At the beginning, the very beginning, during the zygote phase, the baby liked pizza. I was dreaming about pizza, thinking about it, craving it, watching it on tv and thinking: “That looks amazing.” Then the craving dropped and what was replaced was a strange sinking sick feeling. Even hunger was masked by this bizarre feeling of nausea and sea sickness–as if at any moment I was going to face a shipwreck. There were no cravings, only hopes…maybe, MAYBE, the baby likes spinach (it has so much folic acid which is good for baby’s brain!) And the baby did like spinach…for about a week. And then slowly, one by one, vegetables were rejected. I remember trying to choke down a vegetarian taco, all beautiful and yummy with beans, guac, and four different salsas from the bar. It was the tomatoes in the salsa fresca that did me in…I couldn’t bare them. And so, Mexican food was pulled out from under me…as was Italian and then slowly Thai. Foods I had always celebrated became bizarre and abstract. Trips to the grocery store became sad little forays with me averting my eyes at almost everything. Fruit barely clung, with bananas in my cereal in the morning and oranges making a miraculous sticking point. Ah! The baby likes tuna fish, I realized during week 7. Sort of.

And then I reached Week 8 and existed almost entirely on white flour and cheese. This was particularly fitting since the weekend prior I had gone to Le Pichet for the first time. Notoriously French, Le Pichet is full of baguettes, cheese, and glass bottles of water on each table. My brother claims it as his new favorite restaurant and since he was in town, this was where we went. I initially went into the restaurant certain I wasn’t going to make it: an array of uappetizing smells from the menu assaulted me.“Curley endive tossed with warm confit of duck gizzards, sweet pickled onions and aged Gouda” and “Radishes, herbed butter, wine marinated hard boiled egg and pistachio-pork sausage” smelled particularly alarming. Luckily, Josh picked the cheese plate and with non-stop baguettes delivered to our table, I ate with wild abandon. I even ate the cheese rinds. I was so satisfied, that I made a mental note to myself: the baby likes carbs. By Monday I had settled into my new diet: cheese quasadillas, bagels and cream cheese, mustard and cheese sandwiches, and bowls of the whitest cereal you can imagine.

Protein as I know it has disappeared. Chicken was tried and abandoned weeks ago. Slowly, I found myself on a carbohydrate only diet. It was against every fiber in my body to bypass the whole wheat bagels for the white and the 8 grams of fiber per serving cereal for Puffins. Doctor Oz from Oprah would certainly give me a free pass, right? I was eating the exact opposite of everything I’ve ever read up on. At one point, I visited two separate coffee shops in one day in order to stuff an overpriced white bagel with cream cheese in my mouth.

During Week 8, I tried to trick the baby by sneaking beans and guac into a cheese quasadilla–rationalizing that it’s mushy and therefore texturally acceptable. The baby punched up the nausea button right in the middle of my creative movement class for autistic children. It was already a bad day; the kids were angry and bored, the whims of movement class were lost on them–even though I brought musical instruments for them to dance with. The teachers are usually stressed and unsupportive. Most of them are desperate for a respite and will often disappear. It would serve them right if I vomited all over them–especially on the really unlikable kid who screams my name as if I’m beating him, “Miss. Maaaaarrrrraaaa, I don’t want to do ANY OF THIS!” (For starters, when will this school realize that I’m not a “Miss.” I’m a “Ms.” and always will be).

But I never vomiedt. Not once. A few times my throat closed in and threatened–a gag. A pathetic little choking sound came out and maybe a little saliva. A cough. A whiff of something strong–like Chinese food wafting through the University district–sent me into confusion: “Ooooh, Chinese food…oh, no, that smells AWFUL.” And thus the churning of the first trimester continued as one ethnic food group is knocked down after another….except for the French.