I'll Go With you Mum

Last week my daughter and her family had a great Chinese meal in Chinatown (L.A.) and noted that this restaurant had a dowdy relation in an area of the Valley that I can get to in half an hour. As I've said before, delivery isn't really an option up here (except for the local pizza place) so you have to really be jonesing bad to drive an hour, round-trip, for food in boxes. I volunteered to drive since Himself has put in a really busy two weeks with loads of driving and son-in-law, Matt, was putting Miss Lottie to bed. Dear, pregnant daughter Jane, volunteered to keep me company on the drive.

We were half-way down the Canyon when I noticed Jane was looking a bit green, but she told me to press on. We made it to a parking lot on a busy boulevard and the sound and sight of Jane retching so miserably and so painfully reminded me of my pregnant retchings in London so very many years ago.

Himself and I lived in the third floor of a three-story terraced house in West Hampstead. While the flat was okay, we shared a toilet with the landlady. Even typing that we didn't have a loo in our flat makes me wrinkle my nose and say, "WHAT???" But it's true. While we had a stove and a sink in the kitchen, and a big enough room that held a bathtub and sink, there was no toilet. I was a fairly robust pregnant person, except for the throwing-up part, and the throwing-up part of my pregnancy loomed large, as that sort of thing does.

The memories of my poor young husband, hooking half-digested pieces of food out of the sink and bathtub, because that's as far as I could get, was enough to endear him to me for a lifetime. When I look back on it all now I wonder at his patience. He thought he'd married this young, sexy thing...only to find out, days after our hasty registry office wedding, that I felt sick a good deal of the time.

As he also discovered, though, for some pregnant women, feeling nauseous and losing one's appetite are entirely different equations. I could happily go out for an Indian meal half an hour after retching and so can my daughter. Half an hour after throwing up in the Motion Picture & Television Retirement Home's parking lot, we all sat down to some great Chinese food!