I had a feeling I was pregnant when my husband Hall and I were driving home from a long weekend in DC and out of all the fast food places off Interstate 81, I chose Jersey Mike’s. I’m not a Jersey Mike’s kind of girl, by which I mean I am a girl. Let the boys have their fast casual sub shops – Subway, Blimpie, any place where food is measured in foot. Let them support a place where, if it had one, its mascot would be a basketball wearing sunglasses. It’d have a wide, jaunty smile and white gloves like a California Raisin. Less racist but still offensive.
I had a feeling I was pregnant, but by the time I scanned the menu and ordered the Big Kahuna Cheesesteak, I knew. My body was no longer my own, and neither was my sense of taste.
I peed on a stick the next day, but really I received my positive test off Exit 17 in Abingdon, Virginia.
I knew to expect bizarre food cravings. Popular culture loves a big-bellied woman housing pickles and Americone Dream. Oh, look at this silly pregnant lady enjoying her treat! The much stronger symptom of pregnancy, which caught me completely off guard, was an extreme aversion to certain foods.
Food aversion is the ugly step-sister of food cravings. She’s impossible to please and has a quick gag reflex. She swears off most meat products and even thinks pasta, which her husband delicately suggests for dinner, is “gross.” She can’t be in the same room as an egg.
My mom said that one of the few symptoms she experienced during all five of her pregnancies was that she didn’t “love chicken.” For me, I didn’t just not “love chicken” but hated that I’d ever eaten it. I couldn’t hear the sound of it sizzling in a pan. Couldn’t bear seeing its pink flesh straining against the plastic wrap, its juices pooling in the corners of the styrofoam and sneaking underneath, begging to escape and well, kill me.
It wasn’t just chicken that I couldn’t eat. Beyond that first wet sandwich off the interstate, I couldn’t stomach any meat whatsoever. Same with grains, beans, rice, potatoes – burlap sack kind of food. I was even off pasta. Who doesn’t eat pasta? It’s like water. Pizza was hit or miss. I either threw it up or ate so much I wanted to throw up (how I’d always eaten it). Dairy products were okay as long as they were super cold but one can only have so much yogurt in a day. Cheese was fine as long as it was string. Eggs never had a chance because of the whole embryo thing. If food was too warm I couldn’t eat it. Anything seasoned was bad. Salt tasted off. Seafood, of course, was a no go. During a trip to Maine, my family ate lobster while I sat facing the other way, staring to sea and clutching a bag of oyster crackers.
My strongest revulsion was to vegetables, particularly the ones from the garden my husband had spent months tending.
Bounding in from the yard one afternoon, he announced, “We have thirty heads of lettuce!”
“Let them rot,” I said from the couch.
I’d been so determined to eat well. Upon finding out I was pregnant at week five, I vowed that my baby would get nothing but the best. I would learn the difference between good fats and bad fats, eat 30 shades of green a day, and snack on nuts and seeds like a beautiful squirrel. I’d switch out chocolate for the healthier cacao, whatever that was, and finally get my head around vegan energy balls.
I would develop an eating disorder in the name of my future child.
I didn’t think it’d be that hard. Previously, I’d loved salads. Spinach, kale, arugula, even a pale iceberg. How could I not want anything served on a bed of greens? I love beds. Whether it came from our garden or one of those light plastic containers impossible to open without causing a scene, I ate salads and vegetables of all kinds. Maybe as a woman I’d been programmed to gravitate towards water-based foods, but I didn’t care. Doused in lemon and olive oil or roasted to hell with parmesan and black pepper, vegetables soar.
It took me a while to appreciate them. Growing up in the 90’s meant eating vegetables prepared in a way that didn’t require teeth. Either canned or boiled in butter, you could effectively chew them by tonguing them around your mouth a few seconds before swallowing. That is if you didn’t gag first. It’s ironic – the softer the baby carrot, the more I had to choke it down.
Thankfully I was never forced to eat canned asparagus like my husband. I can’t imagine. It sounds like eating an infection.
But it’s possible that civilization has swung too far in the other direction. A couple years ago, I went to a hip restaurant and ordered a salad so crunchy and fresh that when I bit into it I got vertigo. Through blurred vision I scanned the floor to see if it wasn’t too dirty to lie down for a quick Epley maneuver.
Regardless of how they were prepared, in that first part of pregnancy I couldn’t eat vegetables whatsoever, or anything not directly causing heart disease.
The main thing I ate were bagels. Sometimes waffles or toast. Dry cereal went down pretty well, and crackers made a great lunch. Occasionally I ate cookies, like the night in June I went out to buy “take ‘n bakes.” Was I the child or already the tired, unimaginative Mom determined to appease the child? I managed to eat the odd banana, but my diet was mostly refined carbs. The more preservatives, the better.
I felt guilty for eating so poorly and wondered if I was letting my kid down already. What was next? Accidentally buying scented baby wipes? Forgetting her name?
I knew I couldn’t change so did the next best thing – solicit blind support from a good friend. By then, the cat was out of the bag and people knew I was pregnant.
“I’m eating like shit,” I texted my friend Clotilde, who’d recently given birth herself. “Did you eat super healthy when you were pregnant?”
This is a leading question. As a friend, there is only one acceptable answer and it goes something like, “I didn’t eat well either but it doesn’t matter. The baby will be totally fine.”
Friendship requires validation, to confirm that whatever you’re currently doing is right.
For example,
“I just spent $400 on clothes I didn’t need,” you say.
“You did need that,” she responds.
Or,
“I haven’t exercised in months,” you tell her.
“Good,” she says. “The body must rest.”
The ultimate test of friendship comes if you texted a guy who didn’t respond to a previous text.
“Is that okay???” you ask her.
If she doesn’t respond with, “Of course! He’s probably just busy!” then you need to dump her.
He was not just busy. Either he forgot or doesn’t care or is interested in someone else or is unofficially dating his Mom. But it doesn’t matter. The friend’s job is to lie to your face to make you feel better.
These are the rules for American friendship, for patriots. But I’d brought up my eating habits with Clotilde, who is French. The same person who told a friend as she was zipping up her bright orange dress for a party that it was “a bit ugly, no?” The girl who, when I said I felt fat when we were on the beach, peered over her sunglasses and said that yes, it looked like I had gained a few pounds.
When she responded to my text, she couldn’t help her honesty. “No, but you need to eat healthy. It’s super important for the baby, no?”
The word “no” is as French as “take ‘n bakes” are American. French people don’t lie in order to be likable or to keep a conversation moving. “Hiking is great exercise!” I once said to a French boyfriend as we climbed a mountain.
“No, but it’s not,” he said. “It’s just walking, no?” He was panting. He had moobs. It was exercise.
Let down by friendship I turned to Google. Surely I’d find reassurance about my poor diet there. The internet’s whole purpose is to support delusion! If you type “benefits of” and then a word into Google, you’re guaranteed results. Benefits of sciatica. Benefits of avalanches. Benefits of animal abuse. You’re sure to find a silver lining by at least page 2.
But “benefits of poor diet while growing human baby” returned nothing. Instead it said, “Did you mean ‘bad parent already wowww you suck?’”
I was failing at pregnancy. In all likelihood my baby would be born with hooves, and because of my diet I’d be the only one to blame.
I spent weeks eating nothing but flour. In mid-July, I was congratulating myself on getting a peach down until I threw it up minutes later. Looking up nausea remedies yet again in What To Expect When You’re Expecting, I came across the chapter highlighting nine basic principles of healthy eating, or as I saw it, “How to make yourself feel bad emotionally when you feel bad physically.”
“Choose calories you can count on” was the first principle. I had never thought of food that way. I imagined needing a ride from the airport and calling an apple. Or my pet sitter canceling and enlisting my neighbor celery to help. An Eggo Mini would never do that for me.
“Choose foods that remember their roots” was another one. I wondered if the Cinnamon Toast Crunch I’d eaten that morning had fond memories of the factory floor.
It also suggested eating six “mini-meals” a day, instead of the usual three. This would help combat heartburn and constipation, and ensure you eat like a bird / celebrity.
Praying that at least part of the peach had reached the baby, I noticed the last principle. “Cave to the crave,” it read.
I shut the book, afraid to see more, afraid it was substantiated with something like, “Go ahead and have that brownie, mama! Just make sure it’s all walnuts, that it’s a bunch of walnuts in the shape of a square.”
With the reassurance I finally found – a simple, taken out of context phrase – I continued fueling my carbo-loaded pregnancy. I ate bagels. Safe, digestible, dense. Comfortable, like breasts to a baby.
If you’re feeling festive today:
Great, viscerally disgusting food writing. “Like eating an infection.” Wow! And congrats on the baby. Looking forward to your vivid description of childbirth 🤠
You can’t even imagine the horror of that asparagus. Hall mashing it with his fork is one of my vivid memories as a kid.