"...Arugula is a lettuce, and it's no iceberg..."
Autism and Arugula, April 7th, 2007
Scoot over "Oral Sex in Elemtray School," because Autism has arrived! Oprah did a show on autism this week. The rates in the US 1 in 150, and higher in boys than girls. Looking for signs of autism in KilBaby is my new part time job. So far so good, I should add. The medical community doesn't know what causes autism. I started buying organic cleaning solutions, which of course, may be determined to be the leading cause of autism. As well as bankruptcy- that shit is expensive.
Last month, a study found that the plastic in many popular baby bottles leak toxic chemicals linked to cancer and more. The bottles are still on the market, and if I wasn't online 20 hours a day, I wouldn't have known to toss mine. (And where do those tossed, leaky bottles end up?) Do I have to get a fucking degree in chemistry so I can buy baby products that don't leak chemicals into the baby's body?
Thanks for the protection, FDA!
If your baby doesn't respond to his name by the time he's 12 months, that's a red flag for autism. And I've only ever called KilBaby by his real name twice, so we're really screwed.
Anne Lamott wrote a really annoying book called
Operating Insructions
. It's about the first year of her son's life, so I have to read it. I hate her writing style, it's like she's deliberately sending me to a dictionary every fourth paragraph. At some point, she compares her fetus to a mung pea.
A what?
A) I don't know what a mung pea looks like and B) I've never even
heard of mung peas. It's not like friends have mentioned mung peas and I decided not to investigate, which was the case for so many years with arugula. (After years of tuning out New Yorkers and their precious arugula salad, I caved in and ordered some. The verdict? It's no iceberg.) But mung peas? In forty one years, I've never heard anyone order baked mung peas or mung pea pie. And now Anne Lamott is making me look it up. Bitch.
| |  |
| Looks like a bean to me.
|
But she makes a perfect point when she writes (I'm paraphrasing) that because of her son, she is vulnerable to complete devastion. It's true. That's what kids bring to the table- the potential to be destroyed. You expect to lose your parents, some friends, maybe even a spouse. You can prep yourself. But you can't prep for losing a kid. If anything happens to Kilbaby, I am finished, I will die of heartbreak.
I was so safe before, so disconnected. Now, I am wide open. Ruin can come in the form of a drunk driver, a metal bat at a Little League game, a paper clip on the floor, baby bottles.
It's awful, no one tells you that. And when they do, you have to look up mung peas first.
