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Sunday, December 8, 2013

The Muddled Male

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

Starvation

         My father was seven years older than my mother.  They met when she was eighteen, and married when she was nineteen and a senior in high school.  It was 1934, and knowing what people would assume, they slipped away from family and friends to get married privately in Pocatello.  My dad gave the Justice of the Peace an extra five dollars to keep the marriage secret because my mother wanted to finish High School and knew that she might not be allowed to do so if the word got around that she was married.  When the two of them arrived back in Ogden they found that in spite of dad’s five dollar bribe, the facts of their marriage had already appeared in the local newspaper.  It wasn’t long before word got back to the School Board who immediately made the obvious assumption and ruled that my mother would have to leave school.  Knowing that the Board was wrong, and hoping that they would listen to reason, she asked for a formal hearing.  There she stood, a shy teenage girl trying to convince a bunch of old men that their decision had been both wrong and unfair.  Somehow they were convinced and agreed to let her finish her senior year.  I tell you all this to prepare you for my arrival one year later. 

         My mother, still a young girl but now a High School graduate, was preparing to have her first baby.  And she was doing so with no previous experience at mothering.  She came from a broken home with her only siblings being two younger brothers who were tough as Hobnails and always into mischief.  Not only did her brothers feel that they did not need mothering by an older sister, they were dead set against it because being chaperoned might restrict their opportunity to get into trouble.
 
          And so my mother found herself with a brand new baby, me, but without any idea as to what mothers did.  There was no Similac or baby formula in those days.  There were two choices, cow’s milk or mother’s milk.  They didn’t have a cow, and they couldn’t afford baby bottles for feeding, so they chose mother’s milk.  As I grew and began to need solid food the challenge to feed me escalated because I suddenly began to crave French fries even though I had never seen one, tasted one, or even knew that they existed.  Beyond French fries and mother’s milk I was excessively picky with an innate distrust of cooked beets and pureed liver.  Several months later, after she and my dad scraped together enough money to take me to a doctor for a checkup, she was embarrassed to find that I was malnourished.  I tell you this to prepare you for my adulthood several years later 

            I was a cautious Engineer even as a youngster and so to make certain that I never embarrassed my mother again by being malnourished I strived to be over-nourished.  My diet included plenty of my favorite elixir of life, French fries, along with hamburgers, milkshakes, and more than enough sweets to make certain that my diet was well rounded.  I became so nourished that before long I was carrying 200 pounds on a 5’-8” frame.  That is the point at which Ann, my wife, became Ann, my mother.  At first it was the simple things she restricted like cutting back on French fries and milkshakes.  Then she began to read labels and, like my friend the Un-muddled Mathematician who collects numbers, she never saw a calorie that she didn’t count.  Then her focus shifted to things like my favorite pudding and diet pop whose contents include hard to pronounce words like Aspartame, Tetrapotassium Pyrophosphate, and Phenylketonurics.  “The evil deeds of conspiring men,” she called them.  My use of multiple cans of diet pop for hydration bit the dust because it contains Phosphoric and Malic acids which are bad for my teeth, she claims.  Drink water instead of pop, she always tells me.  It is natural and is much better for hydrating your body for a proper fluid balance than is diet pop. 

Now she has a vendetta against Hydrogenation.  Saturated Fats are bad enough by themselves, she tells me over and over, but Hydrogenation also turns saturated fats into trans-fats, which are bad for anyone’s diet.  Now I am afraid to tell her that water (H2O) is just hydrogenated Oxygen for fear that my diet will be down to one slice of low calorie, sugar free, gluten free, one hundred percent whole wheat bread with a small glass of water.  Without the water.
 
 

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