I love chicken. Steamed, roasted, fried, grilled, I can have it cooked any style. Some people can’t stomach steamed chicken Hainanese style, especially if there’s a little blood. I eat it unfazed.
Chicken is a versatile meat and a common ingredient in most savoury dishes in Malaysia. There could be pieces of chicken in fried rice, noodles, dumplings and soups so it’s quite hard to avoid it. I never minded, until my first trimester.
Then, I gagged every time I tried to eat chicken. Even just seeing it made me sick. I couldn’t even watch raw chicken being prepared on television. With pregnancy, I had expected the morning/whole day sickness and was routinely and dutifully overcome by nausea every time I ate. But what bothered me more was suddenly not knowing what I wanted to eat. Or what I could eat.
Food just didn’t taste the same anymore. Almost everything had a strange metallic taste I can’t quite describe, except to say that suddenly my favourite foods became unfamiliar to me. I had to make lists of what I liked and didn’t, as if I had some sort of food amnesia and was rediscovering myself.
It also meant that menu browsing in a restaurant became a long drawn out process. Never would I be able to just quickly point to a chicken chop, or pasta with chicken, or chicken rice. My husband would ask whether I was ready to order, and, overwhelmed by pregnancy hormones, I would snarl, “No!” then feverishly turn the pages of the menu, wishing I could guess what wouldn’t taste like alien mush to me.
Before I got pregnant, I used to think it would be strange having my body go through changes like that. I knew some people talked about how they loved being pregnant, the glow on their faces and all that but all I could think about was how fat I was going to be and how on earth was I going to waddle around with that huge ball in front of me? I knew about morning sickness, knew that nausea would probably hit me, but one thing I wasn’t prepared for was the aversion to food and how everything I ever liked to eat, I wasn’t going to like anymore.
In addition to food aversions, there is the well-known fact of food cravings during pregnancy. I became a great fan of seafood and steaks, now that my favourite – chicken – was off the menu. People like to say that if you crave something that you wouldn’t usually eat, it’ s the baby who wants to eat it. It’s amusing thinking it might mean knowing your baby’s tastes even before he or she is born although the sceptical part of me thinks it’s just your body that’s telling you what it needs, like more protein or specific nutrients.
Experimenting with the foods I could tolerate resulted in a high-protein diet because most carbohydrates gave me indigestion. That meant lots of fish and beef and chunky vegetables and salads. And it wasn’t easy to always plan meals with hardly any carbohydrates because it had been such a huge part of my diet.
It is normal to lose weight in the first trimester due to the nausea and frequent vomiting as well as eating much less because you can’t tolerate most foods. Things are supposed to improve in the second trimester, and for some people it is from this trimester onwards that they are in danger of gaining too much weight as they regain their appetites to catch up on what they had lost in the first trimester.
However, enough weight has to be gained for the baby’s healthy growth so I had to make sure I was eating enough, and that meant I had to figure out what I wanted to eat. I made notes of what didn’t make me throw up and give me indigestion. By the second trimester, when the nausea abated, I had become accustomed to the “new” me who liked different foods. But just as I got used to my new diet, my taste buds returned to the way they were as soon as the baby was delivered. Chicken was – suddenly and miraculously – no longer repellent. Just like that.
One thing’s for sure, when you’re pregnant, your body is no longer your own. You are housing another human being inside you, a person who might have an entirely different set of wants and needs that you have to accommodate. I can’t help thinking that this is Nature’s way of introducing the idea of being a parent to a woman even before the baby is born, telling us that from now on, our decisions will never be just about ourselves anymore.
People say identity crisis as a mother begins after the baby is born, when you often have to put yourself last and juggle your roles as a daughter, mother, wife, and – if you work fulltime – whatever position you are at work. I say it begins in the womb, when already the tiny human being inside you is demanding assam fish head when you’d really much rather have a cheese sandwich.
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Janet Tay was a freelance writer and editor before becoming a stay-at-home mum. She has published short stories, book reviews and articles on books and the literary world in MPH Quill and The Star. She current juggles her time between writing and running after her toddler around the house.
Image Credit: Dreamstime
