Recently I’ve been feeling accosted by peeps who are very intense about their new-trend diets. Apparently if I do the things their diet lifestyles ask of me, I will be cured in general, and I can skip purgatory. If I don’t, I am bad and my body will disintegrate within a matter of days into zombie flesh. It doesn’t sound quite right, but maybe I’ve been unfair in my skepticism and, I admit, occasional hostility. I’ve decided to give a range of new and old diet approaches a try over winter break, one day at a time as follows:

Day 1. Raw. We will sprout things in jars and eat lukewarm gruels. Also flower petals.

Day 2. Vegan. We’ll eat seitan roast and pretend we like it, and also try to say its name in a way that doesn’t make us think of the master of evil, while having deep insights about why vegans seem to feel such a desperate need to make their not-meat look like meat.

Day 3. Real Paleo. Not the trendsetting modern approach but hard core, I.e. no cultivated foods and only wild kill beasts. For this day I will send the kids out back with a sharp multi tool they can use to pull up random vegetable matter (using their paleo caveman sixth sense to avoid poisonous things) or to kill small game. I think the squirrels look healthy this winter. Bonus: no toilet paper.

Day 4. Supermodel. No food. One hungry day. Because skinny is the new skinny.

Day 5. GAPS (Gut And Psychology Syndrome). We each get the giblet sac from a whole (grass fed organic free range) turkey’s ass and some cracked beef ribs so we can suck out the marrows. Also sauerkraut.

Day 6. Atkins. During which I will give each of us salad greens, microscopic portions of fish, and a stick of butter on a stick.

Day 7. Carbo-Load, aka the 80’s runners diet. This is the one I’m most familiar with. Fill our 18-gallon tin tub with noodles. Dessert: bagels.

Day 8. Gluten-Free. I guess I could call this “the rice flour day,” but to honor American G-frees we’ll also eat really bad-tasting cookies made out of spelt and quinoa.

Day 9. Dessicant. Really? You haven’t heard of this one? It’s pretty new. Only dried foods. Meat jerkies and dried fruits.

Day 10. Weightwatchers. This may be especially hard for the kids. Eat whatever you want, but you better be able to spell it or draw it, because you’re gonna journal it, dammit!

Day 11. Buddy the Elf. All 4 food groups (Candy, candy canes, candy corns and syrup). Because Christmas. Bonus points if you get your Iggy on and spend the day shirtless, wiggling strangely while you croon

Candy candy candy
I can’t let you gooo
All my life you’ve haunted me
I love you soooo…

On the 12th day we’ll rediscover our humanity, end the charade, and eat an old-fashioned Korean feast, which is to say REAL food, rich in tradition and spice and vegetables; well-rounded and inclusive but reflecting moderation, especially with respect to animal flesh; and just plain tasty. AND good for days of leftovers. You can’t beat that.

We’ve had a tough few weeks in the Pennington-Cross household. It’s been so bad that I was reduced to the Naughty/Nice Threat this morning.

Nick, who’s 4, could give demonstrational seminars on how to effect ADHD on steroids. His decibel levels would put Metallica to shame. Most of his noises aren’t even human. He is exhausting me.  Meanwhile, Jesse is stressed about everything, everything, everything. Her “I hate…” Tourette’s tic is in full force.  It makes me want to head-butt her and send her to her room for a month with a chamber pot, hot pot, 10 gallons of water and some freeze-dried foods.  She could drop her waste out the window to me every day via a bucket pulley.

Instead, I take deep breaths and wonder if I could learn to act like the animal trainer from the Shedd Aquarium who proudly declares that his trainees will never hear the word “No.”  Well goody goody for you, Mr. Awesome Trainer, I’m so glad your animals live in La -La Land where no one says “no” and they’re trapped their entire lives in watery cages dreaming of a day when they’re free of their never-say-no captors.  Just sayin’.

Living day-to-day with Jesse is like Chinese water torture.  The struggle is in the details, and they’re too boring and repetitive for words, which is also what makes them so awful at times.  In particular, I’ve got some sort of post-trauma reaction going on when it’s time to get ready for school and head out the door.  Jesse has TRANSITION ISSUES.  Around this time of year, after almost 4 months in school, I’ve lost the fight.  I feel in turns morose, blank, and enraged as I search my mind for new and not-too-negative ways to persuade her to get a move on.  Once in a while it backfires in the worst way, like last week when I left her inside by herself and waited in the car with Nick.  It took her 15 minutes to come out.  She was in tears.  “Why didn’t you come when I called, Mommy?  I called and I called, like this, MOMMMEEEEE MOMMMEEEE!  I had a messy poop and needed your help to clean it!”

Huh.

This morning I slumped on the sofa with a cup of coffee, watching Jesse and Nick cheerfully run around doing their thing – sneaking the iPad and kindle, moving dinosaur figurines here and there.  I asked Jesse politely for the 5th time to go upstairs and get dressed, because we needed to leave for school in 10 minutes.  She ignored me for the 5th time and went on about her sassy-pants business.  The words came out my mouth glumly, before I could stop them.  Jesse.  It’s Christmas next week.  Do you want more presents or less?  Do you really think you’re inspiring me to go shopping for you by not listening?

Jesse deflated on cue and marched upstairs to get dressed.  She was really great this morning.  She went off to school promptly and with a smile.  Unfortunately, I’m almost certain she’s faking it.

If history serves, she’s going to spend the next 7 days until Christmas in an emotional tailspin, struggling with self-loathing and exacting her revenge on me with increasingly erratic behavior — word tics, screaming, stalling, mewling and keening, being extra mean to Nick, physically attacking her parents and the dog, sleeping even worse than usual, and so on.  Jesse doesn’t perform well under pressure.  And I should have known better than to use the naughty/nice threat.  Jesse has pitifully low self-esteem, especially around Christmas time.  Like all decent, compassionate people waiting to happen, she’s extremely critical and judges herself unworthy of generosity.

When Jesse was 4 or 5, and when we were still just beginning to wrap our heads around what ails her, we went to Little Grandma’s house for Christmas.  (Little Grandma is my mom, so dubbed poetically by Jesse years ago because she’s very petite as compared with Big Grandma, Anthony’s statuesque English mother.)  Christmas morning came.  Jesse wouldn’t leave the bedroom.  Anthony and I encouraged her to go on out to the hearth to see what Santa brought.  She refused and acted very anxious, but finally she left.  Uncle Mark observed the rest.  Jesse tiptoed into the living room and saw that Santa had indeed come and left toys.  Instead of yelping for joy and running to them, she paused and sighed in relief.  “This means I HAVE been good…”

I was wretched when Mark told me.  I hid in the bathroom and wept to think of my wee child struggling under such duress.  I decided to stop talking about Santa’s naughty/nice list except in the most optimistic terms. Now when Jesse worries aloud about it, we ask rhetorical questions like, “Is it really possible for any child to be sooo naughty that Santa won’t bring her anything?”  “Has Santa ever really met a naughty child?”  Jesse responds dutifully, “Noooo,” but you can see that her head is spinning out the alternative answer.  I think she may also just be creeped out by Santa, like lots of kids.  A couple years ago, the Target checkout lady asked Jesse if she likes movies about Santa.  Jesse thought a moment and answered, very seriously, “I don’t like chubby men.”  I get it.  This particular red-clothed chubby man watches her from afar, exempted for some reason from stranger-danger rules, evaluating her actions according to a code of conduct that hasn’t been made clear to her, planning his supernatural entry into her home and sanctuary, his judgment weighing on her mind more and more as Christmas approaches, like the executioner approaching the gallows.  He’s a menace.

Hence my disappointment in myself for making the Naughty/Nice Threat this morning. Jesse can’t handle it at all.  In my defense, I didn’t refer explicitly to Santa or to any list, but Jesse’s a smart cat and will easily move from my words to Santa’s list.  I blew it.  Add me to the naughty list.  I’ll take myself off it later today after I perk up, get my cheerful grumpy back on, and think of a way to help Jesse feel better about the threat of Christmas giving.

I married a no-nonsense, straight-talking man. We met as sophomores in college and, other than a year off for good behavior after we graduated, we’ve been together ever since.

Over the years, Anthony has done things and laid lines on me that would have sent many women running, especially when we were in college. He had trouble remembering my name for at least a year. When in doubt he would call me by his dog’s name, Dusty. He’d defend himself: “I love Dusty a LOT, so it’s actually a compliment.” He used to follow me into the restrooms in the dorm, wait until I was peeing, and then splash ice cold water from the sink on me over the stall door. He thought that was hilarious. This may be an apocryphal memory, but I’m pretty sure the first time he told me he loved me was after just such an incident, when I came out of the stall cursing him. He laughed as he announced, “I love you!” Years later he told me he actually meant it, but at the time I assumed he was mocking me. “Fuck you,” I shot back as I marched out.

Before I learned better, I occasionally asked Anthony if he thought I was beautiful. He would answer every time, “I think you’re really really good looking.” At first I would push back. But don’t you think I’m beautiful? How can you love me if you don’t think I’m beautiful? Unphased, he would reply, “I think you’re really really good looking, AND I love you.” I once asked him which part of my body he loved best. He looked at me appraisingly and answered with a straight face, “your calves.” He would tell me I had long legs. For a short person. He once explained to me that, although other women might be better looking than me from far away, I was better looking up close. He disliked most of my haircuts. He hated my eyeglasses so much that one weekend he and a good friend hijacked me to the mall and basically forced me to get new glasses. For years, Anthony’s endearing nickname for me was Dumbelina. He would say, “how can someone as smart as you be so stupid?”

And yet we never dumped each other.

I used to have trouble understanding how I could so love a man who wasn’t willing to see me more perfectly. As far as I was concerned, I embodied mediocrity in Anthony’s eyes. So it was even harder for me to understand why he claimed to love me, when I was far from any ideal. I felt like the ugly woman in Shakespeare’s sonnet #130, except my man spoke in short sentences that didn’t rhyme. It puzzled and frustrated me.

I understand better now the muddled expressions on Anthony’s face when he was forced to engage with me on what he must have perceived as such shallow and vain interrogations. The questions I asked Anthony about my body were STUPID. I was basically encouraging him to objectify me, to dumb down his love for me into a 2-dimensional code of alleged-beauty — especially lame because I was such a consummate slob. Like a fish in water, and like so many American women, I couldn’t see the way this demented culture made me value my visual body more than the rest of me, even as I educated and empowered my mind and embraced core feminist ideals. I was fortunate that Anthony never let me drag him down that path.

Having children at 38 and 42 has done a real number on my physical self-image. I’m overweight; I’m headed toward 50 and I don’t get enough exercise or plastic surgery; my belly has that post-childbirth LOOK, sort of squinchy and blobby. As for the belly bit, I was whining ad nauseum about it one evening. Anthony interrupted. He told me gently, sweetly, that it doesn’t look ugly, it just looks like motherhood. He patted my gut, the way you might pat a good dog’s head. It was a deep expression of love, Anthony style. After 28 years together, I knew that right away.

But come on. That didn’t stop me from rolling my eyes in disgust, grunting something rude in return, and waddling out of the bathroom to go put some pants on.