That's not my bosom burning, it's my stomach rumbling

It's the first Sunday of the month. All of the Mormons reading this blog know what that means: hunger. When I joined the LDS Church as a figure-conscious 14 year-old, I thought fasting was a great idea-- I'd force myself to forgo two meals on Fast Sunday, my parents would give the money we would have spent on food to the Church to feed people for whom hunger was more than a monthly experiment, and I'd (hopefully) reap some spiritual blessings in return.

But now, more than 15 years later, I'm not sure about the whole fasting thing. For the last 6-1/2 years I've probably fasted less than ten times. I've been a baby and milk-producing machine for so long that my body hardly knows what to do when its caloric intake grinds to a halt.

When I was a teenager and a college student and a young(er) married person, fasting was annoying (I'll admit that Fast Sunday has never been my favorite day of the month), but there was an easy solution-- staying out of the kitchen. Away from temptation, my stomach would rumble and my head spin, but I could always restrain myself before I got too close to the source.

The problem for me now isn't simply the hunger, it's that I can't escape being surrounded by food. This morning, as I was making breakfast for the third time, it seemed too ironic to me that I'm the only person in the house who fasts (kids too young, Eddie too prone to migranes) and I'm the one who is constantly getting people food. I always pop a little bit of what the kids are eating into my mouth, and I caught myself at least ten times today with a chocolate chip or an M&M or a goldfish cracker millimeters from my tongue.

After three hours of force-feeding Isaac to keep him quiet during church, smelling the cinnamon on the teddy grahams and resisting the urge to lick my fingers, I peeled out of the parking lot like a crazy woman, raced home, plunked the sleeping babe in his crib, and ran to the kitchen, whispering a quick, silent prayer as I rifled through cupboards and defrosted my secret stash of chocolate chip cookies.

Five minutes later I had eaten: 1/3 of a Terry's Chocolate Orange, a bowl of Blueberry Muffin cereal, a handful of what Annie calls "swirled morsels," a diet cherry coke, and three (ok, four) chocolate chip cookies. So in one fell swoop I consumed more calories than I would have had I actually sat ate the table and eaten the two meals.

So fasting is something I obviously need to work on.

But then again, if I get pregnant this month, I'll get a reprieve for another two years.

--originally published 1/7/06