…and by “fruit basket”, I mean “cookie jar”.

(Part I)

You see, this is how things work in my world – bad things happen to me, I roll my eyes and joke about them, and move on.  But in this case, I joked about it prior to it happening to me, so I’m either psychic or I’ve cursed myself.

I received a phone call yesterday – which I promptly ignored because I didn’t recognize the number – from one of my midwives (God bless the patience of the good staff at OBGYN Associates of Ithaca!).  So remember that glucose test I took a few days prior? With the orange syrup potion that I took down like a champ?  Yeah, so the results were not ‘good’.  My levels were elevated and so there’s a “risk” factor there of gestational diabetes.  That means, testing my blood daily and having to go to a dietician to feng shui my eating habits into place. Wonderful.

After finding out the news, for some reason I just felt mad. Mad at what? I couldn’t quite pinpoint it.  Mad at everything I suppose.  Mad that things had been going so well til this point, it figures SOMEthing had to go “wrong”.  Mad that I wasn’t just as naturally (read also: “lazily”) healthy as I had thought and would actually have to put work into it.  Mad I would have to prick my skin and check my blood.  Mad that I just didn’t have the time (or energy) to come home and “fix meals” like normal people.  Just, not a happy camper dammit…

But I wasn’t mad at myself and looking to blame myself for not leading a healthier lifestyle & diet which I should have been doing all along – ya know, the check-down-list baby-magazine-model-perfect oh-boy!-another-celery-stick-and-carrot diet.

Oh, no.  Let’s be honest here, and allow me this momentary lapse into selfishness that I feel I’ve worked so hard to achieve over the years:  I was mad that I felt that I had to give up something that made my life more enjoyable/delectable/indulgent/delicious.  Life was about to mess with my one cherished vice I have in this world – FOOD – and I was a brat that wanted her sugary cake and to eat it too.

Pregnancy took from me my wine; it took my sushi from me; took my cold cuts & brie cheese, my craft beer with my chili…  Pregnancy made me into the built-in designated driver.  Pregnancy says I “shouldn’t sleep flat on my back” because I could cut off blood flow to my placenta… Pregnancy stands by and laughs at me when I can’t fit into yet another pair of pants.  And now, it’s coming for my chocolate, ice cream, cookies, cereal, rice, and everything else that makes me melt into a pile of free-lovin’ foodie satisfaction.  It wants the very freedom that I thought I had to grab a chocolate peanut cluster every time I breezed past the jar in the kitchen.  It wants me to enlist.  <sigh>

Alright so now that’s out.

Now before anyone goes making the P.C. statement that “oh but you have a child to think about now, how could you be so selfish?” “it’s worth it for the health of your little one, it’s not about you anymore,” and multiple variations thereof, let me just reinforce that – yeah, I get it – and reassure you that by this morning I’d already cut the hazelnut flavored creamer from my coffee and bypassed the box of cookies for a Greek yogurt (which I’m sure will probably show up on my list of no-nos in some form too, because that’s just what happens to me apparently).  What else can I do?

At this point my internal Mommy Alarm is functioning quite nicely now that it’s had its batteries changed, and is hyper sensitive now to what gets shoved down my gullet.  And for that, I’m no longer “mad”, but more resigned to moving on to the next phase.

And the next phase is… picking up blood monitoring supplies from the pharmacy, and meeting with the dietician from Cayuga Med tomorrow to see what kind of glycemic prison cell I’ve been assigned to.

And all I want is a friggin’ chocolate peanut cluster to top off my night.

More to come…