By: Lou Maze
Goat Humour Columnist
If you are drinking a cup of coffee while you read this, I will try to forgive you. I’ve been having some health issues that necessitate my weaning myself off caffeine. At first I thought I had to give up coffee completely. I lasted a week. It was long week.
This isn’t the first time I have given up coffee. About a decade ago my husband and I were desperate to conceive. One of the many websites I visited suggested giving up coffee. It didn’t work. Now I wasn’t just infertile, I was comatose as well. Nothing sparks up your love life, like sleeping 13 hours a day. I tried herbal teas. I even found one I liked and if I steeped an entire box of the stuff for a day or two, I could actually taste it.
Coffee has been my friend for at least 40 years. That’s longer than I’ve been married. One of the reasons I married my husband is because he brought me coffee in bed. If I had to choose between my husband and coffee, I would choose my husband but I would resent it. He would pay in a million little ways that would render him as miserable as me. But I’d kiss him a lot, especially in the morning while he still has his morning coffee taste.
Without coffee, I can’t get my day going. I keep waiting for morning. I suspect it is out there because it’s noisy, there is light coming in and people keep honking and yelling about red and green lights. Everything is foggy, even with my glasses on. And it’s not that fun party time foggy, it’s that morning after foggy, complete with a throbbing headache.
Coffee is my reward for getting out of bed. I have reasons for getting out of bed, a bathroom to visit, a child to take care of, and a job. But coffee is the leverage in the internal bargaining that goes on when the alarm goes off.
I like big coffee mugs, the ones that you can cuddle up to, the ones that are more of a bladder-flush than a drink. And that’s my problem, my bladder. A friend said her mother-in-law gave up coffee and it cured her. So I went a week without coffee before I learned it was the caffeine I had to quit.
Now I’m cuddling up to a big mug of decaffeinated and it’s my new best friend. It doesn’t wake me up in the morning but it greets me with a warm familiarity and best of all, I can put off the adult diapers for at least another year.
