lumière des étoiles

I have time to think about these things in the summer
2006-06-29 11:31 a.m.

I finally have my pie chart on Fitday.com balanced equally between three parts. Yippie! That pie chart, and its weeks of unbalanced proportions, has been the bane of my existence ever since I began tracking what I eat and where most of my calories come from. No matter how I tried, it seemed I could never get enough protein, or that I'd have a disproportionate carb-protien ratio. Also, when I saw how deprived I was of things like Vitamin D and Folate, I had to reconcile with eating more every day just to get those numbers right and that pie chart to look more like a Y. Important, conventional wisdom says, especially for a woman like me, who, according to current medical dialogue is past her "ideal child bearing years" at 28.

Disregarding for a moment that potentially biased advice about "ideal child bearing years" (which would conveniently frighten women into focusing more on their reproductive capabilities than on movements to perpetuate their rights, freedoms, and advancement in political life), it's just practical and vital for all of us to be so conscious of nutrition, since everything from portion size to "ideal" targets for nutrients and weight have been so distorted in our culture. Is that giant soda an appropriate size? Is size double zero something that exists in nature? Hard to discern the answers to such questions when there is so much misinfo out there, especially if said misinfo has a political agenda and therefore is created to sound very persuasive.

In any case, I do resent the notion so pervasive among women's fitness magazines and information sources that "nutrition" interests for a woman like me, of "my age", most likely revolve around my desire to be or soon become pregnant. Surely there are women - plenty of them - who are more than marginally concerned with that, but to assume all of us are? Or to take that "let's not kid ourselves about what you're really after here..." attitude? Barf. What year is it again?

Sitting around with my bestest girlfriends the other night (outside, on a Friday, having wine - I love summer), the subject of children came up. We joked about 28 being "past ideal child bearing years", since at 34, both of them are WAY past "ideal child bearing years" - supposedly. We discussed that fact that while there are certain biological facts we can't escape, those "facts" are often distorted by the media or have been historically misunderstood (how much could there really be to "study" about women? We can trust the old conclusions, right?). This widely accepted understanding of women, reproduction, and limitations often contribute to the tired stereotype of the sad, lonely "career woman" who has risen to the top of the public sphere, but is somehow eternally empty inside (except for being full of regret) since she has no children.

Oddly, this loneliness/regret issue doesn't seem to plague professional men (at least not in anyway we feel is worthy of feature stories in national magazines), which is usually easily explained or dismissed away by citing the simple fact that men can continue to participate in the conception process their entire lives. Not exactly true - but certainly understandable, since we do tend to elevate men to super-power, iconic status while continually pointing out women's flaws and limitations.

Anyway, I know that one of my friends would like to have children, and one is ambivalent; so the discussion turned to me since I've never really brought it up with either of them before. "It's not because I don't want to talk about it," I said to them, "it's because I don't think about it." They dug that, but then I went a bit further in my thinking myself: would I even want to have children, I thought, given the dismal projections about the future of life on our planet that are being brought forth by everyone from Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth was the most exciting power point presentation I've ever seen, by the way) to Steven Hawking.

What a cop out, I was told. And touche, Nicole, for pointing out that my mother and father were most likely terrified of pending nuclear Holocaust but went ahead and had my brother anyway.

Well, regardless of whether or not Steve and I will decide that we'll have children hoping that there will be a planet left for them to inhabit, or we pull an Angelina and adopt all of Malawi, or we decide that a niece and nephew are quite enough, thankyouverymuch, I'll continue to eat well. Folic acid does more for a woman than just prepping her for carrying a child, you know.

xoxo