Sick of the Morning

They call it "morning sickness" like they expect it to go away after 11:59 am. But like most things this is a misnomer. Morning sickness can occur at any time during the day.

When we found out we were pregnant, we started reading up on things. It's hard to weed through the quacky material and get to sensible advice, so I ended up with the statistic that almost 80% of women experience some morning sickness, while my husband had read that only 50% did. We argued about this for a little while and then I finally said, "Well, I still think we should have saltines in the house. That way we'll be prepared."

So we bought saltines. This is basically the advice our knowledgeable, worldly pregnancy experts give. They don't know what causes it, they don't know what helps it, they don't know why it goes away. Here, dear, just eat some saltines.

It started at a worktime lunch where I was gamely munching on a chicken caesar salad. I have chicken caesar salad every day at lunchtime. I like chicken caesar salad. Normally. But this day the salad tasted like cardboard with dressing, and I ate less than half of it. I saved it for the next day, and around 10am (when I normally start thinking about the lunch I will have two hours from now) I thought about my perfectly good chicken caesar salad, and felt instantly nauseous.

This is what they mean by "morning sickness"?

I cast around in my head for something that was not insanely gross like chicken caesar salad, and settled on a local Mexican restaurants side order special called simply "rice and beans." It's rice, beans, and cheese, all nicely cooked up and melted together. Together with some chipotle sour cream, it's a delight. This odd concoction was okay for me to swallow, while lettuce and chicken had become utterly unpalatable, to the degree that the mere thought of it made me sick to my stomach.

This was my new relationship to food. The choices I had became extremely narrow, and quite specific. I asked my husband to bring home hot and sour soup from the chinese restaurant, and he, deciding on his own to be creative, brought home seafood hot and sour soup instead of regular. That sent me on a downward spiral. It wasn't really all that different, but it was not what my narrow palate could eat. And this wasn't the famous cravings of pregnancy, but rather my settling on a food which didn't make my stomach curl when it was thought of.

Also, about this saltines thing. Don't bother. Saltines have nothing to them which make them the miraculous morning sickness cure. The only things that got me out of this slump was real food, and by real I mean; meat and potatoes. Protein. Carbohydrates. Stuff you aren't supposed to eat on a regular, singular basis.

By now the morning sickness has faded. The narrow palate hasn't. And so far I think I've kept my secret pretty well. I've switched my lunchtime meal from chicken to steak tips, caesar dressing to italian, and though my lunch mates have noticed the change, they haven't gotten suspicious about the cause. They'll know, of course, soon enough. Sooner or later, it'll become obvious. If they have the hindsight to look back at my sudden change of eating habits, the women in the group might do a mental "Ohhhhh!" But by then the scenery will have changed, I suspect. We'll have other fun symptoms instead.