Brunch Blues

If you ever lived in Manhattan then you are probably familiar with the Sunday late morning scene in the East Village. It was by far my favorite moment of the New York week: waking up in that border state between still drunk and slightly hung over, putting on your daytime best and meeting your sunglas- sporting, vintage-clad fabulous girlfriends at 7A for shrimp and avocado eggs Benedict, cappuccinos, mimosas and juicy boy stories from the night before. Straight out of Sex and the City.

Three years later, I am still a brunch person and my favorite part of the week is Friday morning brunch at Tal Bagels in the German Colony. Definitely the See and Be Seen equivalent to 7A, except instead of shrimp and avocado it's omelets, cheeses and Israeli salad, and instead of mimosas it's fresh squeezed orange juice and “cafe afuch.”

There are a few more differences. Nobody is hung over at Tal Bagels, and the tables are not full of singles recovering from a night full of dancing and drinking, they're full of young mothers recovering from a night of diapers and breastfeeding. But much like the Sex and the City girls, these young mothers show no signs of sleeplessness or exhaustion. All head coverings are perfectly tied, hiding freshly washed curls, skirts tidy and pressed, sandals exposing manicured toes, dangling earrings framing their smiling faces. And just as my East Village girlfriends would sport their latest found vintage designer purses or shoes, these women (about the same age as their NYC equivalents) show off their tiny wrinkled bundles of joy or their swollen pregnant bellies.

I made the foolish mistake of working for a Jewish non profit and living in Manhattan (both of which are perfectly peachy decisions, they just should never be done at the same time). This pretty much left me unable to have anything new, shiny, or fashionable to show off at my weekly brunch in The City. I was lucky I could buy brunch! And who would have thought, three years later, on the other side of the world, I would find myself in the same situation.

Now I would try to paint myself as an selfless, mild, good natured person who only looks at all those young mothers and their beautiful little creatures with happiness and endless patience, but that would just be a big, fat, ginormous lie. While I am happy for my friends who have kids or who are about to, and I love my friends' babies,(I even love the ones who are yet to be born) there is a very not-so-tiny voice inside my head throwing that big Russian/American/Israeli hissy fit (previously mentioned in the last entry) screaming “WHEN IS IT MY TURN??? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?” Now I know from many a single friend that they look at me and my marriage and wonder the same thing. I know that I should count my blessings, that I am not even 28 yet (let me savor these last few weeks) and I do (theoretically), but this is my blog and I'll cry if I want to!

I wake up every morning and pee on a stick. Then I put the stick in a monitor at which point its screen begins to blink. It stares at me and blinks for five minutes and I stare and blink right back at it.

This is the conversation going on in my head for those five minutes every morning:

Maybe today it will say I am ovulating...
Don't be stupid, you're getting your hopes up! You said today you wouldn't care!
So why are you even sitting here waiting? Go brush your teeth!
I will in a minute, it's almost done.
I thought you didn't care what it said...
I don't, but maybe the bar will go up...

And then it stops blinking, I take out the test stick and inevitably the result is the same as the day before. Then I dive swiftly and quickly like a pro baseball player going for a foul ball to capture my mood before it hits rock bottom. Practically this means making coffee and listening to uplifting songs on my ipod the whole way to work. I hope I don't miss the ball one of these days, I never was much of an athlete.