Smell the Onion

Is at the grocery store. Even though it is nearly 11pm. Because I was near tears over a bologna sandwich.

It is fantastic and ridiculous how much difference a lentil sized baby can make in my overall being. I am many-lentil-sized, and yet, this one particular lentil piece of me is dictating that I spend most of my day glued to the couch thinking about food. Not because I’m hungry, mind you, but because it takes the hours leading up to a meal time for me to come up with *anything* that sounds…not appetizing, really, just not vomit-inducing. So far, he likes bananas with peanut butter for breakfast pretty consistently. Lunch is a crap shoot. Today, cheese and a triscut. Yesterday super nachos with shredded chicken– and fresh fried mini donuts rolled in cinnamon and sugar. The silver bullet from my first pregnancy– coke– is a no go. Vegetable beef soup sounds good, but cutting up raw meat does not.

In case anyone wonders (and because I have recently been asked), yes, it is completely, definitely, 100% worth it. Even when the puking starts.

I had the most fantastic English professor at York– Thomas Golden. I left his classroom with a head brim-full of wonder at the universe nearly every time we met. One of the first days of freshman comp, he talked about writing with “sentient details,” and then he lined us up and asked us about our childhood Thanksgiving holidays. He was getting frustrated with our trite descriptions of how the house smelled like a simmering Thanksgiving feast, and he sighed and exclaimed “SMELL THE ONION!” Beyond the obvious application to writing with detail enough to transport an audience, I think smelling the onion is a fantastic metaphor for being really present in each moment of my life.

So, there you go.

Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate.
-Charlotte Gray

“We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.”
Joseph Chilton Pearce

“This generation of mothers labors under [the] dubious pronouncement that babies sleep best in isolation. Every infant knows better. His protest at nocturnal solitude contains the wisdom of millennia.”
Thomas Lewis, M.D., A General Theory of Love

P.S Tim fixed it so all of my beloved readers can comment without logging in.
P.P.S I am pregnant.