
Now our living room looks like a construction site imagined by Toys R Us, and I can actually articulate the difference between a back hoe and a front-end loader. But nothing gets my boy more jazzed than seeing a real-life, honest-to-goodness truck on the road while we’re driving. “Big truck! Big truck!” he shrieks excitedly from the back seat. And these days, a major source of entertainment involves standing in the driveway, watching the sanitation guys roll through the neighborhood picking up recyclables. “Hi, Truck!” Fletcher waves enthusiastically when the garbage truck stops at the end of our drive. He is in awe. To him, the guys who drive and ride these trucks are way cooler than Justin Timberlake will ever be. It’s my tough luck if we’re running late for school on pickup days because I’ve learned it’s futile to even try to wrestle him into the car while the truck’s still on our block. “Bye, bye, Truck!” he shouts as it disappears from view. Though I don’t get the allure, it must warm these guys’ hearts to know they have such a devoted fan base.
One night, when it was just the two of us at home, we played on the floor in his room. Fletcher spilled out his bin of cars and trucks and lined them up, a long snake of bumper to bumper toy traffic. “Vroom, vroom,” I said, making some circles with a yellow cement mixer, in what I hoped sounded like a convincing I know how to play this game tone. “Vroom, vroom,” Fletcher parroted back, happily. Gradually, it began to dawn on me that this wasn’t such an enormous stretch from playing tea party. Pushing toy cars around on the floor, pushing toy cups and teapots around on a table. It was the same game of pretend, really, just with different props. The point was, the two of us were having fun playing. Together.
Not that there was any rationale to my insistence that there was a girl baby cradled in there. My thinking ran along the lines that my sister already had two boys, and I figured, with the kind of twisted logic that makes Lotto addicts play the same combinations day after day, convinced their numberswill come up … someday, that it was simply time for our collective family to have a girl. And thus I was carrying her. So certain was I, we’d already picked out her name -- Quinn. I wasn’t even thinking about boy names, because … well, why bother? Obviously, we were having a girl.
And then around about 14 weeks, I had my amniocentesis.
“Do you want to know the sex?” the ultrasound tech asked as she slid the wand over my belly, before the maternal-fetal medicine specialist came in to play pincushion with my expanding waistline.
Now some people swear they don’t want to know their baby’s gender until the doctor joyfully announces “It’s a boy/girl!” in the delivery room. “There are so few surprises left in life,” they sigh wistfully, as if Christmas will never come again, and even if it does, they’re sure to get nothing more exciting than socks. “We want to be surprised when he/she arrives.”
Whatever.
I promise, if you’re newbie parents, there are still plenty of surprises in store for you. Just wait till your toddler is covered in sky-blue paint because you left a paint tray on the floor when you went to answer the phone and he decided to “help” paint while you were gone -- as my oldest nephew Eli did. (“He looked like a Smurf!” my sister still shrieks, now with laughter, but at the time, given that she’d just had her carpets cleaned … well … that’s another story.) Or when your daughter learns how to get her diaper off, discovers that poop is her true medium and finger paints her crib with it -- as my friend Gail’s daughter did. I’d bet hard money they were … surprised to say the least. So trust me on this: whether you find out at 14 weeks or 40 weeks when you give that final push your baby’s gender will still be a surprise. But knowing ahead of time, at least gives you a jump on nursery décor.
“Sure, what is it?” I agreed, confident my girl hunch would at last be confirmed.
“It’s a boy!” the tech said jubilantly, as if she’d somehow had a hand in his creation.
Wait … a boy? I looked at her dumbly. A boy? (What did I tell you about surprises, right?)
“Check again,” I directed, thinking she must have somehow been mistaken.
“Oh, it’s a boy all right,” she said, turning the monitor toward me and pointing to the fuzzy gray image onscreen. “See? That’s his penis, right there.”
It all just looked like a fuzzy gray blur to me. But Stewart, who knows his way around an ultrasound and had spotted the evidence well before the tech’s announcement, confirmed it. We were having a boy.
Later on, my mom called, all concerned. “Are you okay? Are you disappointed? You can tell me,” she said conspiratorially.
Well, on the one hand, I was delighted that the ultrasound showed everything was as it should be, and that I wouldn’t be giving birth to some eight-legged octopus alien out of Men In Black. Girl or boy, a healthy baby was ultimately all that mattered. But, yeah, my heart of hearts sank just a bit. And not just because I’d miss out on the parade of little girl baby fashions. But because the terrifying truth was, I had absolutely no idea how to play with a boy.
Growing up, I was the girliest of girly girls, from the ribbons in my hair to my lace-trimmed ankle socks and black patent leather Mary Janes. I disliked sports, loathed getting dirty, hated to rough-house. I played dolls, I played dress up, wearing so much of my mom’s tacky costume jewelry, I looked like a retirement home granny dolled up to receive visitors. For weeks after seeing my first Nutcracker ballet at age 5, I danced around the house in a pink tutu and cardboard tiara, pretending I was the Sugar Plum Fairy. In other words, I knew what to do with a girl. I could play tea party and house and Barbies all day long. (Sure, I knew how Barbie’s unrealistic dimensions could torpedo a girl’s self-esteem, but I was already prepping a feminist self-actualization speech to deal with that dilemma.)
But a boy? Utterly clueless. I felt like I’d been dropped into unfamiliar territory without interpreter or GPS. How’d the nursery rhyme go? Snips and snails and puppy dog tails? Having a boy meant there’d be no Barbies or princesses. Instead, I’d have trucks and bulldozers, trains, cars, and let’s not forget: -- assorted weaponry. (As I’d long ago learned from observing my nephews, any toy, no matter how innocuous, can instantly be transformed into a sword or a gun.)
My fears were only compounded when I dropped by my sister’s one night and found her hunkered down on her patio with a new Hot Wheels track, racing cars with her boys. I didn’t know how to play cars. Nor did I know how to play Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Rescue Heroes, Avatars or Transformers -- or any of the other things that seemed to captivate my nephews. The closest I’d come to playing with “action figures” was having Barbie make out with G.I. Joe because even as a kid I knew Ken batted for the other team. Even after my sister promised her boys would “bring me up to speed,” my anxiety that I wasn’t up to this task wasn’t entirely allayed.
After the baby formerly known as Quinn now formally called Fletcher was born, I held out as long as I could, studiously avoiding the obviously gender specific toys to see if we could find some middle ground I could relate to. Now there’s an uphill battle against evolutionary hard-wiring that’ll give you glutes of steel. Sure, Fletcher loves playing in the toy kitchen. But then, again, in our household, kitchen duty is hardly “girl” stuff: It’s my husband who mans the stovetop since I’ve been known to burn water, ruin box brownies, and once did actually set a kitchen on fire.
When I visited college friends and watched their daughter deck herself out in plastic beaded necklaces, rings, bracelets and tiaras, I knew I was swimming hard against the gender currents. Fletcher would endure a wicked case of diaper rash before he’d ever reach for that stuff. And as soon as he could make his preferences known and was mobile enough to get to what he wanted, Fletcher headed straight for the toy cars, spy gadgetry and play guns he found in his older cousins’ toy bins. Last Christmas, he instantly commandeered the new spiral racetrack that had been a gift to my nephew Dylan. While the rest of us ate, first, Christmas breakfast and then later moved on to Christmas dinner, Fletcher refused all attempts to engage him in anything else. He stuck with that toy the way a determined slots player sticks with a progressive jackpot.
I knew when I was beaten. I gave up and gave in.
Now our living room looks like a construction site imagined by Toys R Us, and I can actually articulate the difference between a back hoe and a front-end loader. But nothing gets my boy more jazzed than seeing a real-life, honest-to-goodness truck on the road while we’re driving. “Big truck! Big truck!” he shrieks excitedly from the back seat. And these days, a major source of entertainment involves standing in the driveway, watching the sanitation guys roll through the neighborhood picking up recyclables. “Hi, Truck!” Fletcher waves enthusiastically when the garbage truck stops at the end of our drive. He is in awe. To him, the guys who drive and ride these trucks are way cooler than Justin Timberlake will ever be. It’s my tough luck if we’re running late for school on pickup days because I’ve learned it’s futile to even try to wrestle him into the car while the truck’s still on our block. “Bye, bye, Truck!” he shouts as it disappears from view. Though I don’t get the allure, it must warm these guys’ hearts to know they have such a devoted fan base.
One night, when it was just the two of us at home, we played on the floor in his room. Fletcher spilled out his bin of cars and trucks and lined them up, a long snake of bumper to bumper toy traffic. “Vroom, vroom,” I said, making some circles with a yellow cement mixer, in what I hoped sounded like a convincing I know how to play this game tone. “Vroom, vroom,” Fletcher parroted back, happily. Gradually, it began to dawn on me that this wasn’t such an enormous stretch from playing tea party. Pushing toy cars around on the floor, pushing toy cups and teapots around on a table. It was the same game of pretend, really, just with different props. The point was, the two of us were having fun playing. Together.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
My (Brief) Life As Chowzilla
My mother was horrified. Horr-i-fied. She’d just watched me chew through a Carnegie Deli-size sandwich like it was a canapé and then dig into a pile of supersized potato pancakes.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’ve eating like you’ve never seen food before. Look how much weight you’ve gained!”
Now, my mother measures calories with the precision of a diamond cutter, and tracks weight gains and losses the way day traders track the mercurial ups and downs of the stock market. Only in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way -- down is good; up is bad; very very bad.
See, weight has always been an issue -- the issue -- in my family. Not that I was ever heavy. But my mom was . . . well, let’s say she wasn’t a thin child. Some moms fear their kids will end up on milk cartons. Mine worried I’d be so fat I’d never get a date. I was 12 when I went on my first diet to lose 5 pounds. The Just In Case Diet. Of course, to truly get how utterly ridiculous that was, you have to understand that except for the time when I was 16 when I became addicted to Cadbury-style chocolate bars -- I ate two a day for a whole summer -- for the vast majority of my adult life, I have rarely ever weighed more than 100 pounds. Now you’d hardly call that a candidate for Corti-Slim.
My secret? Being vegetarian. And a pretty strict one at that. For years, I not only eschewed all meat, fish and fowl, but eggs and dairy too. Going out to dinner was an exercise in what I couldn’t/wouldn’t eat.
And then I got pregnant.
For my husband Stewart, a diehard carnivore who still talks wistfully about the $25 cheeseburger stuffed with foie gras that he devoured on one of our trips to New York, that was like Christmas, his birthday and our wedding night/honeymoon all rolled into one. He gleefully soaked up tales about friends’ vegetarian wives who’d turned into insatiable meat-eaters once they got knocked up. He immediately made reservations at his favorite steak joint. Just in case I had a sudden urge for Kobe beef.
Initially, I’d meant to stay the vegetarian course. After all, I’d been eating vegetarian for nearly 10 years. And old habits die hard. But the baby clearly had other gastronomic plans. And apparently they involved a smorgasboard. Lots of pregnant women complain that they miss their sushi and brie, they want their coffee and martinis. Not I. Sure I was off those things too, but a whole new world of gustatory delights beckoned. Suddenly it wasn’t what couldn’t I eat, but what wouldn’t I eat?
Turns out, not a whole helluva lot. First there were the buttermilk pancakes that I absolutely had to have at 2 AM. Days later at a diner it was a tuna sandwich, which got woofed down in three bites and was promptly followed by another. I polished off Buca di Beppo’s “small” spaghetti marinara, which normally can feed several hungry frat boys, as a single serving. I dove into eggplant parmagiana, bagels with cream cheese or whitefish salad, French toast, shrimp cocktail, turkey clubs and cheesy omelets. Even junk food like Big Macs and Egg McMuffins, which disgusted me even before Morgan Spurlock, became must-have menu items. I rediscoverd the joys of full-fat mayonnaise. And thousand island dressing. But when I cut across four lanes of traffic to pull into Tony Roma’s, ordered a full rack of ribs, then picked every last bone clean and sucked out the marrow, I knew I was definitely off the wagon. When they asked me what I wanted for dessert, only decorum kept me from ordering a whole other slab.
I’ve never been so food obsessed. I was eating like a had a Delta force division in my belly -- not a baby, barely 2 centimeters long. Halfway through my blueberry pancakes, I’d be thinking ahead to what I’d want for lunch and dinner. It seemed our unborn child had pumped my appetite full of steroids. But I was getting a little self-conscious about my piggy appetite even before my mother pulled me aside to warn me about the 80 pounds she gained when pregnant. “Don’t let it happen to you,” she cautioned as I stuffed my face with reheated Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Yeah, I knew the more I put on, the harder it would be to take off later. And that excessive weight gain could bring on all kinds of pregnancy complications, like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, a very dangerous condition, involving high blood pressure and excess protein in the urine, that could endanger me and my baby. Yet, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
An old college pal Rich, who works as a producer at Comedy Central, gently helped me off the hook. “The first trimester,” he explained with the authority of someone who watched his own wife morph into Chowzilla when she was expecting, “is so critical to the baby’s development you need to consume about as many calories as climbers require to get to Mount Everest’s base camp one.” That did make me feel like scarfing down Reubens slathered in Russian dressing ultimately served some higher purpose beyond giving me some extra cushion in the seat.
Strangely, though, once I hit my second trimester, those weird-ass cravings vanished like freeloaders when the check comes. I lost my taste for BBQ ribs. And that double quarter-pounder with cheese once again went from seeming incredibly appetizing to incredibly disgusting. It was like I suddenly got sober after a meat-eating bender.
But for one brief shining moment I ate whatever I wanted.
And I loved every bite.
(A version of this essay was originally published in Las Vegas Life)
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’ve eating like you’ve never seen food before. Look how much weight you’ve gained!”
Now, my mother measures calories with the precision of a diamond cutter, and tracks weight gains and losses the way day traders track the mercurial ups and downs of the stock market. Only in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way -- down is good; up is bad; very very bad.
See, weight has always been an issue -- the issue -- in my family. Not that I was ever heavy. But my mom was . . . well, let’s say she wasn’t a thin child. Some moms fear their kids will end up on milk cartons. Mine worried I’d be so fat I’d never get a date. I was 12 when I went on my first diet to lose 5 pounds. The Just In Case Diet. Of course, to truly get how utterly ridiculous that was, you have to understand that except for the time when I was 16 when I became addicted to Cadbury-style chocolate bars -- I ate two a day for a whole summer -- for the vast majority of my adult life, I have rarely ever weighed more than 100 pounds. Now you’d hardly call that a candidate for Corti-Slim.
My secret? Being vegetarian. And a pretty strict one at that. For years, I not only eschewed all meat, fish and fowl, but eggs and dairy too. Going out to dinner was an exercise in what I couldn’t/wouldn’t eat.
And then I got pregnant.
For my husband Stewart, a diehard carnivore who still talks wistfully about the $25 cheeseburger stuffed with foie gras that he devoured on one of our trips to New York, that was like Christmas, his birthday and our wedding night/honeymoon all rolled into one. He gleefully soaked up tales about friends’ vegetarian wives who’d turned into insatiable meat-eaters once they got knocked up. He immediately made reservations at his favorite steak joint. Just in case I had a sudden urge for Kobe beef.
Initially, I’d meant to stay the vegetarian course. After all, I’d been eating vegetarian for nearly 10 years. And old habits die hard. But the baby clearly had other gastronomic plans. And apparently they involved a smorgasboard. Lots of pregnant women complain that they miss their sushi and brie, they want their coffee and martinis. Not I. Sure I was off those things too, but a whole new world of gustatory delights beckoned. Suddenly it wasn’t what couldn’t I eat, but what wouldn’t I eat?
Turns out, not a whole helluva lot. First there were the buttermilk pancakes that I absolutely had to have at 2 AM. Days later at a diner it was a tuna sandwich, which got woofed down in three bites and was promptly followed by another. I polished off Buca di Beppo’s “small” spaghetti marinara, which normally can feed several hungry frat boys, as a single serving. I dove into eggplant parmagiana, bagels with cream cheese or whitefish salad, French toast, shrimp cocktail, turkey clubs and cheesy omelets. Even junk food like Big Macs and Egg McMuffins, which disgusted me even before Morgan Spurlock, became must-have menu items. I rediscoverd the joys of full-fat mayonnaise. And thousand island dressing. But when I cut across four lanes of traffic to pull into Tony Roma’s, ordered a full rack of ribs, then picked every last bone clean and sucked out the marrow, I knew I was definitely off the wagon. When they asked me what I wanted for dessert, only decorum kept me from ordering a whole other slab.
I’ve never been so food obsessed. I was eating like a had a Delta force division in my belly -- not a baby, barely 2 centimeters long. Halfway through my blueberry pancakes, I’d be thinking ahead to what I’d want for lunch and dinner. It seemed our unborn child had pumped my appetite full of steroids. But I was getting a little self-conscious about my piggy appetite even before my mother pulled me aside to warn me about the 80 pounds she gained when pregnant. “Don’t let it happen to you,” she cautioned as I stuffed my face with reheated Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Yeah, I knew the more I put on, the harder it would be to take off later. And that excessive weight gain could bring on all kinds of pregnancy complications, like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, a very dangerous condition, involving high blood pressure and excess protein in the urine, that could endanger me and my baby. Yet, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
An old college pal Rich, who works as a producer at Comedy Central, gently helped me off the hook. “The first trimester,” he explained with the authority of someone who watched his own wife morph into Chowzilla when she was expecting, “is so critical to the baby’s development you need to consume about as many calories as climbers require to get to Mount Everest’s base camp one.” That did make me feel like scarfing down Reubens slathered in Russian dressing ultimately served some higher purpose beyond giving me some extra cushion in the seat.
Strangely, though, once I hit my second trimester, those weird-ass cravings vanished like freeloaders when the check comes. I lost my taste for BBQ ribs. And that double quarter-pounder with cheese once again went from seeming incredibly appetizing to incredibly disgusting. It was like I suddenly got sober after a meat-eating bender.
But for one brief shining moment I ate whatever I wanted.
And I loved every bite.
(A version of this essay was originally published in Las Vegas Life)
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