Set Point. Pretty Set. In Stone. Not Budgin'...Nope.

You may recall my conviction that my current weight is Speedybuns' fault. Whenever I have a baby, I receive a two-year gift subscription to Rubenesque R Us. We've got another six months till expiration this time around, but I thought I'd try giving Mother Nature a nudge in the Skinnygirlz direction: you know, cut back on the chocolate-snarfing and settle into a more sensible eating pattern. (Yes, again. Last year's attempt died before it was even born. Though not before I'd spent a wad on South Beach books.)

But three weeks in, it's made no difference. I stuff my face with about three thousand calories a day...I weigh 64 kilos. I eat sensible portions of sensible foods at sensible mealtimes and forgo dessert, snacks, sodas, and wine....I weigh 64 kilos. Well, fine. That's an easy choice, isn't it?

Snarf, snarf, snarf. And, oh, waiter, bring me some whipped cream to go with that, would you, hon?

Gained in Translation

For years, I've waited for my thoroughly Dutch children to get old enough to lose themselves in my childhood favorites. Our bookshelves have patiently housed these thirty-year-old beauties, some the worse for multiple readings, for ages. Narnia. Little House on the Prairie. Harriet the Spy. Nancy Drew. Dominic. Freaky Friday. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. A Wrinkle in Time. And a hundred more.

For the last couple of years, whenever the kids have complained of a bookless nightstand, I've eagerly trotted out my childhood treasures. Alas: no go. Oh, there's been an occasional glum attempt (largely to please me, I suspect) that fizzled out just pages into the story. Some inexplicably baffling somehow, the books just didn't take.

And then it hit me. By the time my children's English is sufficient to revel in the wonder, they'll be too old for the wonder to work its magic. They'll have missed Alice in wonderland, Mary in the secret garden. 

So we've started a whole new library, full of my childhood favorites in translation. 

White Woman Blues

So I'm downstairs playing solitaire, wiggling and jiggling and just hardly able to sit because there's blues wafting out of the speakers. And I ask myself, as I have so many times, how a privileged piece of whitebread like me grew up to love early Delta blues all the way down to her toes? To dream of Mississippi road trips searching for gravesites and juke joints? To stare lovingly at photographs of worn-down, beat-up, poor itinerant black men that died before she was even born, and wonder how they lived, and what they thought, and how they felt? How uppity is that?

Turns out, not all that uppity. 'Cause I got me a bit of a blues life, baby. I truly do. You don't got to be born poor and black in the early twentieth century to have a blues life. I got me a daughter dead at sixteen and a no-good alcoholic ex-husband. I got me a crazy-ass Jerry Springer mother who double-crossed me some five years back, and I ain't spoke to her since, though sometimes it breaks my honky little heart to think I'm a girl whose own momma don't even love her. And even when things is goin' good, I got me a hearty helpin' of recurring depression. That's a fancy word for the blues, baby. Don't never know when it's gonna jump up and strike, neither. (And, as you can see, I got me a visegrip on backwoods Southernspeak. Don't you just wish you could hear me talkin'? I know how y'all yanks love a Southern accent.)

'Course, it ain't all a blues life. I got me a fine third husband and three livin' children who're sweeter than pecan pie. I got me a really sweet home, baby, I do, big and pretty, and I got me some friends, and I know how to read, and I don't got to work to put food on my table. Best of all, I got me a workhorse of a body, maybe a little on the chubby side, but that don't matter in the blues. What matters is it don't never get sick, and it gets me where I wants to go.

That's what a bit of the blues is good for. It makes the rest of life, all the parts that ain't blue, seem mighty, mighty sweet.

Captive on the Carousel of Time

Contractions were getting fierce this time eighteen years ago; after twelve hours I described as bad menstrual cramps, I'd gradually been reduced to leaning against the bookcase and panting. I was some nine hours away from giving birth to my first, wildly excited to meet her and increasingly nervous about the simultaneously epic and ordinary process that would get me there. It was intense, and it took all I had to keep my head above the pain.

In the end, I was up to the challenge of birth. Four times over, I've risen to birth's demands, once seven terrifying weeks too early, once in a much-dreaded but medically necessary c-section. But that first time was textbook. Alas, my daughter's battle with glioblastoma multiforme fifteen years later was also textbook: despite radiation and chemotherapy, she died thirteen months later, just short of the average post-diagnosis GBM lifespan.

Tomorrow, we'll celebrate the day she was born. There will be no balloons and streamers; she isn't turning eighteen, and she never will. But there will be steak and salad, ice cream and jellybeans, games of Sorry and 10,000; maybe she'd have moved on to new favorites, but we'll make do with the old ones. We'll have to.