"Smushed?" update

I’m sorry to have to make fun of my own mother…well, not that sorry. But she has been forewarned, and she really does have it coming. She has been giving me something of a hard time about what I eat and expose myself to as a pregnant woman, which is fine, though I’m sure she will admit she can be a bit of a “nudge” (nooj? Not sure how to render that Yiddish word in English).

But she really topped herself a few days ago when she left me a message in which she read aloud from a novel called The Barbarians Are Coming. It was a passage about a medical student who discovers that cadavers that have been placed on their stomachs become undesirable specimens because of the way the fluids pool in the organs and “engorge.” She read on and on, into my answering machine, about corpses with engorged organs; I had no idea, for the longest time, what the H*LL she was talking about. Actually, I thought she had finally completely lost her mind. Then, at the end of the reading, Mother Dearest said: "Sar, this passage [from a novel, about face-down cadavers] proves that you should not be lying on your stomach." (Not that I wasn’t already worried about that, as anyone knows who read “Smushed?”). I said, "Mom, you do realize that I'm going to have to write a blog post about this insanity. I'm sorry, but you leave me no choice."

I love you, Mom (aka M.B., the Matzo Ball)

P.S. Mom, feel free to correct any elements of this anecdote that I may have gotten wrong, especially as I have not actually read this novel that is so chock full of sage advice for the pregnant :-)