The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 7
Sunday, Feb. 25
This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
Fuck. Do I really have to make Southwest Breakfast Bowls for breakfast today? Ugh. The dishes from last night are still not clean.
Melissa Hartwig shamingly writes, “This is not hard. Birthing a baby is hard.” I know what she means; I have birthed two babies. But you know what the Whole30 is like? It’s like the first month after you get home from the hospital with a new baby. You’re on this endless treadmill of nonstop baby care and feeding, and if you get off the treadmill to rest for just a little while, you end up making things REALLY hard for yourself. You are on this punishing schedule of nursing and pumping, nursing and pumping, and if you forget to pump, you might end up with mastitis, like I did once, and you’re constantly having to wash all the pump parts, which washing the Spiralizer parts totally reminds me of, and it seems like you are constantly up against having to prepare yet another meal from scratch EVEN IF you eat leftovers for some of your meals, the same way the baby has to nurse every two to three hours round the clock (but at least you don’t have to stand over a hot stove, since the milk comes directly out of your breasts). You are housebound except for errands to buy highly specialized products. Extra small nipple shields = Cascadian Farm organic fire roasted frozen sweet potatoes.
My kitchen sink has mastitis, meaning that it is completely full of dirty dishes, and my breakfast menu has another elaborate meal on it. I still have to go to the store and wash my hair today. Big Kid might be having a friend over in the afternoon, and I had hoped to go visit my mother. I don’t have any leftovers from last night’s dinner. I think that instead of the Southwest Breakfast Bowls, my breakfast will be the banana chia pudding that is still in my fridge. Lunch will be a baked sweet potato, baked in the microwave, with some ghee and salt on it, plus a few slices of bacon, prepared in a skillet. Not every meal has to be a 10-ingredient affair with a million chopped vegetables and half-teaspoons and multitasking.
When Little Kid was new, we had a visiting nurse who would come over (for free!) every few days, and she really helped. I wish a visiting cook would come and help me out here. But I wouldn’t want Melissa Hartwig to come. Something tells me a visit from her would be dispiriting.
OK, I ate the banana pudding, and then when I was drying my hair, I started feeling queasy from not having enough to eat. I started singing a version of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” that went, I’m queasy/Queasy from eating so lightly…
I made myself a microwaved sweet potato with ghee and salt and 3 slices of bacon and now I feel better. Hopefully there’ll still be time for me to visit my mom and go to the supermarket.
I did visit my mom, and stayed for a couple hours, and by the time I was ready to go to the supermarket I was starving. Shit. Why didn’t I anticipate this? Now I would have to go to the supermarket, make the 40-minute drive home, prepare an elaborate meal, and THEN eat. Fortunately there were some bananas at my parents’ house, to tide me over. I had a banana just before leaving.
I went to a supermarket near my mom’s house, in the hopes that I might find some things that are hard to find at the stores near my house. They did have these funny-looking yellow plums I hadn’t seen before, so I plopped a few of them in a bag. By the end of the shopping trip I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand driving all the way home without eating anything, so I bought a bag of cashews (this time, not cooked in peanut oil) and ate from it while I drove. I ate so many cashews that I wasn’t hungry anymore for the turkey burger I had decided while shopping that I would make. When I got home I had one of those yellow plums for dinner. And it was enough.
It was after 7pm when I got home and my husband had already fed himself and the kids, so at least I had had a break from that. It was bedtime for them, and after they had gone to sleep, my husband and I watched two episodes of “The Good Place” and I had made it through a week of the Whole30.
