We might appear to be all about this health nut thing, what with our flamboyant editorials on biking. But really, our love affair is with sugar. All this biking is only to make way for sugar intake.
As an ode to our Health issue, we’d like to admit to you our addictions. While Kerry is prone to the chocolate binge, Kandy has become addicted to the unusual and rarely seen “Frosting Affair.”
Peanut butter frosting is her weakness. She will make tiny little bowl after medium bowl after large bowl, and eat it by the spoonful. Sometimes she claims to be making a cake, but the cake itself never materializes. Other times, she claims it’s a tribute to her childhood memories of mom’s birthday cake. However cake, again, is the missing link.
For a frosting binge to take place, a lot of things must come together at just the right moment for Kandy: She must be conscious, have the ingredients on hand, and the nerve to make another bowl.
Consuming the frosting takes just as careful a formula: a couch, the day’s paper strewn from one end to the other, and The Young & The Restless (or anything from the Golden Girls to CNN) to be on T.V.
It’s magic when it all comes together.
For Kerry, her weakness is Ghirardelli Chocolate. She doesn’t know how to pronounce it (having called it many things, including gorilla chocolate), but she knows what stores carry it and how much makes her sick.
Because her weakness is store-bought, she has been known to head out at all hours of the day and night for “bananas.”
When either of us falls victim to a binge, there is one thing we both insist upon: privacy. Who wants a witness to gluttony? But, when forced to, these binges sometimes unfold in front of the children, who are still, we pray, too young to grasp the grotesqueness of the scene.
If they ask for a bite, we preach, “Sugar is bad for you!” And if they start making a case for how sugar is bad for everyone, we stand by our revered mothering standards and quickly ground them for backtalk.
While these little “insights” from the children are annoying, the worst thing that can happen during a binge is for the husband to come home unexpectedly.
This is when it takes on the feel of an illicit affair. We scramble up from the couch, straighten our clothes, brush back our hair and snap the top button of our jeans. We wipe our face and look about, wondering, like we might with a man, if we can hide a bowl of frosting or a giant chocolate bar under the couch.
Our husbands, if they have any sense at all, will pretend they see nothing. Tim will busy himself at the front door while Kandy walks to the kitchen with large, awkward steps to rifle through the cupboards for “the cake mix” she’s been looking for for six months. Nate will pet the dog into a lather while Kerry finds a brown moldy banana to open, glad she made that late-night run to the store after all.
Sometimes, though, Tim will walk right into the debacle and sweetly wipe the powdered sugar from Kandy’s face. This, at times, will throw her into an indignant rage. Other times, though, she pretends she has no idea how that got there. And he pretends she isn’t lying right to his face.
And that, we must say, is the key to a happy and healthy marriage.
So, as we celebrate HEALTH in this issue, we want to make sure you know we are doing all this biking stuff for all the right reasons. And, so, should you.