Dessert and marital deceit

During Graham's first month out of the womb our family received benefits through the Woman Infant Child (WIC) program. We applied because we were unprepared for my inability to produce breastmilk and especially unprepared for the resultant cost burden of infant formula, which was sharper in the first month than it is now—even though Graham eats more now than he did then—because we spent the first month feeding Graham with a supplementary nursing system, a contraption that allows a non-breastfed baby to nonetheless feed at the breast and that can only—this is the WIC-related part—be used with ready-to-feed (already liquid) formula, which costs significantly more than the powdered formula Graham now eats. So that's why my family stole your tax dollars:  because my boobs were broken and I wanted to trick Grahamie into thinking they weren't long enough for us to bond through meals eaten at the breast.

WIC applicants must meet with a WIC nutritionist in order to be granted food or formula vouchers. I'm not sure what the purpose of the meeting is. (The WIC office I visited also had among its staff lactation consultants, and the organization, along with everyone else in the world, exhorts mothers to breastfeed, so you might assume that the nutritionist is there to reveal the tenets of a healthy diet as a way of promoting the production of quality breastmilk. That's what I assumed at first, but I can think of two facts that seem to undermine that assumption:  1. WIC vouchers for food entitle the mother to the "cheapest brand" of eggs, milk and cheese, and cheap often means, among other unhealthy things, hormone-ridden; and 2. I'm a pretty healthy girl—I consume the right amount of fruits and vegetables daily; I am careful to eat iron-rich leafy greens and take iron supplements, knowing that womanhood and vegetarianism make one at risk of anemia; I assiduously track how many grams of protein I intake each day; if I go to a restaurant with a meat-eater and she says, "You can get a salad," I am nutritionally intelligent enough to regard my co-diner as a nutritional dummy … All of which is to say:  I don't think poor nutrition is primarily to blame when a mother doesn't produce breastmilk, so I doubt a nutritionist's ability to solve production problems.

The WIC nutritionist grilled me—like I was cheese sandwich—about my eating habits, which, as I just finished bragging, are pretty good … if you overlook the fact that I eat dessert every night, unless I have a drink instead, and, to be honest, on some occasions it's an and/both situation rather than an either/or one. And when it is "just dessert" it's still not actually just dessert:  I usually have a giant block of chocolate (cake, brownie, or a candy bar) and a glass of milk, and until a few months ago, I drank whole milk, because, despite the health nut identity I affect, the truth is that I am a fucking glutton. 

I figured the WIC nutritionist would give me a talking to once he found out about the dessert damage I willingly, eagerly do to my body daily, but he didn't. He gave Aron one! He stopped speaking to me altogether, and he looked at Aron and said, "At night when she wants a snack, just slice up some fruit, toss it in a blender and make her a smoothie." And then what? Shove me to the ground and plug my nose to stop my breathing until I'm forced to open my mouth? A smoothie? Be for real! The truly insulting part of all this is that the nutritionist was attempting to convince Aron that a smoothie could be comparably satisfying to a brownie and a mug of whole milk. Yeah. Right.

The meeting with the nutritionist took place almost half a year ago, and I had every intention of disregarding his advice and never thinking of his cruel face or preposterous suggestion again. But as Aron took our week's worth of recycling out Sunday night for collection Monday morning, he noticed that our recyclables included two pints—rather than the usual single pint—of ice cream. There were, however, no wine bottles in the recycling. Aron usually has a glass or two of wine a night, but this week he replaced wine with ice cream. Which is fine. But now he wants to replace ice cream with fruit smoothies, which he plans to make with flax milk—not even yogurt!—and berries.

"Please, don't take the sugar out of our marriage," I pleaded. "There's sugar in fruit," Aron replied cold-heartedly. He's being very clever about it:  he's making smoothie pops, like a smoothie but on a popsicle. I guess that's cool. I'm not going to eat a smoothie at night, because I associate smoothies with exercise and worry the "dessert" would interfere with my sleep in a Pavlovian sort of way—not that I've ever actually eaten a smoothie before exercising, but it's certainly an idea that exists in pop culture, and it's wise not to underestimate pop culture's influence on an ordinary human life. But in the interest of solidarity, as Aron eats his smoothie pop tonight, I will support him by foregoing my block of chocolate and having instead a cup of tea with honey, which should be easy enough since I just sneaked a Snickers ice cream bar while Aron and Graham were napping.

Shhh …