Scene: Me working out at the gym on my lunch break, circa 16 weeks. I'm looking in the mirror, feeling pretty good because I think I might be getting That Glow I had heard so much about. That Glow would beat the severe case of acne I have developed on my upper back and shoulders since becoming pregnant, which I was now calling "backne" in an effort to be funny about something disturbing and unattractive.
I'm standing in front of the mirror, chatting with a woman I had become friendly with at the gym. I hadn't seen her for a few weeks, so I dropped my happy bomb on her.
"Guess what?" I announce gleefully. "I'm having a baby!"
She smiled, and offered her congratulations. "I knew it!" she said, and gave me that knowing smile that all women with children give to first-time-mom pregnant ladies. "You look great, and you are still working out which will really help. How far along are you, about 30 weeks?"
The woman in question was one of those extremely athletic types - you know the kind. Judging from her BMI (which I estimated to be around 4) and her complete lack of breast tissue, it appeared that she ran marathons on a bi-weekly basis and did Iron Man Triathalons just for shits and giggles on the weekends. Frankly, I found it hard to believe she could summon forth a menstrual cycle, much less carry a baby to term, given her lack of body fat.
"Well, you see, I'm only 16 weeks, but the women in my family always show really soon, plus I had a very salty lunch, and my posture isn't great which makes my stomach look bigger..."
She looked worried, not only that she had offended me (she had) but also out of genuine concern for my health and the health of my child. She launched into a long dissertation about gestational diabetes, and warned me not to "let myself go" simply because I had the convenient excuse of being pregnant. Seeing as how I spent most of my days at work either vomiting or sleeping under my desk, I didn't see how being pregnant was all that convenient.
"Be careful," she warned, "you don't want your husband to lose interest in you after the baby is born (oops! too late!). I myself only gained 16 pounds when I was pregnant, and I had a 10 pound baby!"
I excused myself and hopped on the treadmill. "Bitch," I grumbled. "I'll show her. I can keep my weight gain under 20 pounds; 30 tops."
After 50 pounds, I started turning around on the scale at the doctor's office. Sometimes we don't want to see just how bad things are. He too made noises about weight gain and my ability to retain my husband's affections. Normally something like that would launch me into a tirade about what a sexist pig he was, but since I had Pregnant Brain, instead of getting upset, I developed a massive crush on him. After much Internet research and chatting with friends who had been pregnant before me, I found out it is very common for Women in That Condition to fall in love with their obstetrician. After all, he's the only one paying attention in that area after a certain amout of months go by, and you know the relationship has an expiration date, unlike marriage, which is supposed to last forever or at least a little while longer than a crush...
Back to people doing things better than you (me). There are always moms who are more involved in their children's school than you (I mean me, sorry). My son goes to a great school that has a very strong element of parental involvement, as long as you aren't talking about my involvement, which has been limited for two reasons:
1. I find it inconvenient to volunteer at the school given my work schedule, which you should know from my earlier posting is an inconceivably stressful 20 hours per week, and
2. Some of the other moms annoy me.
They bring snacks. They volunteer to tutor kids in the class. They go on those god-awful field trips and actually pretend to have a good time. For shit's sake, some of them actually work on fundraising for the school, a thankless task that requires tenancity and the ability to make people feel guilty and hand over money. I'm tenacious when it comes to something like getting a bartender's attention when it's three deep at the well, but getting people to donate money to my favorite cause has never been something at which I excelled. I believe that in my six months of fundraising for my law school, for example, I brought in around $500. This was especially unfortunate, since I was paid by the school for my alumni development efforts. By the time I was done with them, I think they were in the hole about 3 grand.
Anyway, I digress. I am a good mom. I am just not one of "those" moms. That's OK, because like I said, some of those women are annoying. But I do my best, and that usually means getting Jake to school every day on time and without incident, helping him with his homework, teaching him the fundamentals of a happy life (minus the grown-up fun stuff, which will come all too soon), and basically just making sure he is alive at the end of each day. And usually, I feel pretty good about my efforts. But sometimes, I am reminded that there are a lot of other women out there doing it better than me, especially when I see things like this on an internet website:
Mom Plans Dinner Menus For Entire Year
Texas mother always knows what's for dinner -- that's because she has planned it out a year in advance. Leslie Chisolm and her husband started mapping out meals for their children after trips to the grocery store became too expensive.
She said the family was wasting money on things like eating out and compulsive shopping. Chisolm said her new plan works because she always has a menu she can take to the store and she knows exactly what to stockpile when things are on sale.
View the family's menu calendar here: menu calendar here.
See, before I clicked on the menu, this story made me feel really bad about myself. Not only do I rarely plan out a meal before mealtime, I often wing it and throw in the (kitchen) towel, too exhausted from my stressful career to do anything. On those nights, we either order food to be delivered (http://www.delivereddish.com/), go to Papa Haydn, or, as we did last night, trek up to Skyline Burgers.
That's not to say I don't cook. In fact, this is sort of a cooking blog, except I never post recipes or write about cooking anymore. I do cook, often, and Jake loves most of my recipes, especially my salmon and of course what he calls The Kobe. But plan out menus a year in advance? No way. So upon first glance, a story like this can make you (me) feel sort of like a bad mom, right? Or if not a bad mom, at least flirting on the border of inadequacy, which is not pleasant.
Upon further investigation, however, I am satisfied that this woman is not my superior in the maternal skills department. If you look at the menu calendar, the first thing that springs to mind is: what is with all this possessive food? Taco's? B. (I assume this means baked, but could also mean braised, boiled or broiled I suppose) Potato's? Frito's? Many of the food items on the menu were appropriately pluralized, but these three items often got the possessive treatment. It was confounding and made me feel superior. Smug, even.
So there. Not only is the food on this menu really unhealthy and uninteresting, it is also often improperly punctuated. I win!
No comments:
Post a Comment