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When a child, grown or not, has a weight management problem it makes sense to me that the parents are concerned.  They’re concerned for the child’s health, and also for her appearance.  I get that.  With a child on the way, I get it even more.  I don’t just want the best for my child.  I want so much more than that.  Any problem, any struggle that my child could have I would go to any lengths to help.  I don’t fault my parents for wanting to help.  I got that, even then.  I do sometimes have an issue with their methods.

Both of my parents have this penetrating glare.  My father’s is especially developed.  If rage only had an expression, and not a sound, this would be it.  The rage was often disproportionate to the problem, and/or ineptly applied.  One french fry should not be enough.  One french fry does NOT make a person fat.  Showing rage at the consumption of a french fry could not, therefore, achieve the goal of helping me with my weight management.  In fact, I don’t think my father has ever seen me eat the foods that make me fat.  I’m an artist with smoke and mirrors.  That fry, or even a handful of them, couldn’t possibly explain my overweight.  I was a teenager at the time, and maybe he thought that the only food I consumed was food they fed me.  Wrong.

I was given lunch money most days.  I believe that my parents knew how much a sandwich/drink/chips combo cost and gave me that amount each day - something like that.  I didn’t use it on food quite the way they expected.  I’m sure they envisioned a turkey sandwich, milk and a snack.  Instead one of my favorite meals was three chocolate chip cookies.  Not the one inch diameter kind like Entemann’s sells.  These were great big ones.  As big as your hand.  They were baked fresh every day and I used to ask for the ones that were slightly under-cooked.  I usually had them with milk, but I don’t think that helped the nutritional content of my lunch.  And let’s face it, that’s not enough fuel to get through the day.  Calories maybe, but not sustenance.  I was always chasing after snacks, and I came home starving.

Did the glaring help?  Would it help you?  Or would it make you eat more cookies?  Would knowing that the food you were eating during the glare wasn’t the problem change anything?

I could not explain the worst pain inside of me to the person who would have done anything to take that pain away.  I could not tell my father, or my mother, that the help they offered was at best useless and misguided and at worst the problem itself.  I could not hurt the people who wanted so badly to help, and on some level also believed that they wouldn’t believe me if I told them the truth.  I gave them the best love I could by holding everything in, and in doing so ate away at my strength.  Without my strength, I had nothing to protect me, and the fat consumed what was left.

Sometimes the best part of having a secret is finally getting to tell everyone what it is.  That’s why I’m truly enjoying telling everyone that I’m pregnant.  Yes, pregnant.  It’s the best news I’ve ever had.  When I say it casually as part of a conversation (”well, now that I’m pregnant the pollen is only bothering me more” for example), everything else stops because the listener wants to go back a step.  Everyone smiles.  There have even been hugs at work.  And, when I am not completely exhausted or nauseated, I’m excited and happy all the time.

 I keep debating the merits of tacky/fun t-shirts.  Ones that say “Needs Coffee” or “I’m not fat, I’m pregnant (and fat)”.  If I saw them on someone else, would I think they were cute?  Can you wear the shirt in front of the same people more than once?  I mean, it kinda loses it oompf, right.  And in my opinion, all maternity clothes must be able to be worn at least once a week for the next few months as they have a very short shelf-life.

I’m due November 25th, so I’ve still got a long way to go.  This is the most important thing I’ve ever done.  But in the middle of it, I just feel like it’s a means to an end.  I can’t wait to find out who’s in there.

Everyone in Kindergarten thought I was odd.  I accepted this a long time ago, and when I talk about Kindergarten this is what most comes to mind.  My oddness.  But I guess that isn’t the entire picture.  There was another part of my personality that had already started to emerge, only at the time I didn’t know what it was.  Fortunately, neither did the other kids.

One day during the school year some emergency or other took the teacher out of the room.  In 1979 apparently you could do things like leave a room full of 5 year olds to fend for themselves.  Or maybe you weren’t supposed to, but on this occassion that’s what happened.  It was only a few minutes.  At first we sat there, mostly just confused about what to do.  Here was an opportunity for freedom.  We had to do something, but what?  What were we going to do, pull cigarettes out of our Sesame Street lunch boxes?  Being 5 is so limiting.  Eventually someone spoke.  Then someone else…somehow Underoos came up in conversation.  Really being 5 isn’t all that different from being 25 sometimes.

One of the ways I explain my current personality to people is that I have absolutely no inhibitions, but I do have a well developed sense of propriety.  That propriety stops me from, most of the time anyway, straying too far outside the bounds of society.  I developed that propriety late in life.  Because I didn’t interact with my peers that often in childhood I never got a great sense of what they considered normal, and never used that to guide my behavior.  So, now you’ve got a kid, with no adult supervision, in a conversation about Underoos, with no sense of societal mores, and no inhibitions.  Need I detail what followed?

I remember taking off my shirt.  I was wearing the Wonderwoman Underoos, which were my favorite ones.  Most underoos had a shirt that resembled an undershirt, but the Wonderwoman top resembled a bra.  It was really just the top half of an undershirt, but to me that was a bra, which made me all grown up.  Someone dared me to show what was underneath the bra, and I did.  Mosquito bites were flashed to the amazed room of toddlers.  Too amazed to assign a look out.  The door swung open, and I quickly lowered my “bra”.  There was still the matter of the removed shirt, but my normally non-existent reflexes got that in place with cat-like speed.

The most incredible part wasn’t that I flashed the class.  That was simply a preview of things to come.  What still boggles the mind is that every single kid in that room kept his mouth shut.  The teacher didn’t have enough evidence with which to prosecute, and so I never saw any consequences.  What she did see - my shirtless little body - contradicted everything she knew about the wallflower I appeared to be.  My reputation was saved by a tight-lipped Kindergarten class and assumptions about my purity.  Bring on 1st Grade.

I went to NJ this weekend to visit my family.  Aside from Mother’s Day, which was reason enough, my parents made an engagement party for my brother.  The whole thing was great.  Everyone was really happy.  My mom had turned 60 the week before, and my parents are having their 40th anniversary this year, so I felt like they needed gifts, and lots of them.

One of the gifts I brought with me was the Calphalon One Frittata Pan.  My parents make frittatas at least once a week.  With Egg-Beaters instead of eggs.  They’d never compromise on fat and heart health.  But anyway, this is one of their favorite foods, and flipping it is always a nightmare.  I thought I could help.

The pan is essentially two pans in one.  One says “top” and the other says “bottom”, so there’s no confusion.  You are supposed to cook the frittata fully on one side, and then flip it to let it brown on the other.  This should not be hard.  This should, in fact, not require instructions of any kind.  The two-sided pan kinda speaks for itself.  After we left on Sunday, my parents used it to make dinner.  I’m supposing the mistake was that the egg beaters had not cooked through enough when my father flipped the pan.  That’s all I can think of as an explanation for why the majority of the yellow not-quite-egg substance wound up coating every surface in the kitchen.  When the egginess hit the hot stove it cooked to a thin yellow layer impenetrable to most household cleaners.  Fortunately by the time my parents called me they were already laughing.

Next year I’m getting them a toaster.  I wonder what they’ll do with that.

Last Friday at a company picnic one of my co-workers expressed concern for today’s high school youth.  Not the usual babble about growing up too fast or dressing like Britney Spears, his concern was that they are all guzzling Red Bull, and other similar beverages, that taste like juice but are actually - well - kind of drugs.  Sure, most of the “drugs” are natural, but as I always point out, so is arsenic.  That doesn’t mean you drink it.

I immediately said what I should probably have kept to myself.  Most of my energy in high school came from my “diet” of black coffee and Marlboro “reds”.  At age 14 I was so proud that I drank and smoked the high octane stuff.  That I never used the word “light” when asking for coffee or cigarettes.  I wanted the real thing.  The one time that one of my friends got a pack of Marlboro Lights, we cut the filters down to half the length so we’d get more of the nicotine.

I think such idiocy made me feel tough and mature.  Now I just feel silly.  I wish I had been hooked on Red Bull instead.