Today started out roughly - everyone else was in a good mood, but I woke up grumpy and barky at every little thing (crumbs on the living room floor, laundry not thrown in the hamper, but right beside it, being touched - for some reason, since becoming pregnant, I cannot stand being touched much...).  Anyway, instead of staying home this afternoon inflicting grumpiness on everyone else, I snuck out to the local bookstore and enjoyed a full hour of browsing before Kirk had to go back to work.  I read random cook books and healthy living books and pregnancy books and random works of fiction. 

There was one pregnancy book that really stood out for me because it had a section on women's actual feelings surrounding weight gain and pregnancy, and how, if millions of women experience disordered eating, so too should we expect women to still have disordered eating, or feelings around eating, during pregnancy.  I suffer from this a lot - never having been a full blown anorexic or bulimic, I have been borderline on both most of my adult life.  Since Anja was born, this translated into secret binge-ish type eating (of which almost every member in my family does).  It makes me miserable, I know it makes me miserable, but I can't always stop.  I know I should stop.  I know I don't want a big baby and I don't want the weight that came with Anja.  So, I did feel guilty and inadequate when my midwife chastised me at our last visit for Christmas weight gain of 7 lbs in a month.  What people don't always understand is it is not always a matter of control.  And Christmas is not always a particularly joyous time for me (although that is changing with our own Christmas traditions).  Anyway, I have been doing well since the chastising visit, for the most part, but it was so refreshing to read that I am not alone - that weight gain in pregnancy, while I know it's healthy, carries all sorts of emotional resonances for many women and we aren't all perfect all the time, even if we are pregnant. 

Also great is that I picked up a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.  I know I'm a little behind the times on this one, but I read the first few chapters over a Green Tea Latte and feel a great affinity with her, and also am so thankful to find a best seller that also contains good, good writing.  One of the questions she asks herself soon after her divorce is "what are the things that make you happy? That you want to do?"  While reading, I had a mini-epiphany that I can still do things that make me happy and be a good mother.  For instance, knowing I was a grumpy pot, knowing I just needed one quiet hour, and knowing that I love looking at books and doing something about it made me exquisitely happy and able to come back home and not bite everyone's heads off for every single word they utter.  What's remarkable is that this choice has probably always been available to me, but for whatever (ummm, well my own mother) reason I've always associated motherhood with consigning yourself to the fact that everything must be a sacrifice.  Many things are sacrifices, but who does it serve if you sacrifice the little things or the big things that make you happy?

What also made me feel connected to Gilbert's book was the fact she found a Louise Gluck book in Rome, and last week I pulled a Gluck book - Wild Iris - off my shelf and was amazed.  I'm not sure of the copyright issues here (I could really quote the whole book), but here is one poem that spoke.  Like many of the poems, it is told from the perspective of a flower:

Lamium

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do:  in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it.  I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like somone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don't all require
light in the same degree.  Some of us
make our own light:  a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.

Louise Gluck

I also should  have gone to the store and bought something for dinner other than peanut butter and banana quesadillas and its-a-disaster-if-we-don't-have-any yogurt, but I didn't.  I simply didn't want to.  And no one is going to die with a peanut butter quesadilla tonight, even if we did have waffles last night.  Anyway, I know I posted yesterday, but wanted to share these things.  And that I bought the recently published L.M. Montgomery's The Blythes are Quoted (oh, I do feel slight guilt about the $40, but our library fines are currently over $200, so perhaps its better economically to buy the books), and am looking forward to reading and discussing. 


One last thing:  as I write this, Anja is watching Dora.  Two episodes.  Let me explain:  we have no TV.  Anja hardly ever watches anything except if she is sick (which is how we got into the Dora kick again this week).  I always got a funny feeling when I saw kids zone out of the world in front of the TV and when I do it myself.  And Dora is probably the least offensive of the bunch.  However, I do feel a bit queasy and eerie when she responds so heartily to Boots and Dora's questions.  "What did you like best about our adventure."  "Um, I liked giving the lollipops to the kids."  Oh, oh, oh.  Surely playing with other kids would be better then forcing my daughter to socialize with an animated character.  On the other hand, it lets me write this post, which means I will also get time to write something else this evening and possibly to yoga.