Didn't I Feed You Yesterday__ A Mother's Guide to Sanity in Stilettos - Laura Bennett [45]
I have a deep-seated aversion to diets. I get nervous if my eating is restricted. If I have to have an Oreo, I have to have it. I just try to keep myself from eating the entire pack. I have no idea how women follow those diets that list specifically every item you need to eat at every meal. And frankly, if I ate the amount of food that most of those diets recommend, my ass would be the size of a double-wide trailer. I suspect my distrust of restrictive dieting is rooted in my own childhood. My parents once decided to go on the Atkins diet with the kind of fervor that made the plan so wildly popular—you had a license to eat bacon and cheese at every meal! Vegans aside, what red-blooded American wouldn’t be thrilled with those instructions? Even as a child, I didn’t see how it could be healthy, but they did manage to lose weight—my mom as much as twenty pounds, which she gained back as soon as she ate a serving of green beans. The traumatizing part for me was their breath: the chemical reaction from all-protein all-the-time was so profound that it would knock me over if my parents said good morning. I knew it was the diet because they both suddenly had the exact same odor from hell. In fact, it was so bad I can still conjure the smell today; it transports me back to my childhood home in an instant. Proust had his madeleines, I have my bacon breath.
I stumbled upon another cornerstone of the Laura Bennett Diet, something much more satisfying than food. After thirty years of three packs a day, my husband wisely decided to quit smoking. He endured two weeks of cold turkey, but I sensed he was faltering and bought him some nicotine gum. Having never been a smoker myself, I didn’t understand the draw of cigarettes, but then I tried a piece of his Cinnamon Surge 2-mg coated Nicorette. It was ambrosia. I suddenly realized that nicotine is the most amazing legal substance of the twentieth century. I was immediately, happily, and willingly hooked.
I credit nicotine gum with everything from keeping me thin to saving my marriage, but I admit it has its hazards. Not health hazards—at least, not any that I know about or want to acknowledge—but child hazards. Peter shares my affection for nicotine gum, and if he sits in any one place too long, at the computer or TV for example, he amasses a small pile of chewed pieces. I want to believe that he has every intention of disposing of these properly, but it doesn’t always happen, at least not in a timely manner. Naturally all the nicotine has been depleted, so it’s not as though the children are going to get a second-hand chew if they put it in their mouths, but still, it’s annoying.
One Sunday morning I was taking a bath—my rather long weekly bath, during which I try to catch up on personal maintenance. I heard Finn crying somewhere in the house and called in vain for someone, anyone, to check on him. There were at least six other people in the house who could have checked, after all. Receiving no reply, I left my legs half shaved and got out of the tub. I found Finn in the living room, standing on the coffee table, wearing a T-shirt and no diaper, his little genitals so completely encased in chewed nicotine gum that he looked like a baby hermaphrodite.
“Oh, my God,” I said to Peter, “Look at what he has done!”
“Yeah, I saw that,” he said.
In all fairness, had the problem been easier to deal with, like, say, the two hundredth spill of the day, Peter would have taken care of it, but this was, to say the least, a sticky situation. Well, thank God for the amazing citrus power of late-night-as-seen-on-TV cleaning products. It took half a bottle of Goo Gone to detach Finn’s little testicles from the side of his leg.
Despite the downside of gum chewing, and its inevitable move into the realm of taboo, I will continue to chew