Read This Book

I just finished reading an amazing book called The Diary of Ma Yan. It's the real diary of a thirteen-year-old girl living in a rural area in China, that was published after it fell into the hands of a journalist on a rare visit to the region. The area is so arid the government has declared it uninhabitable. About three million people still live there, scratching out a hand-to-mouth existence. Ma Yan describes her struggles to get an education, at a tiny school a 12-mile-walk from her home, and her deep admiration for her parents, whose ceaseless exhausting labor is barely enough to feed the family. She especially admires her mother, who has a serious medical condition that causes her such pain she occasionally sits down moaning in the middle of the wheat field she is harvesting - but the family can't afford to go to a doctor. No matter how hard the parents work, they are just one breath away from starvation. Ma Yan describes trying to concentrate on her studies when the only thing she has had to eat in the past 48 hours is a single bowl of rice.

I was awed and moved by this description. I felt like the discrepancy between this family's situation and our own - which until then I would have rated near the bottom among our circle of friends, since we are living in quite a small apartment with not even a separate bedroom for the baby - was extreme, nearly obscene. I looked around at all the evidence of wealth in our apartment, the Made-in-China baby toys, the fancy artisal organic cheese in the refrigerator that we are able to afford, the overflowing bookcases, the color TV and piles of CDs we hardly even have time to listen to. We have so much food that I complain about eating too much. It made me feel sick to think that I was munching away on blueberry tart while elsewhere in the world, young mothers my age are literally starving.

I can't imagine how all-consuming and horrific it must feel when your children are in real danger of illness and death, when your whole family is really just one catastrophe like an illness or a particularly bad drought away from destitution. It reminded me of the quote: "We all cultivate illusions of safety that could fall away in the knife edge of one second." (Barbara Kingsolver)

To assuage a bit of my guilt I called up one of those international aid agencies and pledged to sponsor a child in India. I have two other sponsored children, one in Brazil and one in Honduras. It isn't very much money and it only touches a few individual lives - when what we need to address the global disparity in wealth is huge sweeping reforms and changes to the global currents of trade. But I feel slightly better. Mainly I just wanted some family on the other side of the world to feel that they weren't suffering in utter loneliness.

Very Berry Good

Last week I went blueberry picking at a local farm and brought home six pounds of berries. They were sunwarmed and so ripe and plump they almost fell off the bush and into my bucket - and into my daughter's hands and mouth (I was wearing her in a harness on my front and she was reaching for the berries with both hands). Blueberries right off the bush are really different from the ones you get in the pint boxes at the store - much sweeter.

Now I need to do some serious situps to make up for my excesses. But blueberries are healthy, you say. Yes indeed they are, but as I found out when I got home and reached for my cookbook, the best ways to eat them - after right-off-the-bush - are: slathered with cream, baked in a tart, in a pie, in a cream cheese pie, rolled in sugar, etc. I made a blueberry jam crumble and a delicious blueberry jubilee tart that I have been noshing on all week.

So far I've been able to avoid bringing any more sugar into the house, though. I did all my baking using supplies on hand. This blog keeps me honest.

The Kiddie Years

There was a magician show just beginning in the children’s room at the library when I stopped by to return some books, so we stayed and watched it. It was so lame. The magician had to fill an hour, so he spent ages just warming up the crowd, getting the kids to chant his name, pretending not to be able to hear them until they yelled it, pretending to lose his magic box of tricks, getting everyone to sing the ABC song with him, asking the kids what their favorite colors were, etc. I can sympathize with the difficulty of entertaining 40 rambunctious toddlers and their associated nannies, mothers, and young siblings in laps. But the show was so lacking in content. Finally about 15 minutes in he did a trick where he pulled a scarf inside out and it changed color. Then he went back to having the kids chant his name.

My kid stared at him skeptically for a few minutes as the show was starting, then turned her back on him and spent the rest of the time looking at the baby sitting behind us. After 20 minutes I’d had enough as well, so we left.

Suddenly I felt acutely depressed – envisioning the years ahead of children’s theme birthday parties, sing-alongs, Disney stuff, Chuck E. Cheese outings, and so on that we will have to attend. You have to do these things with kids, right? I mean, she thought the magician was dumb. But soon enough I guess she’ll be into this stuff, and I'll just have to bear with it. I have to learn the stupid Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes song and that other one about the cheese standing alone, and find out who Dora and Hannah Montana are, and take her to Jonas Brothers concerts, or she’ll think I’m so uncool she won’t even be talking to me by the time she’s a teenager.

Maybe she'll turn out to be a weird socially awkward bookish child like I was, more interested in books and horse camp than boys, and so completely out of sync with her peer group that she doesn’t even notice she’s out of sync with them. Then I can give her all the horse books I loved as a kid, and we can bond over them.

Chocolate Rain

I went out with friends to a posh new restaurant specializing in chocolate. The menu has appetizers, salads, and five-course desserts all oriented around chocolate. It's amazing what variety there is - everything from chocolate vinagrette for the salads to grilled cheese topped with melted dark chocolate to chocolate-kahlua elixirs, and of course lots of desserts like fudge bars, white chocolate cheesecake, cream pie dusted with cocoa, and fruit plates decorated with curlicues of drizzled chocolate.

Most people order the themed five-courses, but in the spirit of restraint I just got a goat cheese and beet salad (yum) and the tiramisu. It was extremely good. One of my friends ordered the same thing but took some of the tiramisu home to her boyfriend, claiming that she was feeling ill from all the chocolate and couldn't finish it. I could definitely have eaten more chocolate. I can't really imagine having eaten so much chocolate that I couldn't eat a little more. I think I just have a higher tolerance for it because I habitually consume more. I'm like a smoker who can handle high levels of nicotine coursing through my system. She's thin as a rail and eats whole-wheat sandwiches with no mayo, carrot sticks, and small helpings of everything. Her body was probably like, "What IS this stuff?"

Most of the time I'm pretty happy with the way I look and with my food choices, but lately it has been more of a struggle. I feel myself descending into a newfound antagonism with food. I used to actually prefer healthy food. I never even liked chocolate very much until recently. But now, suddenly, I can't get enough of it. I crave fatty things like potato chips and cream and butter. I went into a Firehook Bakery last week and bought one of their giant chocolate espresso cookies. It seemed very unlike me, at least the old me, who I guess was like my chocolate-lightweight friend. The new me has a post-pregnancy belly bulge and a hummingbird's keenness for refined sugar. I even wander over to the kitchen at work sometimes just to see if there's any leftover food up for grabs.

I want to be better about all this stuff, embrace the no-mayo sandwiches and stop snacking all the time. I feel occasionally disgusted with myself when I look down at my paunch. Until recently I could justify the frequent eating with, "I have to keep making milk for the baby. Now's not the time to go on a diet." But now that she's a year old and is drinking formula and cow's milk in addition to breast milk, I could wean at any time.

What makes it hard is that I don't always feel strict with myself. Other times I look at myself and think I look fine, that there's no need to be extreme. Or, I simply feel unable to resist eating one more cookie.

Well, they say the first rule when you're in a hole is to stop digging. So here's my action plan. Starting now, I won't buy any more chocolate at the grocery store - even when the white chocolate bars that I love go on sale for $1 apiece and every cell in my body is urging me to stock up. No more ice cream or pound cake either. Or brownie mix.

I figure I can coast for a while on the cupboardful of sugar that I currently have. After that runs out, it will get hard. But I know that if you do a thing routinely, you start to enjoy it (which is the vicious cycle that has turned me into such a chocolate fiend), and if you can get out of the habit of it for a while, you stop enjoying it as much. So wish me luck - here I go!

The Shirt I Didn't Buy

There’s a thrift store across the street from where I live. It’s mostly old-lady clothes - saggy stirrup pants and garish blouses that smell like mothballs. But I still browse there occasionally; I've picked up some good deals from the children’s rack where most items are 10 or 25 cents.

I almost bought one toddler-size shirt not because it was cute but because it was just so awful. It had a picture of a pelican on it, and there was a flap of plastic attached to the shirt that was the top half of his beak, so you could lift it up and look inside his mouth. Inside, there were some shrimps hanging out at tables and drinking martinis, and there was a little stage with a jazz band (the performers were also shrimps). A banner across the top of the pelican’s beak proclaimed it to be “The See Food Lounge.” Hilarious! For 10 cents, I thought, I have to have this shirt. But oh my gosh it was ugly. In the end I didn’t think I could bring myself to put anything that ugly on my child. When I went back a couple weeks later, it was gone – so I guess someone else got a kick out of it.