Originally published in LLL of New Mexico’s Enchantment, circa 1987
I was sitting in a Shartlesville, Pennsylvania, doorway holding my stomach and groaning with every breath. “I will never, ever, eat again,†I said. And I meant it. I had just emerged from an all-you-can-eat, family-style restaurant and was not sure I would live to see tomorrow.
For those of you not familiar with that kind of a place, you sit at long tables on benches, and the waitresses bring in bowls and platters of all kinds of delicious food. No sooner would you spoon some creamed corn onto your plate, when the bowl would be whisked away and replaced with another bowl, full to the brim. We had ham and honey, beans, corn, chicken, potatoes (sweet and mashed), hominy, and tapioca pudding. I particularly remember the tapioca pudding because the tapioca balls were as big as grapes. Just when I thought the meal was over, somebody brought out trays of shoo-fly pie. Well, I thought, I’ll just have to have some of that!
Some minutes later, I stumbled to an empty doorway to feel sorry for myself, along with several other travelers who were lured by the billboards along the interstate. I moved from the doorway some hours later to the back seat of my car where I moaned and groaned for a while again. Slowly, every so slowly, I started to feel like a normal human being.
A La Leche League conference can be like that restaurant. Your mind is crammed with the things you heard at Dr. Campbell’s talk, with information from all the sessions, and with the informal discussions you had with some of the mothers with whom you rode to the conference. You tell yourself you will never be able to go to another La Leche League gathering again until you can digest all the stuff you just heard! In fact, sometimes you might even feel like that’s enough La Leche League participation for the year!
Well, like eating at the Shartlesville restaurant, you will digest everything and feel back to normal after a while. You’ll retain the things that were important and perhaps fit with your own instincts and experience. You’ll forget some things and put some items on a mental back burner to think about later. Sometimes this digestion process takes weeks. Sometimes months. And maybe years for some of the pithier concepts. Some of the things you heard and read at the conference may not make sense until you’ve had more experiences as a parent or wife or grandparent.
Just like the Shartlesville all-you-can-eat restaurant, nobody at a conference begins a talk by saying, “Well, have you had enough already?†If you’re sitting there, you must be hungry, right? The speaker just plunges in with tons of information, suggestions, recommendations, and medical data that you’ll just have to pile on top of the session you just heard. It can be overwhelming, but it will digest. You’ll just have to find some mental doorways to sit in afterwards.
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