Wake Up and Smell the Herbal Tea

If you want to know a woman’s soul, don’t read her tea leaves. Take her breakfast history. Show me a woman who has worked out her breakfast routine and I will show you a woman who has taken control--for 20 minutes.

For me, as for many young women, the years from age 1 to 19 were The Rebellious Years. These were the years when I did not eat breakfast. Breakfast became a symbol of something normal people did. Breakfast was something people ate in books, something my mother wanted me to do to be like those people (although she felt under absolutely no obligation to make personal concessions to normality herself).

Occasionally, in clear view of my mother, I would eat certain select items for breakfast. The white parts of a Hostess cupcake or just the filling in a Twinkie were favorites. These would be washed down with a Coke.

Don’t try this at home, kids. Especially if you’re my kids.

During the mid-1950s, when I would do anything anyone in a clown suit on television told me to do, I tried a number of new sugar-coated cereals. I had the soul of a junkie then. Unfortunately, once the prize was retrieved, I’d had my fix and the cereal soon became tiresome, not to mention disgusting.

In high school, I’d occasionally meet my boyfriend in the morning in the school lunchroom, where the nerds who ate oatmeal (and who would someday rule the world) dined. After a large peanut butter cookie and a furtive peanut-flavored kiss, I had the energy I needed to make it to lunchtime, when it was hot dog, fries and groping in the cloakroom.

In college, I discovered the egg. Breakfast was the only meal I could ever afford to eat at a restaurant. I felt I was doing something very good for myself when I went out and got the breakfast special around 11:30--the last possible second you could. Two sunny-side-up eggs, two strips of bacon, hash browns, white toast and jam is what we thought would give you vigor. That was during the Kennedy years when even the surgeon general probably still smoked a pack a day.

When I got married, I realized that eggs had serious symbolic meaning for my husband. When he was growing up, his budget-minded mother had insisted he eat cereal each day. So, I scrambled for my man and stopped eating breakfast. I was cultivating the lean-and-hungry Lucy Ricardo look.

In the health-obsessed ‘70s, I went through a wide variety of granolas, hot seven-grain cereals and weird concoctions of natural products from Mother Earth. I liked to start my day with something that looked like a bowl of mud. But my soul was at peace.

I finally settled on raisin bran. This was the period when I enjoyed the highest illusion of control over my life. I would wake up and smell the herbal tea, see the sun in the heavens, taste the cereal in my bowl and feel all was right in the world.

After 12 years of the grand bran illusion, my breakfast world began to fall apart again. Perhaps it was because I became a doubting soul. I questioned whether the raisin bran actually had more calories than I had figured when mixed with eight ounces of skim milk. And I began to suspect the purity of the product the day a bug flew out of my cereal box. Suddenly I was thrust back into wake-up chaos.

After a few years of wandering the breakfast wilderness, experimenting with various combinations of bran cereal and fruit, I have finally settled on one shredded wheat biscuit crumbled over half a sliced banana covered with skim milk in the blue Japanese bowl. It has to be the blue one.

Most days I’ll just eat it with a spoon from the old Scandinavian flatware. But when I’m being very, very good to myself, I will use the real silver spoon.

I recently caught a glimpse of a headline in the morning paper: “Attempts to Develop a Healthy Shredded Wheat.” Healthy? The implication, of course, would be that this perfect breakfast that I have finally disciplined myself to eat and find comfort in is actually not the wheat treat it’s cracked up to be. Had I read the story, I might have learned that the cereal I had been counting on is nothing more than Twinkie filling, daily requirements-wise.

But I closed the paper. I got out the silver spoon. I’m getting too old for any more truth with my breakfast.