sugar                                                                                    

The taste in my mouth is so constant, so awful, so impermeable, so maddening I find myself desperately inhaling various and edible objects in effort to mask it, ameliorate it, make it go away. Lemon sours from the health food store, hard candies, salted nuts, sour lemonade, minty gum. None of it works and, if anything, eating only makes it worse-- the food that I bite into never tastes as I remember, as I imagine it was intended. I stand in the front yard talking to the contractors about septic tanks and my stomach growls, everyone looks at me I and feel it lurching, angry and empty. I excuse myself to the other side of the house, lean forward and spit. 

Half an hour later I'm standing in fuzzy slippers and a lazy tree pose, wrapped up in the warm glow of my kitchen, beating a scrambled egg and stirring hot coco, I am anxious and shaking to eat. Three bites of breakfast and one sip of chocolate finds me, yet again, hunched over the bathroom sink furiously scrubbing with toothpaste and toothbrush, marveling that so many feedback loops exist in this one body to prevent me from eating.

weakness

I went to the barn yesterday to enter in notice of my early retirement. My lesson was starting and I leaned on the rail in fleece lined boots and down jacket, exhausted and wasted and not at all interested in riding. Last week on the flat, attempting a simple pattern over white poles not even set up into jumps or standards I could barely keep my seat, panting and sweating and utterly exhausted. The high school girls smirked, my trainer's face was kind but grim. You're just too weak, she tells me. I nod and push my helmet back off my forehead, gathering my reins and pride in front of me. I'm used to running six miles in under an hour, jumping easily over grand prixe fences, effortlessly clearing expansive cross-country courses. My mind races, my ego withers. I look over to my left at the huge mirror on the long wall of the arena, pushing my shoulders back and shoving down my heels: I look the same, I think to myself, but in that moment I no longer recognize the girl looking back at me.  

guilt

I spend a lot of time feeling guilty for not being a glowing, beaming, exuberant pregnant woman, bursting with happiness. I secretly worry that the intensely visceral occupation of my own body betrays an inability within me to love, as if this simple maelstrom of hormones implicates me already as a failed mother. I cannot undo the unnescessary and ingrained connection between pregnancy and mother-hood and I feel like, if I doing this part so poorly then I am surely doomed for the rest of it. I know that pregnancy for some people is an enormously important, vital, self-affirming, life altering part of our existence. I have so many friends who are trying, others who know that they will never be able to conceive and I feel terrible inside and always. Because here I am, knocked up and ungrateful, annoyed at the ptyalism  and dysgeusia, the nausea, the GERD, the weakness, more obsessed with trying to eat than colors for the nursery.  I feel like I owe it, at least, to these women to not feel so flipping grumpy about a little bit of drool and heartburn.