Sugar Whore

I’ve been eating a lot of sugar lately.  I mean, a lot.  Cake for The Boy’s birthday, cake for my birthday, cake for my husband’s birthday, which was just last week.  And my friend, Nikki, who lives in Connecticut?  She baked me chocolate peanut butter cake balls and chocolate peppermint cake balls and peanut butter cookies with chocolate chunks, and then she shipped them all to me along with a sack of caramel corn and chocolate-covered peanut butter-stuffed pretzels.  And my friend, Lisa, brought me pumpkin cookies with chocolate chips.  And my friend, Brian, came by with a vanilla cupcake with pink frosting.  And at some point I had to start freezing things because I simply couldn’t keep up, even though I tried very hard.

I like sugar.  I get very, very excited when I see cookies with colored sprinkles.  I feel a little thrill when I hear the words “cinnamon crumb.”  I bought a hot chocolate sugar scrub to use in the shower and I’ve come this close to tasting it.

Now, I understand the physiological reasons for my craving.  I get that the more sugar I eat, the more I’m going to want.  But I’m also dealing with some hereditary baggage.  I come from a long line of sugar lovers:  a grandmother who rolled out her cookie dough in powdered sugar instead of flour, a father whose appetite as an infant surpassed his mother’s milk production and who was consequently given sugar water to supplement.  Sugar water.  And while this might make most of you recoil in horror, I think:  oh, lucky, lucky baby.

And then, of course, there’s stress and you know I have stress.  And even though yoga and Nia and writing all help me cope, there’s really nothing quite like a chocolate cupcake with cream filling at the end of a hard day.

So last week my husband went out of town.  For six days.  And when my husband goes out of town, particularly over the weekend, it’s not as if The Boy says, oh yay, now I get quality time with Mommy.  Instead, he’s bitter and pissed and prone to middle of the night awakenings which make me cry.  Because I like my sleep almost as much as I like my space.

So I didn’t enter Day One with much enthusiasm.  And in a fit of idiocy I’d invited friends over for drinks three nights in a row, which meant that every day I was buying wine and vacuuming up dog fur when I should’ve been writing.  And then after the first night of drinks, when I went to check my email before bed, someone had left a comment on my blog telling me that I’m boring and pretentious and directing me to a message board where other people had said the very same thing.  And that in and of itself didn’t bother me too much because I’ve been writing for a long time and by now my skin’s pretty damn thick.  Plus I was fairly amused that I’d generated so much emotion that someone actually got off the message board so they could come to my blog and leave me a negative comment.

But what creeped me out was that this was a mother’s message board and that meant someone’s mother was operating with malicious intent by night and then getting up in the morning and, say, making her kids breakfast.  And so then I was just depressed about the state of the world in general and the fact that this is the sort of person The Boy will have to deal with when he grows up.

And then on Friday The Boy’s school had a noon release for no reason I could discern.  And really the noon release was an 11:30 release because Friday was also Inventor’s Day and the children had the opportunity to display whatever projects they’d been working on.  And if they didn’t want to participate they didn’t have to because The Boy’s school believes that children should never be forced to do anything, a sentiment which makes many members of my family craaaazy.  By Friday morning The Boy still hadn’t decided if he wanted to display his fighter plane.  And Good Mother really wanted The Boy to participate, but Bad Mother was sort of hoping he’d bow out because she wanted the extra thirty minutes to herself.

Bad Mother lost that round but bought herself some luck when The Boy was invited to a friend’s house later that day.  And when I got back to the house afterwards I should’ve started cleaning up because I had friend #3 coming over after The Boy went to bed.  But what I really wanted–what I really, really wanted–was chocolate chip cookies.

Actually, I wanted a little taste of the dough.

And so instead of vacuuming up the dog fur or wiping up muddy paw prints I mixed butter and sugar and vanilla and licked the beaters.  And I had the iPod cranked and I was dancing around and a front had blown through and the kitchen window was open and the wind was deliciously cold . . .

And then I tripped over the big white dog.

And the bowl flew from my hands.

And the precious cookie dough, when I picked up the bowl, lay in a sad little mound on the floor.

With a gasp of dismay I scooped it up and put it back in the bowl.  And then the big white dog was snuffling through the remains and I wanted to cry and cry because I was so, so jealous of the big white dog.  I mean, the dough’s the very best part.

And so I stood there, biting my lip and blinking back tears and feeling sorry for myself.

And then I looked in the bowl.  And I couldn’t see any dog fur.  So I took out a spoon.  And I couldn’t taste any mud.

So I ate a couple of spoonfuls and felt much better.  And my friend, Robert?  He said the cookies were great.  He even took a bunch home with him.

And that’s a good thing, because my jeans feel alarmingly snug.

Copyright © 2009  Jennifer Hritz  hritzontheedge  All Rights Reserved