Hungry by Sheila Himmel Read Free Book Online

porch, we sat in our childless living room and laughed. When spoiled children dropped food to a restaurant’s floor and got up and down, up and down, we clucked disapprovingly. Why couldn’t their parents get through the grocery store without a breakdown, holding up the checkout line at rush hour?
    There seemed to be a lot of pandering to children’s tastes. An actual conversation, overheard in a grocery store, went like this:
    “Chelsea, do you want a banana?”
    “No!”
    “Do you want an apple?”
    “No!”
    And so on, to everything else on offer that day, until the exasperated mother cried, “What do you want?”
    “I don’t want what I want!”
    We were to have our own versions of this conversation, but before having children we could float above the fray, like Spock on Star Trek , thinking if not saying about other people’s child-rearing: “This is highly illogical.” Any children of ours, we knew, would eat everything, and they wouldn’t have fits in restaurants.
     
     
     
    Early on, Ned and I discovered that the best result in splitting household tasks was to focus on areas of competence, and Ned had the cooking competence. He also liked to shop for food. It gave him a sense of budgetary control and ensured we had on hand what he wanted to cook. We loved trying new foods, at home and in restaurants.
    In my dreamscapes of maternity leave, I envisioned six months of sitting on a park bench, one hand holding a book, the other on the stroller where “the baby” slept. Our view of taking kids to restaurants was only slightly more realistic. If we trained them right, wouldn’t they just sit there and smile?
    Baby boomers got the idea that we could control everything that happened to our children, an ego trip foolishly accepted by each successive wave of parents. Perhaps the economy will put a dent in this overconfidence, but we assumed we were the captains of our family ships, much more so than our own clueless parents had been. Certainly we were to be totally in charge of what our children ate. And if they didn’t eat well, it was our own fault. Dinner became a show of skill as well as love. Working women brought the discipline we’d honed on the job—control, cause and effect, retraining—to the job of feeding. Books and experts were consulted. During my sister’s pregnancy, her bedside table always had a foot-high pile of books on childcare.
    Right off the bat, there were skills involved with breast-feeding. Don’t let the baby nurse too long on one side. Do consume brewer’s yeast, helpful for the letdown of milk. Breast-feed for at least six months—or risk frequent colds, allergies, and low achievement. Bring a breast pump to work, despite there being only a restroom stall to use it in, because the less formula the better.
    And then came the complications of solid foods, grown or manufactured by strangers. Solid foods were “introduced” to your child, as if they were new friends. Or enemies. As guardian at the gate of allergies, the wise parent introduces one food at a time. That way, if the child breaks out in hives, you know the culprit. The high performers of parenthood jumped through blenders, grinders, and strainers to make their own baby food.
    I focused my anxieties on giving birth to a healthy baby. That is, eating well, sleeping a lot, and taking a Lamaze class, which provided breathing techniques we actually used, but also new things to worry about. One mother-to-be had heard that if you didn’t push properly the baby could go back up the birth canal. The rest of us snickered silently at her naivete, but at least one of us was thinking, “I really don’t know what’s going to happen. My body has never turned inside-out before.”
    It was the dawn of reality for many of us, that life wasn’t practice, with infinite opportunities for do-overs, and that having a baby wasn’t just another thing to try, like being a vegetarian. Childbirth classes drive home the awesome