the chemical make up of ginger chews

Early on in pregnancy you get to find out just who your real friends are. Trader Joe's Veggie Rice Bowl, for example, is the enemy. It precipitated one of my most noxious vomiting episodes and I can't imagine ever wanting to eat it again in this or any other lifetime.

I've thought about naming all the chapters of my fabulous upcoming pregnancy journal book (wish it true, wish it true…), the food items I was able to keep down in the first trimester. What eager reader wouldn't want to dive into Chapter One: Chocolate Pudding and Root Beer, or not be tantalized by a peek ahead at Chapters 19-23: Peanut Butter on Saltines and Orange Juice, White Cheddar Popcorn and Grapes, Carrot Sticks and Cinnamon Coffee Cake, Honey Nut O's and Mashed Potatoes, and – that crazy cliffhanger – An Apple and A Hardboiled Egg, respectively.

Most of these food items were only fair weather friends it turns out. Sure they soothed for a couple days, but when things got tough most of them turned on me. I was a moaning, whiny blob of rotating cravings. Each time I found a food I could eat, I thought I was saved. Thinking we'd discovered the miracle cure for morning sickness, we'd go out and buy bottles and bottles of root beer, for example, only to discover a day or so later that if I even looked at a glass of root beer the room started spinning.

Something we bought in bulk before we caught on to the pattern of rejection were ginger chews. (My former doctor informed me once in the most sincere robotic voice she could muster, shrugging off the probes about numbness in my arms and long after the morning sickness had subsided, that some people thought ginger calmed an upset stomach. Ah. I see. How can I put this?… um, DUH! What a waste. Four friggin' years of medical school and all she had to do was ask my mom, or three out of five folks walking down the street. Aren't your people looking for you back on Planet No Shit?)

For the time that they worked, I piled these little ginger miracle chews into my pockets, carried them in my purse, stowed them in my car, … you get the idea. I was particularly fond of stuffing handfuls, desperate as an addict, into the bag I used for my teaching materials. In an attempt to just get through the end of my summer class without having to call the janitor, I snarfed these suckers before, after, and during class. In a recent rearranging project in our tiny apartment (nesting??) I rediscovered the summer teaching bag. It was completely intact, like some sort of time capsule. I hadn't cleaned it out or filed it away or tossed it altogether. There it all was, my list of grades, my extra copies of newspaper articles about immigration, my post it notes directing me to read journals and email Rosa. And the "connecting force" through all this work? The ginger chews. Gluing paper to paper, ballpoint to folder, the chews had melted into some other form of life, leaving nothing unscathed and taking no prisoners.

The wrath of the chew didn't stop there. I've found them around the house, as gummy cat toys or self-stick coasters, forming ink blot shapes I don't need to analyze. I know you've come to know me as a rational, even-tempered person, so it may surprise you to hear that I tend to yell at the ginger chews when I find them in these states of decay. I throw away what I can still scrape up with force – just to show them.

There is no winner in this ugly game. Hey, I'm normally not one to go in for misdirected dichotomous visions of GOOD and EVIL. I mean, the doctor, she wasn't all bad, she had nice sandals. And even in my predictable cast of characters who've traipsed through this blog, that is, me = negative psycho weenie, and husband guy = saintly optimist, there is sometimes a third dimension to our paper thin personalities. How about when I admitted I'd probably love my baby, or when husband guy fell asleep instead of attending to my needs?? Yeah, see, not that black and white anymore is it, huh?! In a world gone to hell and a country gone to the religious right, it's all I can do not to be swept up in the duality and the pointing of fingers, not to have the veggie rice bowl and the ginger chew absorb my own dark, projected feelings. – Oh, but there's so much instant gratification in the blame game.