Me and Humas

I didn't know any better. Everyone is different and I didn't know how my body was going to react. This is not a story about allergies. It's a story about flexibility.

I used to love humas. And I mean love with a capital L. I was supposed to bring something to a potluck at work and someone suggested that I bring humas. It's cheap. It doesn't need to be served hot or cold. It sounded like a great idea, so I did it.

The results were horrific.

It was the first time I made humas. I made the recipe perfectly. I brought the pita bread and humas to work. Nothing spilled. Everything was fine. Everyone ate it. No one was poisoned.

I was not fine.

I was approximately three weeks pregnant at the time and I didn't know it. I had never been pregnant before and I didn't know that the week before I found out I was pregnant was a special week. Everything I saw, tasted, or heard would become my triggers. If I listened to Sarah Brightman sing, I would vomit. If I looked at a blue dragon, I would vomit. If I saw a particular color of brown, I'd vomit. If I only thought about a blue dragon, I would vomit. And if I was even in the same room as even the ingredients for humas, I would vomit. Eventually, I would lose track of how many times a day I would vomit.

I had a lot of triggers, but I eventually got over my problems with bread, BBQ sauce, tomato juice, lemon juice, and the color brown, but years passed and more years passed and I never got over my problem with humas.

Yesterday, I made a plan. I was going to serve humas at dinner. I was gonna give myself a break and I was going to buy it, but I was going to eat it no matter what. I was going to do this to myself because I want to be flexible.

When I write leading men for my romance novels, I have a little trick for differentiating between them and setting each one apart so they aren't too similar. I give them each a word and then, if I'm having a conundrum about how my boy should behave, I refer back to the word. The words are admirable traits and one time I wrote a man whose word was FLEXIBILITY. He's one of my favorites. He rolls with everything.

While watching his story unfurl, I saw a benefit for flexibility. It cancels out disappointment. Trust me, I have been disappointed by humas. I have walked into social gatherings, taken one whiff of the air, and felt queasy. I have been to places where no one wanted to eat anything else. I've justified my NO HUMAS position with the pregnancy story above. No one could blame me for hating humas with a story like that, could they?

Except, with that kind of thinking... Is it only humas?

I have been noticing more and more inflexibility within myself, catching myself sneaking back into old habits of perfectionism and pride. Insisting on having only things that make me look good in my life? Insisting on only having people who see me the way I want to be seen in my life? Insisting on events playing out the way I planned? There's more.

But I know that living that way has left me empty and choosing to live that way will leave me emptier still.

So, I choked back my knee-jerk response. I apologized instead. I chopped down the tree of my pride and turned myself into pulp. As an author, the idea of tree pulp is very exciting. In a few steps, the pulp will be paper and the words that will be written on it will be the words of God. The universe wants to present me with new opportunities and I will not be open to them if I have to have things my way.

So, I ripped apart the pita bread and put the humas in my mouth because i hoped that by doing this one thing, by breaking this one rule, I would take a step to stop tripping over my own pride, my own expectations, and to learn to enjoy a surprising good that I had not anticipated.

It tasted good.