Blogging For Kicks

God, I love chocolate! I always have. I loved anything chocolate, but for some reason my mother thought that was a bad thing. Whenever she bought ice cream for my brother and me, I always begged for chocolate, even just chocolate chip, but she wouldn’t hear of it. It would be vanilla, or maybe Butter Pecan, but never chocolate. She told us once that when they made ice cream, if they dropped it on the floor they’d just pick it up and put it in the carton anyway, since you couldn’t see the dirt on it.

Look, my Mom wasn’t a stupid person, she was pretty smart, actually. She just had some really strange ideas about things. Now, I understand how that could happen, since I carried the beleif with me up into high school that my eyes were actually bigger than my stomach. After all, Mom told me so, and Moms know all, right? Anyway, I believed mine did, right up to the time I mentioned that little known “fact” to a teacher in the middle of class. Yep, there’s not a better way for a kid to find out Mom is fallable, after all. Now, actually, it was my young brain that took a silly saying and gave it the varnish of truth, but at the time I was humiliated and that made it all her fault.

But, back to the chocolate ice cream remark. Now, I have no idea, based on my experience with the eye/stomach thing, whether she was serious about it or not, but it sure seemed to me that she was. I finally understood her aversion to the Nectar of the Gods, anyway. But, it didn’t make me stop wanting it. I didn’t care, figuring if I couldn’t taste the dirt it wouldn’t hurt me, and I just kept wishing she would give in just once. But, she never did.

I was left having to get my chocolate ice cream fix when I was with my Dad, since he wasn’t worried about dirt in there, either. His favorite ice cream was vanilla, but if chocolate was what I wanted, chocolate was what I would get. I loved going shopping with Daddy!

The reason I’m bringing this subject up now is quite simple, really. Last year they came out with the news I’d been wishing for all my life - chocolate is really very good for you! Yes, it is better for your heart than the ever popular red wine, better than broccoli, better by far than vanilla or Butter Pecan. Yes, those wonderful scientists had come up with a finding I could really get behind full force. My one regret was that they hadn’t found this out when I was a kid so I could have let my Mom know that it was actually a good thing to eat chocolate.

But here’s the kicker. Barely six months after learning this wonderful, marvelous news-of-all-news, I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic!! Yes, my mother got her way again. She was always a very tough, determined woman, and you either did it her way or paid dearly, so she pretty much always got what she wanted, and now she wanted to not be seen as having been wrong. Yes, all those years she told me how bad chocolate was for me could not be all for naught. Oh, no. She had to be right, I tell you. Now, as it was when I was a child, chocolate is again a no-no for me.

Do you have any idea how many new kinds of chocolate delights they’ve come out with over the last year or so, since I became unable to enjoy them? More than I care to remember, that’s all I can tell you. I have to sit here and watch beautiful people on my tv screen obviously enjoying the soothing, sensuous, scentillating chocolate cookies, candies, ice cream, cakes, pies, and pudding treats, knowing I can never be one of them. Oh, sure, I could take a small bite every once in a blue moon, but come on, who but my Mom could be satisfied with one bite of a chocolate treat like that?

I’m sorry, all, but today seemed to be a particularly heavy chocolate commercial day, and I feel like an addict who can see her drug of choice sitting right there in front of her, but she can’t get to it because her arms are tied to the chair. That’s really harsh, I tell you, and as I sit here reliving those wonderful chocolate splurges of old I can’t help but remember all the chances I could have had to eat my favorite thing in the world, if only my mother would have known what we all know now. Isn’t that just the way my luck runs, tho?