Minkgirl Muses

OATMEAL

I’m sitting in front of my favorite window this morning, enjoying the play of winter sunlight on the whitewashed house across the street and eating a bowl of oatmeal. Oatmeal is the breakfast of choice for British women (of course, they call it porridge, a word I’ve never been able to embrace, because it conjures up creepy images of soot-smudged Dickensian orphans for me.) Oatmeal is quick and easy to make for the kids and mums like to eat it too, mainly because it satisfies the four F’s: it’s filling, full of fiber, not fattening, and free! Okay, it’s not actually free, but a box of Quaker oats costs about £1.09 here – the equivalent of $2.25 – and you can get about 20 bowls of oatmeal out of it for an average cost of 10 cents a bowl. I usually doctor mine with some raisins, brown sugar and chopped apple, so throw in another 75 cents for the fancy extras, and you’ve still got a meal that comes in under a buck. But I think mainly women eat it because it helps them lose weight – all the mums I know do anyway. With a glop of oatmeal in your belly, you can go hours and hours without eating again, plus eating something that looks as yucky as oatmeal makes you feel gastronomically virtuous – it’s essentially the opposite of a chocolate bar.

Women’s bodies are such tricky things. It seems that we’re always trying to grow and shrink them according to various alchemical formulas in order to turn ourselves into pure gold. Like Rapunzel, we wake up each day full of hope that we can accomplish this obscenely impossible task, if we’re just a little more diligent, a little more faithful, a little more willing to believe that the perfect body will bring us perfect happiness.

My body has never been more imperfect, but I’ve never been more satisfied with it. First of all, I am THRILLED not to be pregnant anymore. Lord Limescale asked me recently if I feel kind of smug when I pass pregnant women on the street. The answer is “Absolutely!” I want to dance a nasty little jig in front of them while yodeling “Haha chubbo! My baby’s out and I can see my toes again!” And G-d willing, that’s it for me now – any future belly I grow will be of my own and not Nature’s making.

But I think the main source of my satisfaction is that I feel immensely PROUD of my body for what it has accomplished. It grew, carried and birthed a really healthy (and really heavy) baby for a very long time. It produced all the hormones, natural painkillers and other metabolic wonder drugs I needed to make it through these radical transformations, and it now creates and dispenses the perfect food to nourish and grow this baby into a stronger and more capable human. My body did all of this despite the fact that I regularly ate crisps, occasionally drank wine, and often forgot to take my prenatal vitamins during my pregnancy. It did all of this whether or not I got exercise or enough sleep, whether or not I was feeling upbeat and positive or exhausted and depressed. It did all of this because that’s what bodies do, that’s what they’re made for – not modeling Minolo shoes or looking good on elliptical machines. They’re made for life – living it, creating it, enjoying it.

Now lucky for me, I happen to LIKE oatmeal. I didn’t always, but somehow I’ve come around to the pleasure of a warm bowl of organic oats infused with honey, pecans and sultanas (golden raisins) eaten on a cold morning. I eat it because it tastes good to me and it makes me feel good – happily it will also keep my insides healthy and maybe make me a little svelter. As I eat my oatmeal this morning, I salute British women everywhere who are forgoing rashers of streaky bacon (the national food I think) in favor of bowls of steaming porridge. I salute women whose bodies are the very bricks and mortar of the civilization thriving around us – women who wake up each day prepared to give themselves completely to whatever task lies ahead, whether it involves poop or politics – women whose belly skin sags and shifts into mystical formations of wrinkles as they burp and cuddle their babies, women who are packing extra pounds from eating comfort food after a day spent delivering comfort to others, women whose feet are sore from kicking ass in the corporate jungle. I salute you and wish you all the kind of cozy pleasure my oatmeal has brought me this morning.

Be well.

Labels: Community Muses, Mamahood, My Favorite Things

# posted by Christine Young @ 2:55 AM