Nesting behind bars

I'm laying in the closet when I hear a knock on the bedroom door. I squeak the closet open and peer through.

“Who's knocking?” My face is squinched against the brightness I have suddenly let into my nest.

The knocking continues but no one responds, so I figure they're actually knocking on the bathroom door. We have seven people in our family and only one toilet. Statistically, if someone is knocking, it's going to be for bathroom access. I settle with relief into my Tijuana blanket and squueeeeerrrrrk the accordian folds of the closet door back into one flat panel. That's a tacky sound, I think. The maintenance guy should have fixed that when he was here today. Worse even than the classlessness of my unoiled hinge, however, is the possibility that it will lead someone to find me in the closet. At 33 years of age, it feels faintly ridiculous to be nesting in a closet. The potential for embarrassment causes me to reflect for a moment, however, and in so doing I realize that there is nowhere else I would rather be.

It's the first day of my period. This afternoon I carted my boyfriend's son off to the sweet shop so I could climb, stealthily, a little further into his heart, and as I watched him eat both an overfrosted cinnamon roll and a cookie the size of his head, I had a sumptuous urge to faceplant into the chocolate peanut butter cupcake we were saving for the other kids. Instead I settled for coconut milk ice cream in the sharp Fall air and fed on the happiness I felt to be Jack's Special Someone for just a while.

Later, when my ten year old asked me if I was okay, I grunted equivocally and then said, “It's the first day of my period.”

He understood immediately. Having lived with just me and his brother for four years, he has been party to both the monthly sugar-binge adrenaline high and the psycho danger mommy that follows. “You need your chocolate and you can't have it,” he said.

Nail on the head.

My blood stream is teaming with hormones that demand, in drug-like technicolor, SUGAR AND CAFFIENE AND SALT AND FRIED, and I can't give it to them. I'm eating applesauce and muffins made from almond flour and liver, for god's sake. When I really push the envelope, I eat frozen coconut milk sweetened with agave. It's like turning to a caged monster and saying, 'Would you perhaps care for a grapefruit?' Then the cage turns out to be unlocked.

I guess the closet is my way of keeping the monster in. I'm sorry baby, I can't feed you your tribute this month, I really love you I do, it's just that this disease will grow if I give you chocolate, and just as I murmur to comfort the beast I slide the padlock shut.