violet I had an email exchange with some friends of mine today. In it, I mentioned that I have never eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Not even a nibble. I just can’t do it.

In the same conversation, I mentioned that burping is among the other things I can’t do.

I don’t mean that I can’t burp at will. I mean that I can’t burp at all. It’s an affliction I’ve had as long as I can remember, but my mother assures me that I did, in fact, burp as a baby.

All around me, people are burping. They burp on command. They burp after a big meal. They burp the alphabet and laugh riotously about it.

But not me. I am silent.

And I am in pain.

When I eat almost anything, air pushes up my esophagus and wants to come out a burp. But what I get is the air bubble equivalent of a ten-car pileup, a giant mass of pain and then a series of pathetic gurgling noises that sound, as my husband puts it, “like a sink backing up.”

Meanwhile, he’s over on the couch burping the theme song to Gilligan’s Island.

Before you suggest that I drink a soda pop to induce burping, it won’t work. All that does is add more bubbles that park themselves in the middle of my chest. And then the sink backs up. And then I have pain.

Also, please don’t suggest, as my friend Jen did, that I pat myself on the back to get things moving. Self-patting seems impossible and I can’t ask my husband to help because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have time in his day to burp his wife.

And so I cope.

I don’t know what my co-workers think when they hear the gurgling after lunch coming out of Cubicle #1. I’ve never asked.

When I can suppress the gurgling, I’m happy. But that means no air is moving and so I blow up like Violet Beauregarde, the big round blue girl in Willy Wonka. I am a ticking, expanding time-bomb that wants to go off so desperately.

So listen. If you can burp, burp away. Burp like the wind! I will forever and always be jealous of you.

And I will never ask you to mind your manners. I’ll ask you instead to “Teach me, Master.”

Stumble it!