The Magazine of LIES

Through a strange train of thought the other day, I ended up thinking about pregnancy magazine’s views of morning sickness. NO, I don’t have morning sickness, like I said, it was a strange train of thoughts that led me to this. So, anyway, I was thinking back to when I was expecting my first and reading every magazine I could get my swelling hands on. I remember being very amused with the article about morning sickness. It would talk about nibbling crackers and such. Accompanying this article would be a picture of a woman (with very nice hair for having just woken up) who was sitting up in bed, leaning against lots of white fluffy pillows, and happily nibbling away at a Saltine cracker. The sun is streaming in through the window and next to the newly pregnant mom is a bed stand with a plate of decoratively arranged crackers.

ARGGGGHHH! So many things wrong with this picture! We won’t even get into the fluffy, white pillows (I don’t have any, do you?) or the sun streaming into the room (most of us are up before the sun), but I do wish to address some other things that we see in this lovely photograph. Let’s look at the mom-to-be, she is looking awfully good for having morning sickness. Most women have a greenish tint to them. Our photo mom is sitting quietly in bed eating her cracker. This is obviously her first baby or else she would be surrounded by children who are bouncing on the bed, making her already queasy stomach feel worse. Those children would be fighting over or eating her other crackers, getting crumbs everywhere and she would be thinking how she had better take the sheets off the bed and shake them out before the crumbs start to attract other visitors. And let us look at that plate of crackers on her bed stand. Who put them there? If she did, she did it the night before. I’m sorry, but I would be worried about roaches, ants or the crackers going stale overnight. Did her husband bring the crackers then? No, that couldn’t be, if she had asked him to bring her crackers, he wouldn’t have arranged them on a pretty, floral plate. He would have brought the bag of crackers in and the top of the bag would be twisted shut.

Yes, that picture has always annoyed me, and yet, I’ll bet if you picked up a pregnancy magazine in a doctor’s office, that same article with the same picture will still be there. Let’s ignore the unrealistic photo and forget too that most women have never found nibbling crackers to help them with their morning sickness. Most of them spend a great amount of time bowing before the porcelain throne anyway thinking, those stupid crackers just make me throw up again.

Oh well, anything to sooth those first time moms as they journey through the crazy time known as pregnancy, because the rest of us well seasoned moms know to skip the article and just wait for the trimester to pass.