A First Time for Everything

As odd as it sounds, I had no issues giving up gluten. I mean, I struggled through the carb flu complete with nose bleeds and vertigo and generally hated everyone for about four days, but that was it. I wasn’t tempted to eat gluten ever again. After what it did to my child? After what it did to my husband? After what it had probably done to me and would have done to Sam if given the chance? No thanks. Gluten: enemy number one.

This outlook maybe did not make me the best sympathizer when Dennis would have a struggle day, a day where he would pine for Pop Tarts, Jack in the Box tacos, and just crap that kills people in general.

Me: “Pop Tarts? You would risk your intestinal health and up your cancer chances for a faux bakery pastry that can sit on a shelf for seven years and not change consistency?”

Dennis: “I will not eat them for all the reasons you just mentioned, but if not for those reasons, yes.”

I was fairly superior in my approach to his “problem”. How could you struggle with killer food? I mean, just look at me and how easily I resist sugar (or not, but I don’t always live a self-aware life. I get tired.).

So you can imagine my amazement when my superior self got slapped down by the first trimester of my first ever gluten-free pregnancy. Smacked down and trampled might be a better description. Suddenly I was in a place where I wanted the following: seven chicken fried steaks, pigs in a blanket with cheese (oh dairy, I’m adding dairy to the offenses!), donuts from a donut shop in my hometown, and a big bowl of noodles, nasty white noodles covered in butter. I wanted to lick the bottom of the noodle bowl when I finished eating them just to make sure I got all the butter.

Dennis pointed out the GF options I had available, and I told him to jump off a cliff. I did not want a chicken fried steak rolled in Bob’s Red Mill and cooked gently in coconut oil. I wanted it rolled in regular, kill-me flour and fried in lard until it was crispy. I wanted to feed my babies lard covered death flour in the womb! I wanted it so badly I dreamt about it and woke up near tears.

Add to this that nothing I eat settles on my system well. Protein, fruit, veggies, and GF snickerdoodles all rendered me ill 15 minutes after consumption. I never suffered like this while pregnant and eating the death flour. Of course, both my kids came out with gut issues, so there's that.

Luckily, in some ways I am a rule follower. I have never smoked or done drugs.  I follow some rules, and not eating gluten is one of them. So I did not consume any of the above mentioned items. I did spring on some GF mac n cheese, a completely forbidden indulgence in our house. It was good going down; it did not do well when it landed.

I think God put me through this so I will stop being a jerk. I think I'm maybe supposed to be the kind of wife who lets my husband pine for Pop Tarts once in a while because he will never have the ones from his childhood again, even though they are not food, they are bad for many reasons besides that they contain gluten, and I have never drooled and teared up over memories of a Pop-Tart. He gets a few hours to be sad about this before I remind him there's a banana in the fruit bowl and if he so hungry all he can talk about is food, he can go shove that in his mouth. I am a work in progress. And I still want a chicken fried steak.