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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. He 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. And for your information, buddy, I have better things to do then 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.
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.
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.
Then, it occurred to me that perhaps smelling coffee wouldn't hurt. I mean, just one or two little sniffs. But, as I opened the lid on the can, something else occurred to me: If I drank a cup of coffee, I'd feel the VERY SAME way I'm feeling now. But, my headache would be gone and, with a little luck, I'd get my mental edge back.
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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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
