Breakfast is Coming: the dawn of my own whole foods journey

I was awake again. My mind churned, going in circles and getting thicker by the long slow minute. It was heavy and I didn't see the good in it: why buy raw cheese for $5.00 instead of homogenized for $2.00? Why go to the trouble of buying milk from local farms and eggs from happy hens? why buy cultured butter? And, most shockingly, why was I even considering buying a $15.00 chicken when my whole adult life I'd been focused on one thing: finding the best price.

My daughter shuffled and kicked in her makeshift bed on the floor beside me. I couldn't get comfortable either. What are we doing here? I thought, and what am I going to do next?

Then my stomach rumbled.

As a young teen, I remember confessing to my oldest sister that all my life I'd been comforted by a growling stomach at night. Naturally, my sister laughed. Why? she wondered.

 "Because it reminds me that breakfast is coming. And I'll have room to eat a lot of it."

 I love that I knew beyond a doubt that my mom's homemade breakfasts would be good each day. I love how I anticipated them.

What I didn't know was that a stomach that allowed for such rapid digestion was not normal. And what I didn't expect was that another, though less abnormal, condition would eventually blight my system: pregnancy after pregnancy after pregnancy. A four-year cycle that left me with two beautiful blond children, two painful stories of early miscarriage, a series of UTIs and a stomach that ultimately decided life was  no bueno. 

The day before, I told my mother, "I'm coming over. I need help. My stomach has gone suicidal on me."

And boy was that the truth!

Since the day I conceived the last ill-fated fetus, ten months prior, my stomach had not growled. Not if I ate, not if I didn't. Not in the day, and never ever at night. And lately, eating had become as difficult as swallowing my big fat pride.

But not now. At this moment my stomach was growling.

As I lay there, nodding at last into a comforted sleep, I knew that breakfast was coming again... and I knew beyond a doubt that it was going to be good. 

to be continued...