Family Daze
Caffeine a hard swallow for coffee drinker's loved ones
By Debbie Farmer
I haven't wanted to talk to anyone about this, but last week my husband came downstairs for breakfast and caught me yelling at the toaster.
To his credit, he didn't take sides. Instead, he just patted my shoulder and said, "Honey, I think you need to cut down on your caffeine."
"What do you mean?" I said. "I can handle my coffee. It's not my fault the toaster your mother gave us for Christmas has a temperamental attitude. After all, I pushed down the handle and it still refuses to heat up. And for your information, buddy, I have better things to do a hang around here all morning waiting for it to feel like making toast. So I ask you, then, what am I supposed to do? What? What? WHAT?" I grabbed him by the lapels.
"Now, maybe it's me," he continued, "but, lately, you seem a little, well, edgy."
Believe me, I am as shocked as you are. As with nearly everyone else on the planet, I have about one, maybe two, cups of coffee a day. Especially if you don't count the cup or two of pre-coffee that I drink in the morning until I can get to my real cup at the coffee bar down the street. And I've always considered my after-dinner cups of instant as more of a nightcap.
So I did what any devoted wife would do: I called my friend Barb for a second opinion. "Say, have I been a little, you know, testy lately?" I asked.
There was silence for a moment. "Well," she said finally, "the other day you did yell at the cart corral at the grocery store for taking up a good parking space."
OK, so maybe, just maybe, my husband was right. But I've been on this earth long enough to know I can function just fine without coffee. I'm not some kind of weak addict that is dependent upon a stimulant to get through my day. No-sir-ee.
So the next day, just to show him what I was made of, I stopped drinking coffee cold turkey. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that doing anything "cold turkey" is a very, very bad idea. And you're right. After all, there's a reason they call it that and I suspect it's because turkeys, as far as animals go, aren't a very smart bunch.
But I wasn't thinking about all this then. I only knew that it was just as easy to drink decaffeinated herbal tea for breakfast as coffee. Why, after only one cup, I could feel all of the caffeine rushing out of my body and being replaced with healthy disease-fighting antioxidants.
Now, all of this healthiness and good nutrition was great--except for the fact that, by mid-morning, my eyeballs felt as if they were hanging somewhere down around my knees and were being kicked every time I took a step.
"Stop yelling, for goshsakes!" I snapped at my 5-year-old son.
"I didn't say anything, Mom. That was the cat."
But what did I expect? Any fool knows that you can't just go around cutting out prominent substances from your diet without going through some signs of withdrawal. That is probably why, when I called my friend Julie to tell her about my new caffeine-free way of life, all that came out was "jummmmgfhupppmmm."
After that, I drank another cup of tea to try to wake myself up. And another.
"Mommy, you don't look so good," my son said, as I finished off my seventh cup.
By the afternoon I began to suspect that there was a little man stuck inside my head pounding on an anvil. So I tried reading the newspaper to get my mind off the pain, but I couldn't concentrate on a sentence long enough to make it to the end. Somewhere in the middle I would start staring into space and think about things like high-speed Internet access, or the wondrous miracle of life, or where, exactly, all of the lids to Tupperware really go.
So I made a cup. Just a little one. But don't worry. If my husband finds out, I'll tell him that the toaster drove me to it.
Debbie Farmer is the author of Life in the Fast-Food Lane: Surviving the Chaos of Parenting. Questions or comments? Email her at paradigm-tsa@familydaze.com.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
