Morning sickness

Sometimes, food takes on extra significance, that bears no relation to its quality or how hungry you are.

On planes, for example. Why is the trolley starting at that end? Will they run out of the chicken? Can I have your bread roll?

At weddings. We’re standing in the wrong place for the canapés – we must ditch these people and get over by the door, in the direct flightpath of the waiters. Mm hmm, uh huh, you met the bride’s mother on a cruise around Canada – why aren’t they coming over here, don’t they realise we’ve been here almost an hour and only had two? Oh god, those prawns look really nice, we’ve only had honeyed sausages so far, will there be enough left, don’t give them any more they’ve had loads, THAT MAN’S TAKEN TWO!

Logie has formed a habit of having a banana in the car on the way home from nursery. It gets him into the car more quickly, it’s pretty healthy, and it’s one of the few words where I am confident we are describing the same thing.

I peel it down two-thirds of the way, so he can eat it like a monkey. Sometimes there is a lot of shouting from the back when he needs the rest peeling, and it’s a tense few minutes til we can get to a red light (okay, sometimes just a traffic jam, surely policemen with children would understand) and I can turn around.

Sometimes he just sticks his snout into the bottom and manages to slurp the rest out using purely the pressure of his hand. Sometimes he continues to be so hungry that he starts nibbling the peel – though that might be because it gets a good reaction from me.

On Monday, disaster struck. There was a brown bit two-thirds of the way down and the banana snapped. He was inconsolable. This was tragedy like no other. His life was basically ruined.

I explained that it would taste just the same. I gouged out the brown bit with my fingers, despite not having checked I had something to wipe them on first. He wailed “NANAAAAAA!” all the way home at top volume, like someone outside a courtroom. Tears coursed down his face. Interestingly, when we got back, he had actually eaten most of it, which is puzzling and impressive as I don’t recall the noise dropping below a constant ten decibels at any point.

My relationship with food has had a new light shone on it in recent months because I am pregnant, and have been suffering from dire nausea. Morning sickness isn’t entirely accurate because it was pretty much all day, and I didn’t vomit – unless dramatic retching in the streets counts.

Happily, it is beginning to subside. Life is returning to normal. But it’s been very hard not writing about it, because it’s been so overwhelmingly the biggest deal in my life, and I am not good at keeping my own secrets. But I didn’t want to jinx things.

So basically, every post in the last 13 weeks has felt like a sham. When I started this blog, it was meant to be about how one’s baby seemed ill all the time, and then you got it too. With a shocking but moving personal twist about depression and ECT. But then the pregnancy nausea started and the thing seemed tailor-made. And I couldn’t write about it.

In fact, I couldn’t do pretty much anything. Like be cheerful, or do any effective work, or anything that didn’t involve staying perfectly still.

I went to the GP. She gave me some anti-histamine pills. I felt like a complete wimp – everyone else seemed to have had it (usually much worse, they pointed out graphically) but they coped with it much better. Permanent nausea began to feel like anxiety. I slept badly. I did a couple of near faints.

I saved up lots of funny things to say about it, and anecdotes to recount, when I was safely in my second trimester and could write about it. I have forgotten them all. Apart from the nice foreign man whose wife made him give me his free vitamin water on the way to watch Olympic tennis at Wimbledon. I’d been doing the retching. I said thank you so much, it’s because I’m pregnant. He shrugged and said something unintelligible that I nonetheless understood perfectly to mean ‘I know. It’s obvious. My wife was a complete drama queen too and if I don’t give you this bottle I’ll never hear the end of it.’

But food-wise it was very interesting. Because obviously when you feel sick you don’t want to eat. So for a few weeks, I didn’t, and lost a few pounds. And then I realised that eating something did sometimes make me feel better, albeit briefly. Either because of the blood sugar, or the distraction, or the way gluttony is hardwired into me.

So I have been on carbfest like no other. Biscuits, toast, pasta, pizza, baked potatoes. Thinking about food, and putting lots of it in my mouth, was strange when I felt so sick. But somehow I managed.

But, thank the Lord, it is fading, and I am getting my mojo back. In the scheme of things, it is just a broken banana incident. The important thing to remember is that we are incredibly lucky to have got pregnant again so quickly – if at all – and the new bean is due in March. And an excuse to eat for two.