Pineapple Head

I like reasons. If I can’t find a reason for something, I will make one up and woe betide you if you challenge it. So the concept of “crazy pregnant cravings” has rankled since the beginning. Just ask Saint Aardvark, who has learned quickly to a) on bad days, avoid calling anything I am eating by the bucketfull a craving or to b) on good days, call everything I am eating a craving, just to watch my eyes spark with rage. At this point he says what he wants because he can totally outrun me but JUST YOU WAIT.

In the first trimester of this pregnancy, approximately mid-October through January, I ate about 5 pieces of citrus fruit a day. I have always enjoyed citrus fruit – in a way that I don’t enjoy bananas, which I have only recently started eating without the vomit reflex getting triggered, or sometimes apples, which often have skin textures that displease me (waxy or too shiny so they squeak against your teeth or if unwaxed and out of season, pocked with worm holes [real ones, not the sci-fi kind]) or even pears, which bruise so easily and then have a texture sort of like natural toothpaste; all gritty and grimy and you know it’s good for you but why does it have to feel so strange against the tongue? 5 a day seemed a little excessive, though. For the oranges. But I wanted them. And it was Box O’ Oranges for $4 season, so it wasn’t a problem to feed my habit. The habit which was emphatically not a craving.

Many reasons were found on the internet about why some pregnant women like citrus flavours. Sour flavours help quell nausesa. The acid helps ease heartburn. The fibre helps early pregnancy constipation. But the one I liked best – and this is what’s awesome about how the world has developed to suit me, the one who always needs a reason for things, by providing me with the internet – was that oranges are high in folic acid. And though I was already taking vitamins with folic acid because it’s important in pregnancy, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps my body knew something I didn’t know – like my vitamins weren’t being absorbed properly. Or they were shitty vitamins. It felt very much like I, as the possessor of the verbal skills and overstated need to control things, did not at all need to interfere with my pregnancy. Because the body had it from here, thanks.

Oranges, of course, are also incredibly high in vitamin C. And with the pregnant body’s calling off the immune system dogs so that it doesn’t reject the interloping embryo as a virus, every bit of Vitamin C helps. Especially when one’s pregnant body is working in an office in cold and f lu season. I had not a flutter of respiratory illness until the dumb cold this past April and I fully blame the bus and skytrain for that dumb cold. You filthy commuters. (I do prefer it if I have many reasons to select from, so that I may choose the one I like best, whether or not it is the one that is most accurate. My world: my rules!)

My point is that over the past 8.5 months while I have been overtaken by mostly benevolent forces, I have learned interesting things about what my body does and why and thus have learned to trust it implicitly. At the beginning, I tried to follow one of those nutritional charts from the food guide but it was far too much like accounting. All those columns and boxes and ticking things off. But by now, I feel like I could go to the grocery store, stand in the centre with my breezeway basket, blindfolded, and be able to find all the food I need. If that means a basket full of milk, Twizzlers, pineapple, plain corn chips and wheat bran, so be it. (I shall call it Intuitive Shopping. I plan to write a book and get on Oprah and get rich; then who’s laughing?)

This morning, as I downed another can of pineapple (mainly to gather the strength to walk two blocks to the store and buy MORE PINEAPPLE) I looked into the nutritional value of this latest fruit to steal my heart. Check it out: high in Vitamin C and manganese; it’s also got fibre and Vitamin B1. And it works as an anti-inflammatory.

As I stare at my swelled hands, which can no longer hold my wedding ring (and oh the hot-preggo-out-on-the-town fun I’ve been having!!) and which ache every morning when I wake up as though I have been clenching them in my sleep, though I know I have not because the morning is never the first time I wake up after I have gone to sleep – there is also a general wellness check tentatively scheduled for 11:3o pm, 2:30 am, 4:30 am and sometimes a surprise check at 3:15 – and each of those times my hands are flat against the bed and achy, so achy, I realize: my body is doing it again. Vitamin C, fibre, plus anti-inflammatory properties to replace the folic acid: pineapple is my late-pregnancy version of oranges. And it’s in season.

I have yet to discover a reason for the Twizzlers, though. I think maybe that’s the babby’s craving, not mine. Kids.

Related: We were recently lent a copy of “The Human Body,” a BBC tv series from 2001 which follows the human body from its beginning to its end. We are currently halfway through. It is fascinating, smart and funny; I highly recommend it.

PS: The full moon has passed, as has the 2 week date prior to my due date, as has the 2 week point past when the babby dropped, as has the one week point since I stopped working and I am Still Expecting. All bets are officially off.