The Bewildered Housewife

I am normally a foodie.  I appreciate the art of cookery and have rarely, if ever, asked a chef to change my meal or told them how to do their job.  At home, cooking dinner was a sort of yoga that served as both art form and meditation.  Until now.

The task of eating has become entirely too confusing in pregnancy.  While there are odd things I can tolerate, and even crave, there is a lot of my normal fare that I now insist on keeping, at minimum, outside an arm’s length. 

Take today, for instance.  My husband had the dubious honor of accepting my invitation to “grab some lunch” with me.  I had every intention of both “grabbing” and “lunching”, but the simple act of ordering an acceptable sandwich turned into a thirty minute ordeal that nearly left me in tears.  I had to reorder my lunch three times – THREE TIMES.  The first sandwich was tossed in the trash the second I opened the wrapper and smelled teriyaki.  Intolerable.  The second sandwich was literally covered in mayonnaise, such that when I stormed back to the counter with the disgusting specimen and tried to peel back the soggy bread as evidence, it kept slipping from my hands.  The third sandwich was finally made to my liking, despite the eye-rolling and looks of amazement passed between the employees: a plain piece of chicken with a pile of lettuce on half of a wheat bun.  By the time I finally bit in, my husband was already picking his teeth, and the rest of the joint thought I was crazy.

Here is a small sampling of my favorite wacky, generic guidelines that pregnant women should follow:

Eat sensibly.

Okay!  But before we commence, let’s try an experiment.  First, your job is to swallow an eleven-inch-long melon that possesses the spectacular ability to both a) navigate small crevices, especially while kicking/punching, and b) expand daily.  Observe the slowing of your intestines, your heightened sense of smell and the zest with which you recoil from broccoli.  Next, throw in a few gluten allergies and, oh heck, a little lactose intolerance for good measure.  Then, sob in fits and starts at most commercials.  Finally, YOU FIGURE OUT HOW TO EAT SENSIBLY.

A pregnant women needs only two hundred extra calories per day in her second and third trimesters.  Two hundred calories is equivalent to two rotis without ghee, a medium katori (bowl) of chole or rajma, a couple of idlis, or a couple of aloo tikkis.

Well.  Glad that’s cleared up.

Eat five or six small meals per day, instead of three large meals.

I’m confused.  Does frozen yogurt with bananas count as a “small meal?”  (Don’t answer that.)

Be sure to get 6 six servings of whole grains per day.

This is not hard to do when most of what I can picture eating is associated somehow or another with an english muffin.  It is, however, entirely counter-productive to my effort to stick to my Blood Type O diet and healing my allergy to gluten. 

Make sure to meet your expanded vitamin requirements.

Gosh, now there’s somethin that never occurred to me.  I suffer from paranoia daily that I am not getting enough calcium, folic acid, vitamin C, B-12… and then I lay awake at night wondering if I’ve gotten too much.

Goddammit.  Where’s my yogurt?