Let us eat

So my main new year's resolution is to not be such a food marm.

"Food marm" is actually kind of a mild description of what I seem to be turning into. "Food Nazi" has been bandied about my home. "Self-righteous bitch" comes to mind, as well as "Overbearing killjoy".

Through a combination of wanting to eat healthier for my pregnancy & baby, and then reading up on the local food movement that's sweeping the white, middle-to-upperclass crowd (that's me!) I've been kind of fixated on learning about nutrition and being more mindful about what I eat. Which is good, but...If you've seen Dogtown and Z-boys, Skip Engblom talks about how as skaters, they really had to be able to execute their moves with style to be considered good. Even if they could do a lot of crazy skating tricks but looked bad doing them, they would get no respect. And the way I'm going about changing my family's eating habits is starting to get a little stank.

When I was pregnant it felt good to channel all of my fear about my changing body & the explosive way all pregnancies end into exercise and a good diet. I didn't worry so much about staying away from bad foods, I took every opportunity to put foods in me that I thought would make me strong and nourished and would make good building blocks for little baby organs and baby hair and baby fallopian tubes. But somehow since then things have gone south. I've talked a little about my rigidity in introducing foods to anonybabe. I went all Exorcist on my husbands ass when I thought his mom gave Gerber applesauce to our then six month old daughter, because it wasn't organic and it wasn't on my food introduction plan. That was warning flag #1. (It was actually more like flag #521, but it was the first one that got my attention). Then warning flag #20022 was when anonyhubby was buttoning up his coat recently to go to the grocery store and I told him I'd like to go to and he hesitated mid-button. "If you go, then I can't buy any junkfood" and he truly looked disappointed. He can't buy junkfood in front of me? Something is wrong. I hate that my husband drinks so many Dr. Peppers, but I hate it more that I give him the stink eye every time he does it, and I hate it more than that that he feels he needs to go in another room to drink his DP in peace. There's a lot more to life than eating healthy. I believe that how you interact with food is very indicative of how you interact with life, and this whole thinking that I can control all bad things in life by eating good foods is just neurotic.

So I need some food therapy. I don't need junk food, but I need to be open to some less-than-perfect eating. I need to enjoy food again. I need to let my husband work out his own food issues and accept the fact that my daughter is going to be seeing a lot worse things than her parents slugging down sweets, and that she'll manage to work things out. At least I'd like her to have a mother that she can openly eat her pixie sticks in front of.