Creature of Habit

The thing about coping mechanisms, addictions, and eating disorders is that even years into recovery, they still like to present themselves as your first recourse whenever you find yourself in a stressful situation.

For the last few months, I think I can safely admit that I was depressed.
Back in August, after a trip for a family wedding that, while in no way disastrous, felt extravagant and unappreciated, I began to tumble down an all too familiar chasm of anxiety.
It was partially spurred by the the use of a substantial amount of funds for the trip and my concern that it didn't leave us with "enough" to make ends meet through the rest of the year.

That's right, I started worrying about things in December back in August.

It was compounded by the relentless terrible news I saw in the media every day.

I kept worrying about how i could take care of my son, how I could protect him, how was I going to make up for the fact that I'd brought him into a terribly dangerous world where people purposefully ignored the environment, turned away the hungry and hurt from their doors, fought over meaningless social platforms, and burst into schools, concerts, and churches to murder each other. In this world, it wasn't safe to walk down the street because a nazi/terrorist in a truck could plow into you just for having the gall to protest the normalization of bigotry and hatred.

Before long I was drowning in fear. I couldn't control anything. I couldn't even financially care for my family because no matter how many jobs I applied for or freelance positions I wrote samples for, or manuscripts I sent out, I never got a bite.

My feelings of inadequacy multiplied and bred in the shadow of these fears. They began to consume my sleep, my time with my son, my relationships, my body, myself.

I should warn you. This is not a comeback kid story. This is not a "And then I had an epiphany and turned my whole life around" story.

This is the truth.

I cried every day.
I retreated from conversations with friends because I didn't want to tell them how poorly I was doing.
I called my dad every day and talked to him for fifteen minutes before hanging up because every time I thought he would say the thing that made me feel better, he was a human being and just asked me how the baby was doing, and whether I'd tried a new recipe for bread, and what book I was reading, and I couldn't fathom being a normal person who wanted to bake bread, or had the concentration to read a book, or could accurately describe how her child was, because everything was terrible, I was terrible, nothing made any sense, and I was somehow still falling, always falling, always getting sadder, more anxious, wondering if this was how it would be from now on.

And this went on until about two weeks ago.
Around the end of October, I realized I hit rock bottom.
I looked around rock bottom, and I don't have to tell you what it looked like because I think you know, but I got there, and I knew, this was a different rock bottom than the one I had reached at 28 when I decided I needed therapy, or at 22 when I looked into the ocean one day and thought how nice it would be just to smash myself to pieces on the rocks to make my head go silent once and for all.

This time rock bottom was a moment of walking to the park. A storm had just blown through, and ripped mighty limbs from trees. Our neighbor's shed had lost its roof. Power zapped out through many neighborhoods including our own. And in that morning light, after the storm, with all the wreckage lying about, the wind still very strong and wild, it was oddly warm out.

I had been crying all morning, but needs must, and I took the baby for his daily dose of fresh air and found the park deserted.

Which made sense. Anybody with half a brain was probably tucked inside safely away from all the debris.

I took the baby out of his stroller, and we went down to the ocean and looked at the waves.
They were crowding the shore, chewing at it hungrily and the sound of thousands of rocks clacking against each other was deafening.

I picked up a stone. It was round.
And I realized that the ocean wasn't responsible for rounding its edges the way I'd always believed. The ocean just bashed the rocks against each other and it was the friction of touching all those stones, tumbling about in a senseless torrent of waves, that smoothed them down and made them blunt.

And it wasn't an epiphany, but it made me think about how much I had been blaming the universe and the state of the world for being fucked up and making me miserable, when it had nothing to do with an omniscient force and everything to do with all the other people, all the other rocks, and me allowing them to smash into me over and over and over and feeling like it was out of my hands, and that I had no control over being stuck in this wave.

But that isn't how it has to be at all.

And a little voice said, "the good thing about hitting rock bottom, is that there's nowhere to go but up."
And i felt better.

It was an increment better.
It was a sliver better.
But it was the first time in three months I could remember feeling any bit better instead of worse.

So I got a job at the local coffeshop working part time so that I didn't need childcare, and I could still spend my days with the baby.


*


When describing one's life, it is easy to get sucked into the desire of fitting one's story into a narrative.
I want you all to leave off with me on that shoreline, wind-whipped cheeks and howling with renewed fervor for life, but that is not the end of my story.

It is not even the end of my depression's story, because life is too many simultaneous narratives to ever possibly fit into such a neat and tidy description: beginning-conflict-resolution-end.

So I got a part time job, and I began to work on my anxiety, and I stopped going on facebook or instagram as much, and I cut certain media outlets out of my life, and I slowly, incrementally, started to feel like perhaps there was a point to what I was doing. Perhaps it wasn't a terrible idea to bring a child into this world, to hope that there might be a future for him that didn't look like my worst nightmares.

Things like to settle into grooves, habits, and routine.

I could work at a coffeeshop in Berlin and it would be just a slightly differently nuanced version of the same thing I've been doing for the last fifteen years.

So this is a new cafe, but the same old habits.
The offensive music we save for the closing.
The pastries we fight over to take home at the end of the day rather than throw them out.
The elaborate shift drinks.
The bad jokes.
The regulars.
The terrible customers.
The mopping.
The cuts and bruises I don't remember receiving.

And I come home at ten o'clock at night, starved from the running and carrying and lifting and cleaning, and I can feel the old monstrous crutches lean into me heavily as I enter the darkened kitchen.

The same demons that always lived here telling me to eat until I want to die.
Eat because I didn't have time to during my shift.
But keep eating because I hate myself.
Keep eating because you have to go back tomorrow.
Keep eating because you're lonely, because you miss your kid, because you miss your kid but you don't want to see him right away when you get home because you haven't actually had a moment's peace.
Keep eating because you don't remember how to listen to your body, because your body is a stupid, wretched thing that you have no control over, that will fail you, is failing you, failing you constantly, every moment, even now.

So it is a small victory but an important one,
that I make a grilled cheese sandwich.
I put butter in the pan, slice up the good, homemade bread.
arranged the cheddar pieces so that they meet the edges of the bread and then press down with the spatula to get that golden toasty outside, with the hot, molten, salty interior.

I make the grilled cheese because making something to eat was also never how I used to come home from a shift.

Then I take it, and I sit down in front of the computer, and I put on a site that I can stand to read, that isn't terror infused, and I eat the sandwich slowly. I taste it. I drink a glass of water to wash it down.
When I get to the last bite, it is the best bite, the corner bit with the toastiest edge and the meltiest cheese. I savor it, and then I finish my water, and then I finish the article I am reading.

I brush my teeth, and then I retrieve my child, and I go to bed.

The smallest victory, but no less important, because it is so starkly different from how I ever sought comfort in the past.

And there is still a voice that screams:

You pig!
Bad mother!
Terrible person!

But it sounds hollow and desperate now.
There is a voice bigger than it, and it sounds like a wave filled with tumbling rocks, and all the ocean behind it, and it says,
"Good. Now sleep. You've done all that you can."

And it is enough.

Worthy

We threw out our scale a few weeks ago.
In fact, I haven't weighed myself in a month, and it wouldn't be that big of a deal if I didn't think about it, every, single day.

See, weighing myself and seeing a number that corresponded with the idea I had fo no logical reason decided to be the most virtuous helped me make sense of my life.

I struggle a great deal with feeling worthy.
As in, I don't.

I won't go into the litany of things from my childhood and young adulthood that destroyed my sense of personal value, but I will boil it down to the three sentences I hear inside my own head more than any other words:

"You don't matter."
"Who do you think you are?"
and the biggie...
"It's okay for everyone else, but not for you."

These tenants run just about every decision I make, and back when I had a full blown eating disorder, I created an elaborate system of behaviors that governed whether I could feel worthy that day.

Doing 2,000 sit ups=worthy (no matter if it took two hours and rubbed all the skin off my spine leaving me with a bloody scab I had to cover with make up).

Not going for a walk because I had too much homework=unworthy

As an adult in recovery, I have worked really hard to  listen to my body and approach my behaviors with curiosity over judgement and forgiveness over shame.

But I still had my scale.

Is it any wonder that, after we threw out the scale, I began to have a real problem with my self worth?

I was unaware of how so much of what I chose to feel about myself was decided by that arbitrary, whimsical number.

I could read all day about how weight is irrelevant to health, muscle versus fat density, body positivity, and HAES, but the information never traveled further than skin deep.

Nevertheless, I am experiencing a reckoning.

I,
-
a thirty five year old woman with multiple degrees, several completed manuscripts, a husband, a son, good friends, a safe neighborhood, and a view of the ocean a ten minute walk from my door,
-
DO NOT KNOW IF I AM WORTH ANYTHING BECAUSE I CAN'T TELL HOW MUCH I WEIGH.


Now, my first reaction is to berate myself for being so stupid, superficial, and easily manipulated by our fucked up media and society's perceptions, BUT,
that is one of the fundamental parts of the problem.
I am far too quick to judge myself as faulty or stupid or morally corrupt for fastening onto something so arbitrary, but isn't this an important moment for me?
Realizing that my inherent value has nothing to do with a measurement, and more importantly my brain doesn't know how to imbue itself with worth if a body isn't involved, is a big deal

But now what?
How do I change these destructive habits I have practiced for so many years? How do I teach my brain to throw out the veritable lego kingdom built out of millions of bricks of doubt and coping mechanisms of thirty odd years?
Is this really why  throwing out the scale was so scary I couldn't actually bring myself to do it?
Is this why I didn't actually do it until my husband handed it to me and told me to take it outside and junk it?

Ugh.

So here I am, a girl standing in front of a mirror, asking it to love her.

No strings, no scales, no immediate pay off.

No caloric equations that will somehow placate the mind into believing something was managed.

No balancing of scales of any kind, no measurements, literally, just a girl and her mind, a girl and her body as vehicle, as sensory receptor, as child creator and sustainer, just a body for god's sake!

Nothing more, certainly,
but finally, nothing less. 

A Snowball's Chance

You know how sometimes you're chugging along, doing your thing, and something comes along and hits you like a mac truck?
Maybe it was something you were prepared to have interrupt your routine, like, say a trip to the top-middle of the country for a wedding...
You tie up all your loose ends, doing laundry, emptying the fridge of perishables, and taking out the trash so it doesn't fester in your seven day absence.
You arrange for the dog to spend the time with your Dad in Maine where she can run about in the woods and be fattened up with sneaky table scraps.
You get a friend to stop by the house and feed the cat. You transfer money and budget for gas. You make seventy six checklists and you shockingly get out the door on the day at the time you planned for, and like tumblers in a lock, everything clicks like it's supposed to.

Then, a mid-west relation on your husband's side, someone with too much make up, or bad breath from a sour stomach, shakes your hand, touches the baby's cheek, or kisses you hello beside your eye, and introduces a fucking cold germ.

The trip continues to go pretty much as planned.

I mean, sure, the world is in chaos, terrible things are happening that make your too anxious to eat regularly. You make some poor decisions like drinking diet coke at four in the afternoon because you're doing that whole "vacation with a baby not sleeping thing," and you maybe eat two frosted rose cookie favors from the wedding while lying in a hotel bed one night after you flee the wedding because it didn't start until 6pm, and so the baby went into meltdown just as they brought out the entrees, and so you haven't eaten anything but half a bread roll and three forkfuls of wilted romaine in italian dressing.

But these are all details that get lost in the relief as soon as you set foot in your own house a week later.

Except you wake up the following day with a head full of bees and a throat paved in crushed glass.
You, your Beard, and your baby, are sicker than a pack of dogs, and due to all the travel and emotional strain, it knocks you out for yet another week.

By the time you get back on your feet, it's almost the third week of August.
You're hurtling well toward Autumn with many stores already shuffling in their Halloween decor, and a desire to drink hot coffee and sit outside beside a smoky fire and eat apple after apple.

or at least that's what you want it to be.

That anxious feeling in your stomach never went away.

In fact, now that you have the biggest financial commitment of the year, and the requisite gnarly cold out of your way, you have nothing but the hideous world to focus on.

You want to be enjoying the last beach days. You take the baby to the beach during the eclipse thinking it will be magical, but instead the water is choked with foul smelling algae, and you flee the stench after ten minutes under the sickly half-sun.

The class you've had to reschedule twice now has to be cancelled due to an open house, and your baby won't take a nap, and your fall classes don't have enough sign ups to run yet, so you're anxiety takes hold of money fears, and you find yourself swinging back and forth between nausea and ravenous hunger, fear and survival, self loathing and self preservation.

Your need for stability and reassurance is constant. You get no succor from talking to people who ordinarily make you feel better, hopeful, like you matter, like you can make things better.

That's what it all boils down to.



Control.


You have so little right now.

With a child who you want to leave a wonderful world, a world better than the one you brought him into.

With an old demon that threatens its ugly rise every time you feel ineffective and lost.

With all the small grievances snowballing against you its really difficult to stay warm and be certain you'll get back to safety.

I feel like I'm trapped inside an avalanche and I don't know which way is up.

But, I've got to spit, and see which way it falls, and then start digging.
I have to dig my way out, and trust the sun is shining once I'm free.

It's Friday.

So there are only three days left before the great Cronk roadtrip to Detroit MI for Cronk the younger's wedding.

This meant my brain thought it would be a wonderful time (at around 3am this morning) to list all the things I haven't done yet to prepare for said road trip, namely the copious amounts of laundry.
Also, I think Baz is teething again because he's been night nursing a ton, and while I was listing laundry, counting phone chargers, and trying to figure out if we needed to bring all of the books the baby wants to read, I was also fantasizing about eating peanut butter, tortilla chips, and frozen bananas.

I feel like I need to blog more regularly, so that I come across as less of a psycho and more of a human, so here's a recap of my week.

Monday-
I finished reading the pieces written by the students in my Magical Fiction class and doodled notes on them. I spent an hour on zillow looking at apartments in Portsmouth and Dover, NH, which are beautiful, and much more affordable than the North Shore.
Still, we don't really have the extra moolah to move right now, so I got depressed and strapped the now 30lb baby to my chest and went for an extra long walk to clear my head. I toodled down to the Beverly market for the first time this year and bought some corn and zucchini. I was surprised at how little produce there was in comparison to how many stands were selling bread. I hung out at the Pigs Fly stand drooling over their stuff for longer than I probably should have considering I don't think buying bread makes sense when I have Fang (my homegrown starter) lurking in the fridge waiting to be turned into magic.

Tuesday-
My Dad came down in the afternoon to hang out with the baby and help with the childcare so I could leave for my class in Boston. We drank tea and ate slices of the zucchini bread I baked that morning. Auntie Rex came over and the baby delighted in having so much attention.
We left the babe with my Dad and ducked out so I could buy a Rose for my class to share, and Rex got me to the train depot in plenty of time.
For the first time this summer, I made it to Grub without having to run halfway across Boston.
I chilled the Rose, and then the rest of the students arrived.
They're a really lovely group, and between them there were brownies, almond cookies, pretzels, hummus, and blueberry cake. One very industrious student took it upon himself to make ice shot glasses in the freezer and brought out a bottle of rum, but he was the only one brave enough to try it.
If I were to drink anything stronger than a glass of wine, there would be no way I'd make it home in one piece. I'd probably end up on the Fung Wah bus to NYC with a garbage bag full of balloon animals and a box of krispy kremes (not that I've ever done that...ever).
I got home on the 11pm train after a wonderful class, and fell into bed with the bairn.

Wednesday-
My late Tuesday nights always melt into eeeeeeaaaaaarly Wednesday mornings. The baby does not care what time I get home from class. He's up at 5:30, and so I am too.
Thank god for coffee.
It was humid and hot, so we went down to the beach at about 8:30am. The baby bypasses the playground and goes running straight for the water, and honestly, I can't blame him, so we splashed and frolicked for a bit, until I could feel the sun starting to scorch up my shoulders, about quarter after nine. It's a good thing too, because I checked my phone and saw a few texts about a coffee date with my darling InkWitch that I totally blanked on thanks to the no sleep. I wrapped the babe up, swaddled him into the stroller and raced for the coffee shop, still making it there in time for the date.
It was one of those necessary lovely things. We only had about an hour to visit, but InkWitch is so generous in spirit and in body, that I always feel really well cared for in her presence. She brought a rattlesnake toy for the babe, and tea and a talisman for me. I've been wearing the talisman for the rest of the week, and it reminds me how much I am loved by a very special witchy lady.
After the coffee date, I ran a few errands, then my third wind abandoned me, and by noon, we were back at the house. I curled up so the babe could get a post-lunch nap and wished with all my might that I could fall asleep too, but not for this Aries. As long as the sun is shining, my eyes are open.
The afternoon involved a lot of reading. Baz picked out book after book, and I read and read. It makes me so happy that he might love reading as much as I and his Dad do.

Thursday-
I woke up with a baking fever. I had a recipe kicking around in my head for Sauerkraut Sourdough, so I mixed up the dough at seven thirty while the coffee pot burbled and the baby finished his sweet potato pancakes. I fiddled with the kraut, but still, it added a bit more liquid than I wanted, and so, when I left for (yes, another coffee date), I was a bit nervous about the final rise.
This has been the week for seeing friends who've been so busy that our schedules never properly aligned. With the trip next week, I got worried I wouldn't get to visit with anybody, so I jammed everything in to this seven day block. It makes me sound way more social than I usually am. Most weeks, we don't see a soul, and I start talking to the walls to feel less crazy. That's how it works, right?
Another early hour at the beach, some running around, and then, an eleven thirty lunch/coffee date with Auntie Face. Auntie Face is really a term of endearment, because she is fiercely beautiful and serves serious face. I am in awe of her luminescence.
I drank two (TWO!!!) iced lattes, and Baz purloined her almonds and dried mango (he's lucky he's cute), then we walked down to another park and played around a fairy tree while talking about the world between worlds. I try to be grateful for the humans I have in my village around here. It's remarkable...how we all find each other exactly when we need to.
After such a busy date, the babe was tuckered out. We came home and he collapsed into his afternoon nap. Sometime I'm going to have to sleep train him, but for now, I relish the feeling of his little body completely at rest on my heart. It makes me feel stronger and more magical than I ever dreamed possible.
The nap ended abruptly, and I nervously bunged the sloppy kraut bread into the oven, then we read a few more books before dinner.
Shockingly the bread turned out marvelous!
Savory, tangy, sour, and salty without an overload of anything. It was really good! The baby ate a piece with his peas and chopped up hamburger, and I had a chunk with some cheese.
I typically eat my biggest meal around two in the afternoon, and then eat a snack and then another snack instead of dinner because the end of the day is super busy, but I guess I didn't eat enough yesterday because of the late night hangries.

Friday-
And here we are!
This morning, I confirmed our rental car reservation, bought some weekend groceries (fruit, cat food, whipped cream, and taco fixin's) but was strangely waylaid by a package of raisin bran muffins. I couldn't tell you why, but I had to have them.
We then scooted straight up the hilliest hill in my neighborhood to visit Auntie Treat, who spoiled us with homemade palmiers (teensy little three bite wonders), and fancy coffee. The babe was in heaven racing around with Auntie Treat's two doggos. We got our exercise too, trying to keep him from eating trinkets, pulling out wires, and knocking over glasses as well.
By then the babe was ready for his nap, so we spirited back home, where I inhaled a banana/peach/sweet potato/coconut yoghurt smoothie the size of my head.
Later I took the babe outside and let him play in the baby pool (another present from Inkwitch), and picked some tomatoes from the garden, before coming back in to split one of the muffins and some salty salty peanuts. Nom nom nom.

An Admission of Guilt

Recovery is not linear.

I repeat this to myself as I realize that I am waiting for my scale to zero out so I can step on it before I get in the shower.

It's a habit I got into when I was pregnant, weighing myself every Tuesday, but I kept it up after the baby was born, and I realized the other day that I am no longer doing it on Tuesdays.
I am weighing myself every morning.

Then something else started happening.

I started seeing a number I wanted to keep.
A low number.

And without even thinking about it, all of them, all of the behaviors I've worked so hard to let go of in the last two years began creeping back into my days.

And so did all of their consequences.

Weird food rules.

Like not allowing myself to eat before 11am.

Even when my stomach is growling.

Not allowing myself this or that thing if I haven't had blank number of servings of vegetables first.

Not allowing myself to eat before I've gone for a morning walk.

Not allowing myself to eat if I haven't had 16oz of water first.

And fuck fuck fucking fuck, I let it tell me all of that.

I made excuses for it. Like it was a bad boyfriend.

I'm not really restricting, I'm eating plenty of food.
I'm not ignoring my body's needs, I always stop when I feel full.
I'm not keeping myself from eating certain foods, I eat anything I want.

Then the pendulum swung, and I binged.

I felt so hungry, and I ate right through my hunger cues into my fullness cues and then past those into my discomfort.

I ate enough to feel sick to my stomach and not to want to eat again for the rest of the day.

Then the shame began.

I lay awake wondering what I'd done wrong.
I woke up vowing today would be different,
and then I did it again.

You read that right.

I restricted all day, and then I binged at night.

And this time, I felt like I was in a car my Eating Disorder was driving drunk, and I knew it was dangerous, I knew I should pull over and get out, but I just had to see if it really was going to crash, and I really was going to die.

And the thing is, it didn't crash this time.
I didn't die.

But I will be asked to get back in this car every day, every morning, every hour for the rest of my life, and if I say yes every time, one day, I will crash, and I will die, and it will be because I let this thing convince me that a bunch of worthless rules, a bunch of stupid meaningless rules, are more important than my body, my life, and my son. I will pretend that they give me control over the uncontrollable, and then I will miss out on every other important thing happening in my life.

So I repeat to myself, recovery is not linear.

And I forgive myself for blundering back into the insidious, sticky swamp of my disordered behaviors. I hope I caught myself in time.
I know that there will be other moments that I fuck this up, but all I can do is take it one hour at a time, one day at a time, one meal at a time, and most importantly, tomorrow, I am going to eat breakfast when I get up and relax for the rest of the day.

And I am not getting on that fucking scale.

Short and Bittersweet

Sometimes I get completely swept up in how fast my baby is going to grow up.

These days it's so easy to become mired inside the amber of long summer afternoons and even longer sticky, cranky nights. I hold him on my lap and he twiddles wiht my boobs and tries to nurse standing on his head, and by god, it feels endless then. I feel like I'll never get my body back to myself. I feel overwhelmed by the needs of this little person, and I feel crushed by the responsibility of giving him what he needs from moment to moment.

But it's slipping away nonetheless.

He races away from me on the beach, a tiny shovel clutched in his fist, and my heart seizes in my chest with the awful certainty that he will repeat this desertion someday, but in a much grander sense.

That's the truly horrible truth about parenthood:
If you do your job properly, one day, your child will leave you, and they may never look back.

Keep Your Home Equity. I wanna Dance!

Sometimes I am paralyzed over one very specific task.

It's usually a money related thing.

A bill I need to pay in installments because I don't have the lump sum (medical shit),
A debt I am overwhelmed by and need to lower my monthly payments on (student loan shit),
An impending expense I have no desire to incur but must in order to continue as a functioning adult member of society and caretaker of a child (any type of repairs).

These things are literally heart freezingly stressful for me because deep deep down, I believe that the fact that I find them necessary and unhappy making is a symptom of the terrible life I am leading.

Honestly, if you wanted to go to the source of pretty much all of my anxiety other than fear of death or injury to my loved ones it's all rooted in this terrible certainty that I am doing my whole damn life wrong.

Do you ever feel like this?

Like, obviously a decent person would have met all her deadlines!
This decent person has a savings account for her son, a retirement fund that both she and her husband contribute to, and yet another account in which they are saving for the down payment on a house.
This decent person doesn't feel a hand squeeze her lungs when she sees that the mail has come.
She doesn't mind ordering checks or setting up her bills for automatic payments because she'll never overdraw her account.

This is the person I believe I should be, and I really really want to be her.

I want to be her, and I have to believe that I will be her at some point,
but I'm not her right  now, and because I'm not, I am constantly sizzling with fear.

It sucks too, because I hate money.
I hate its importance, the materialism, malcontent, and greed it inspires.
I hate that as soon as I got to my thirties everyone asked me when we were going to buy a house.

And I actually don't give a shit about owning a house.

You can't take it with you!
I want to scream.
Why bother tying yourself to a piece of property that will only rob you of any extraneous funds you put aside for the traveling you wanted to do in your old age?

And smart people, real grown ups, people nothing like me, have answers for all these questions.
Answers that begin with equity and end with 'DON'T YOU WANT TO LEAVE YOUR CHILDREN WITH ANYTHING?'

And yeah...I do...
but I would much rather leave them with memories than a bunch of stuff they have to figure out how to either get rid of, sell, or store after I die.

Why is it so difficult to convince people that I don't want THINGS?

I would much rather go out to a meal with six of my closest friends than get a necklace that cost as much as that dinner.

I would rather take a trip than invest in an upgraded vehicle.

I would rather splurge on the vacation, the boat ride, the road trip, and anything other experience that I can lie in bed and relive over and over again in my mind.

When I am dying, I won't be lying there fondly recalling all my stocks and bonds. I won't be happily going over how many clocks I collected or how, the day before my stroke, I finally got that diamond tennis bracelet I was coveting.

I will be lost in the memories of the meals laughed over until midnight, the embrace of my loved ones in an airport after a long journey, the sunrises over multicolored oceans, the breathless, weightless feeling of being in a foreign country and trying to memorize how everything feels and looks even though you know it's impossible.

So here I am, struggling, like everyone else, to equate my idea of a well lived life, with taking care of my family and staying secure, so there's food on the table between vacations, doctor's appointments and vaccines before summer adventures, and electricity pumping into my home, so that on a sick day, my kid and I can curl up and watch ET for the millionth time.

It's odd, but I feel better writing that all down.

My Dad once told me that his goal was to die owing a million dollars.
He's in his seventies now, and he laments that he'll probably not get there.

I laugh at him, but I silently agree.

Fuck it.
I wanna dance!

Falling on a Summer afternoon

Today has been a backwards, inside out kind of day.

Like all of them,
it looks perfectly ordinary from the outside.
We woke up and I fed the baby breakfast: toast made from homemade bread, with peanut butter and bananas and cottage cheese with cinnamon.
We took the dog out.
We cleaned up, got dressed, went to the park.
I drank coffee.
I chased the baby around the park and the beach for an hour. He wanted to see trucks. He chased after dogs. He befriended a four year old and they chased each other around giggling.
We shared a bottle of water, and he ate a handful of pita chips.
He fell asleep in the stroller as I navigated through appalling construction that made the fifteen minute trek to the grocery store take three quarters of an hour.
He woke up in the store after only a little bit, and I peeled a clementine for him.
He sucked the juice out of the segments and I finished the shopping.
I took a weird roundabout way home to avoid the construction, and it was eleven thirty before I got home, and I had been awake for five and a half hours and I hadn't eaten yet.

Bastian ran around while I made a smoothie, and I forgot I hadn't eaten, even though I was starving, and I put in the frozen leftovers of an almond milk latte from the day before, and after I drank the smoothie, I got such a caffeine buzz, but it was nothing compared to later.

It's four thirty in the afternoon.
And I think I am fighting a panic attack.

I did all the normal things.
I talked to my mother on the phone about her trip to Canada to see my Grandmother.
I fed the baby lunch and talked to Bob during his lunch break.
The baby and I went to the library, and played for an hour. I read him The Cat in the Hat.

Then I left with him in the carrier thinking that he'd fall asleep.
Which he did.
Except I couldn't calm down then.
All I could think about all day was going to the farmers market.
All I had to do was walk for forty minutes with the baby asleep on me, and I would be there.
All I wanted, was for him to sleep, for the wind to blow, for there to be strawberries at the market, for there to be something delicious that surprised me. I wanted to see the baby dance to the musician playing in the square.

But my legs hurt.
And my eyes felt unfocused.
My head clouded up, and the prospect of walking so far suddenly made me feel weak and sick.

So I turned around.
I came home.
All I wanted to do was have a lovely market experience with my baby.
But when I couldn't do that,
all I wanted was to sit in front of the computer and write while he slept.
Except, the moment I sat down, he woke up.

I couldn't stop feeling weak.

I thought maybe I needed to eat more.
I made toast with hummus.
I drank a huge bottle of water.

And I feel drunk.

I feel dizzy and weepy and off.

I don't want to eat.

I don't want to be in my house.

I feel like I've failed everything, and I don't know why.

Like I'm falling down a tunnel, and I don't have the strength to scrabble at the walls.

What do I do?

Wait until it passes.
I guess.
Like everything.WhatW

Racing To Win at Losing AKA:Parenthood

I've mainly been using this blog as a therapist's chaise longue to process through my ED recovery lately, and that's okay.
A large part of my recovery story was and is becoming pregnant and then transforming into a mother (still doing that second part), but there are many transformation occurring within and around us all the time.
For example, my baby, my little squish, has suddenly transformed into a toddler.

I was looking the other way.
At the end of April he was still only just sixteen months. He still had all these little rolls on his arms and legs like the can of biscuits when you first open it. His head was still a little big, and he had very little hair. He slept twice a day and only woke once or twice in the night to nurse a little and then cuddle back down to sleep. He liked books, but couldn't sit still through them, and he played with toys in an abstract way picking them up and putting them down without any kind of idea what they were for. Blocks weren't for stacking so much as knocking over. Toy trucks and trains were for banging on things to make noise, etc.
Then May arrived and blew us apart with a solid five weeks of teething.
Everything went topsy turvy as my kid cut six molars in the course of a month.
Our sleep schedule shot to shit.
He ran fevers, drooled constantly, was congested, sneezing, coughing, and generally miserable. He went back to nursing several time a day to ease the pain, and he didn't play much at all. He couldn't sit still he was so uncomfortable so reading was out. We spent a lot of afternoons plonked in front of the tv watching a movie as he nursed the pain away.
I was happy I could do that much and shoved aside those feelings of guilt that I should be doing more.
Then with the beginning of June the teething ebbed away like the tide.
And strangely, it took with it the last of his babyness, leaving me with a toddler and the feeling that he had become a new animal overnight.

Suddenly he was eating a ton more food, entire hamburgers at dinner time, bagels and cream cheese for breakfast, his own portions of sweet potato and beans.
Along with the newfound appetite, his body and energy were changing. He didn't want to nap twice a day, instead sometimes he'd play through his a.m. naptime, racing around at a breakneck speed, picking up his toys and examining them with new curiosity. He began to bring me books to read aloud, only to squirm out of my lap halfway through and go to chase the cat or run a train around the floor ON ITS WHEELS like you're supposed to!

Out of nowhere he threw tantrums when I picked him up to leave the playground, wriggled out of my arms when I tried to dress him in the morning, and refused to sit down in the tub for his bath.

I felt ambushed by this new, willful child who replaced my dumpling of a boy from only two months earlier. I didn't understand that I needed to discipline him, not just keep him alive, and it blew my mind when one night after chasing him for ten minutes with a t-shirt for him to sleep in, I gave up, and he came over to me with a onesie he picked out himself which he then allowed me to snap onto his body as if to say, "i just wanted to wear this, not the one you chose."

Yet, there were huge new wonderful things about this toddler, he wrapped his arms around the back of my neck and kissed my face then leaned back and smiled at me and my whole heart exploded with love. He clung to my legs when we went to the library and there were new kids he didn't know, and he held out a hand so I could help him anytime he wanted to climb stairs or descend the steps out of our apartment. He petted the dog and giggled hysterically when she licked his face. He chased the cat, and tickled her ears, and I could tell him to be gentle and he would pet her more softly.

Then he hit a kid in the head with a toy train at the library because he didn't want to share, and the next day, he slapped another baby in the face who was trying to climb the same structure as he.

Mortified, I bundled his screaming, squirming self into the stroller and ran away, shouting apologies over my shoulder to the understanding parents, descending into a pit of shame on the walk home.

Now I have these new obstacles to surmount, screen time to police, games to supervise, and lessons to dispense. I feel as though my job as mama, all encompassing love noodle has been pulled out from underneath me and these new responsibilities thrust upon me with no warning.
Perhaps that's the riddle of parenting, just when you catch up to being what your child needs, they shoot ahead of you, and you have race to acclimate to the new thing they need you to be.

Thoreauvian vs Pavlovian

For a really long time I bought into the idea that I could only "earn" food by doing some form of exercise.
At my most disordered times, this manifested in me running or walking for ten miles or more on an empty stomach and then continuing on to my job, which was being a baker (a very physical job that contrary to popular belief left very little time to actually eat anything) work an eight hour shift, and then come home only to be in such a deficit from only eating one meal  the whole day (usually a chunk of bread or a day old muffin) that I would inhale the contents of my fridge and cupboards, only to start the whole fucked up cycle again the next morning.

As I've moved further and further away from those patterns throughout my recovery, I've noticed the voice that screams at me for not doing everything my disorder thinks I should is getting quieter.

The first thing I found difficult this year has been giving up on the dream of getting back into distance running now that the weather is nice.

It's tricky because distance running was a very large part of my disordered routine for a long time, but I still truly love the challenge, and I miss it. I have gone on a few runs this spring, and every time, I feel so good afterward. I know my body would really like the chance to train again, but to do it properly.

Secondly, I do a lot of walking. This we know. It's my main mode of transportation being that I do not drive, and it's also my main form of meditation both before, during, and after my pregnancy.

I have, however, noticed that it is also the activity that I lean on to expend energy (read: burn calories) when I give in to that voice in my head telling me I need to do some kind of penance before I am allowed to eat.

This is why I am very curious, because this week, for the first time in about twenty years, I don't feel like walking.

It's a very strange feeling for me because even my "not walking" still involves me walking distances most people drive like to the corner store, grocery, train station, or post office. I'm lucky, and I live in a pretty town where everything is relatively close, and I can stroll to the library, grab a coffee, and take the baby to the playground on foot with ease.

I've been doing this as much as possible since the weather got good.

I have also been doing at least one three mile "excursion walk" every day for about as long as I can remember. Like since I was thirteen and my parents let me leave the house alone. No joke.

I have walked with ear infections.
I have walked with UTIs.
I have walked after broken hearts, huge fights with my beard, bad news, good news, big meals, no meals, bad storms, rainbows, while pursuing degrees, while growing a human inside my body, while exploring cities and countries I'd never been to before, while pondering the next chapter in a novel or the next journal entry. I have walked hundreds (probably thousands) of miles while on the phone long distance, and it has always felt a certain way:

Necessary.

I'm not kidding.

I walk so much it's officially become part of my identity.

I am recognized by strangers who often ask me what my name is and "are you the girl I see walking everywhere?"

Walking and writing go hand in hand, and I feel quite happy being the "walking girl" wherever I live, but there's been a bit of a heat wave this week, and I didn't feel like walking on Monday when it was 96 degrees, and I didn't feel like walking yesterday, when it was 93 degrees.

Today it is unarguably gorgeous outside.
The temperature is a stunning 71.
The sky is cerulean.
There's a cool breeze, and it's as though the entire world wants to be walked.

But I don't feel like it.


The voices in my head argue, "but then you'll feel better!" "You'll earn an ice cream cone!" "Maybe you'll sort out that scene you're having trouble writing!" "You should call your Dad!"

I dismiss them all.

And it feels revolutionary for the walking girl to put her feet up.

You Will See Me

So I am in recovery from anorexia nervosa and binge eating disorder.

This means every now and again I relapse.

It's funny.

I like to think I've made so much progress, but there are still all these mental and emotional booby traps hiding in my psyche. Sometimes even calling attention to them can cause me to behave irrationally or borrow from my disordered past. Other times there's a relapse on the horizon like the gathering clouds of a storm.

First of all,
I noticed the other day that my blog is described in the about section as being about motherhood, but really this is about self care. The two are completely different things and, in this society, they rarely walk hand in hand.

I am considering rewriting the About section so that people stop reading my blog looking for parenting advice. Let's be honest, I don't really write about parenting right now.
One of the luxuries of keeping a blog with almost no followers at all is I don't feel pressured to create any kind of "interesting content". Clickbait be gone!
This blog exists as a way for me to process one of the biggest-if not the biggest-change my life has ever gone through, which dictated the other biggest change.
I got knocked up ergo I had to confront my eating disorders.
I wanted to have a healthy baby and a healthy me to care for him, so I had to recover. The two were utterly mutual in their exclusivity. There was no skipping one to have the other.

Anyhoo, so I've been slowly integrating more recovery media voices into my social media diet as it were. I started with Kylie from ImmaEatThat, which is a phenomenal blog written by a phenomenal certified dietician. If you want to read a very sensitive, understanding woman's personal perspectives on recovery from restriction, orthorexia, and BED, she is an excellent place to start.
From her I have continued to add people like Isabel Foxen Duke, Alice from Alice Loves Peanut Butter, and many others.

To be fair, I also follow people like Jes AKA The Militant Baker, Erin Unleashes, B. Stereo, and Dori Deere, Brittany Gibbons, Joy the Baker, and Deb from Smitten Kitchen. These women are all in their thirties, they're all living very different lives, and some of them aren't in recovery from an ED, but they're women and they love food, which for me is a revolutionary enough description to merit idolization. They're all women. They all eat. Some of them give TED talks. Some of them have children. Some of them are battling with another physical or mental illness than ED recovery, and some of them are so startlingly wholesome they seem to be right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Some of them are dancers, some of them are models, some of them are photographers, and a couple of them are currently pregnant and sharing all of the weird body dysmorphic stuff that comes along with that journey.

If you are not following these women, I feel a little bad for you because they are the smiling faces that greet me from my social media platforms. They are wise, witty, gracious, and grateful. They are nervous, honest, foul-mouthed, confident, and cautious. They fear for the world the same way I do, and the mourn the same things I grieve.

They're good sisters, man.

And they keep me in good company during a time when loneliness is a big big enemy to me getting to a place where I can really trust myself again.

Because that's the root of recovery.

Trust.

Somewhere along our youth, we bought into the idea that we couldn't trust our own bodies and minds to do what was best for us.

I don't know when it happened for you, but it happened for me when I was six.
A person I was supposed to trust implicitly hurt me irrevocably.
Instead of addressing my hurt, the situation was made entirely about the person who hurt me and what would happen to him if it was found out that he had done this.

Time has gone by. He is not a bad person. He never hurt another person in that way, and I honestly believe it was because he was out of his mind at the time that the event occurred. I, as a child, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was not my fault.

However, that was never explained to me.

The thing that i remember being impressed upon me the most was that I could never tell anybody about what had happened because it would get him in trouble.

When I think back to many many things that I did, that I chose to do, or allowed to be done to me, they all lead back to this moment where the two adults I trusted most in the entire world explaining that whatever I felt, whatever I needed to make sense out of the hurt I felt, the desire I had to talk about it was not as important as a grown man's reputation.
They did not say this, but it was the message all the same.

You and your body are not as important as a man's reputation.

This seed was sown deeply into me, and it is the one that I have the most trouble addressing.
Even now as I write it, I feel so sorry for the little girl I was. How could anyone have told her that?
It feels insane, but even knowing that, as an adult, does not serve to contradict my feelings and reactions of worthlessness in my own life.

I let a lot of people use me as I grew up.
Including myself.
When I began monitoring my body, one of the bi-products of the decreased nutrition was a plunge in my hormone levels, and without my hormones, I found my emotions more stable. I didn't get as worked up about things as I always had. I could be betrayed, and it didn't faze me.
My eating disorder helped me to manage this horrible certainty that
"Everybody else's feelings matter except mine."
"Everybody else's body is worth protecting except mine."
"I will not stand for anyone treating people I love a certain way, but if I am treated that way, I deserve it."

When my body finally broke the mold of anorexia and the pendulum swung really hard in the other direction, I viewed it as my control being dismantled. I viewed it as my failure as a human.

But it wasn't.
It was actually my body saying loudly, "I DO MATTER. I WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO SUFFOCATE ME QUIETLY. I WILL TAKE UP SPACE AND I WILL MATTER. I AM NOT GOING TO BE INVISIBLE ANYMORE."

All of this to bring me to today...


Today I binged.

I know physically why, but I couldn't put my finger on psychologically what triggered it, but I think I get it now.

I've been feeling invisible lately.

I've had a lot of friends make plans with me only to break them.
I've had a lot of plans with friends that I've had to break because of the baby's teething and instead of checking back with me to reschedule, those friends with whom I broke the plans have not been in touch.
I'm sending out my writing and not hearing any replies.
I'm trying to get people to sign up for a class I am teaching, and I'm not getting enough students.

I feel like nothing I do matters.

I feel like I don't even need to be seen.

I feel overlooked, uncounted, and un-missed.

And moreover, I feel powerless to counter these feelings.
 So my body reacted by filling itself up, by fighting back in the only way that has ever got me to slow down and pay attention.

If I hadn't binged today, I wouldn't have asked these questions. I wouldn't have followed the thread of my disorder all the way back to its painful origins. I wouldn't have reminded myself that when I am at my worst, I feel invisible and of no consequence because that was the overwhelming feeling I took away from the worst experience of my childhood.

If I didn't do those things, I wouldn't have realized that i need something I am not getting right now.
I need recognition.
I need to be seen.

I can attend to those needs now.

For the first time in my life, I think I'm grateful for a binge.

I'm grateful that my recover thus far has taught me to be curious instead of judgmental in the aftermath.

Here I am.
And You will see me.

The Hardest to Break

My last rule.


My final rule to shake from the ghost of eating disordered past is the most difficult one.
It is the one that I have the most emotional investment in, and the one that has the deepest hooks in my soul.

We all have one of these, and this is mine.

Breakfast.


I never eat it.



I think back to when I was a kid, getting ready for school in the morning was a blitzkrieg affair.
I hurtled through the shower, getting dressed, packing my homework and books into my backpack, and then downstairs to the kitchen, where every morning, without fail, I took down one of the china bowls, dumped in a pile of cereal, poured on the milk and sat down to eat.

This was the time I was at my healthiest relationship with food. I never purposefully skipped meals. I had never understood how girls who sat at lunch could nibble at a yoghurt and then go the rest of the day without eating. It blew my mind. I was always hungry. When I got up in the morning, my stomach often growled, and I raced through my morning routine to get to that cereal, and even though I was in a rush, I always enjoyed the cereal because I liked eating. There was no emotion attached to the act other than nourishment and pleasure.

When I was finished, I rinsed the bowl and ran out the door. Sometimes I didn't rinse the bowl. Sometimes, I was running late, and I nuked a bagel in the microwave and ate it on the school bus. Sometimes I had a spare five minutes, and I'd treat myself to scrambled eggs. I liked them with loads of black pepper.

I was always hungry when lunch time rolled around. I never thought twice about my breakfast. It was just part of my day.

Sigh.

I think back to that girl I was, and I feel so sad that she's in for such a rough time. I was always proud of how wholesome and normal I was compared to the numerous girls in my high school who did have eating disorders, or who were cutters, or who got knocked up at sixteen and got abortions or dropped out to raise kids.

My eating disorder got its hooks in me when I was older. This is probably why it ran away with me the way it did.

I learned to restrict.
I cut calories. I lost weight.
I tightened and obsessed and got smaller and smaller until people started to take notice.

Even then, I ate breakfast.
It was a cautiously measured and recorded 300 calories, and I didn't eat again until dinner, but I ate breakfast.

The one exception was on those rare occasions when I would binge.
Back then a binge was barely anything.

It would be after dinner
(which I ate at five in the evening every day and never allowed myself to eat again afterward).

Sometimes I was so hungry at night my whole body shook. I would curl around the hollow of my stomach that ached like an empty tomb. I would writhe in agony, counting minutes until the sunrise, when I was allowed to get out of bed, do my sit ups, and then go eat my breakfast.

Only, every so often, I couldn't make it.

I'd eat a bag of microwave popcorn with a handful of chocolate chips thrown in, or a stack of rice cakes slathered with peanut butter.
My stomach was so shrunken and shriveled at that point that those quantities made me feel overfull.
I would feel ashamed, and I would punish myself by skipping breakfast the following day.

If I could add the calories from my binge to the calories from the following day, divide them, and still come up with two numbers under a thousand, then I could relax.

This was how fucking insane I was.

When the pendulum finally swung in the other direction, boy did it swing hard.
It felt like all the will power I had ever had in my life was used up, and I had no self control around food.

Still.
I always started every day with good intentions.
After binges, I never ate breakfast.
Oftentimes it was because I was still painfully full from the night before.

After so long restricting and counting calories, I would restrict all day, eat a "diet dinner" and then at nine o clock at night, I would put away amazing quantities of food. My parents were constantly wondering where the gallons of ice cream they bought disappeared to, loaves of bread, and jars of peanut butter.

Still, every day, I rededicated myself by skipping breakfast.

It was all a giant cycle.

Diet mindset and disordered eating research shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this kind of restriction around food always results in a binge later. We cultivate a starvation mindset, and our bodies respond in kind blasting through our resolve and crushing our concept of will power in favor of survival.
After almost two years of being so restrictive around food, my body took back control. I ate everything I could get my hands on because it was so scared I would starve it again.
Instead of lying awake at night waiting until I could eat, I was lying awake berating myself for eating. I didn't remember how it felt to sleep unless I was so full I could barely breathe, nauseous and saturated in guilt. I fell asleep every night vowing the next day would be different and then doing the exact same thing, over and over and not understanding that the only way I would ever stop feeling crazy about eating was if I stopped vilifying the act itself.

It took me years, ten years in fact. I am finally, after spending almost half my life losing my mind fighting my body, I gave in. I started eating when I was hungry. I started stopping when I was full.

And here's the thing,
I did manage to eat breakfast once or twice in that time.
There were a couple of times while I was pregnant that I made oatmeal and bananas and ate them while my morning sickness told me "Do this, or I'll kill you."
There have even been a few times on holidays that I've munched a piece of toast with a large mug of tea.

But in my day to day, I keep pushing it.
I keep pushing it to nine...ten...or as of late 11am.

It's the earliest I can force myself to eat.

And it's going really poorly.

Perhaps with the baby's increased nursing, the extra walks to put him down for naps, and some stress, the days run away with me, and before I can think straight sometimes it's noon or one o clock before I've eaten, and then...I kind of binge.

It's nothing compared to where I was at before, but I can feel my feet slipping on that slope of excuses.

I deserve better.

I worked too hard. I still work too hard.

I cannot fall back into such a horrible void. I deserve to be comfortable.

I woke up with a grumbling stomach this morning, and I ignored it.
I fought it.

I shut it up with coffee.
I shut if up with errands and baby and running around.

Then it was eleven, and I was so hungry I was dizzy.

I knew the signs.

I knew I was going to binge, and there are precautions I take now so that I don't hurt myself the way I used to.

I make a smoothie with a shitload of fruits and veggies.
I eat some nuts and drink a big glass of water.

Then I take a break.

I force myself to sit with what I have eaten for at least an hour, so I know that if I am still hungry I can and will feed myself.

Anyway, they're still rules. They're still food rules. But they're in place to rescue me now instead of doom me. They're there to protect me and my baby.

And I know I probably need to eradicate them...

But that's going to have to start with the root of the problem.

And that problem is breakfast.

One little change, like all the others, that will eventually help me to get back to that little girl who listened to her body because she hadn't learned how not to yet.

The Least I Can Do Not the Least I Can Be

I've been having a weird body week.


The babe is getting his molars right now, and all May long he's been in the throes of serious gum pain and snot production, high temperatures and congestion, sneezes and interrupted sleep. It's been rough on both of us, since I am a co-sleeping, breastfeeding, hippie type mama.
Whenever he cuts new teeth, and especially at night, when he's trying to get some rest, he nurses. He nurses A LOT.
This means, because this is how my body is engineered (and not how many women's bodies work), I lose weight. I am constantly hungry, constantly fatigued; my blood sugar rides a roller coaster of unpredictability, and I funnel every calorie from every morsel of food I consume into my boobs.

This means I have a lot, and I do mean, a lot, of disordered eating thoughts to deal with.

See, the shitty thing about the ED voice, is that it takes a really long time to go away. I expect that mine will stick with me for another ten years, since it took ten years for me to realize I didn't need it.

It tells me to look in the mirror.
It tells me to poke my stomach and compare it to the memories I have of my stomach pre-baby, post-baby, last week, and then compare it to every woman's stomach I have ever seen either in person or on television or the internet. It tells me to see if I can grab an inch or if I suck in my gut can I see my ribs? It tells me to snap a photo (just a quick selfie it hisses) and to use the app on my phone to slide that photo side by side of a pic I took of myself when I was three weeks post partum.
It tells me to compliment myself on this weight loss and to lord it over others who have little tummies, big tummies, round tummies or flat tummies.

It's still a fucker, in case you were wondering.

I've gotten better at separating myself from the ED voice.
I no longer feel guilty when it tells me to feel good because I'm skinnier than Person A.
I know that it is telling me my worth is still dependent on being skinnier than Person A., and when I inevitably gain weight, like a woman, like a human being does, I will no longer be skinnier than Person A. and I will lose value.

I no longer feel guilty when my ED voice is a bitch, because I know it is one thing above all else:

It is a liar.

It lied to me for over a decade, telling me that I had no control over anything in my life, but I could control food and I could control what I looked like and so I might as well be content with that.
It lied to me about what I was worth when I went on vacation and could slip by restricting and lose ten, sometimes fifteen pounds in a week.
It lied to me when I inevitably returned from that vacation and my body demanded I binge to make up for those lost pounds.
It lied to me when I said I wasn't hungry for years, when all I wanted was to eat with the comfort, safety, and ease my peers seemed to do so.
It lied to me when it said that I was unlovable, disgusting, and a failure, because I couldn't even get eating right.

I know it is a liar now, and I call it out on this horse shit.

I will not get on a scale this week.
It will be unhealthy to know exactly how much weight I have lost due to the extra nursing.
I will not spend time examining my body in the mirror and making comparisons of it to anything.
If I look at myself in the mirror it will be to check if I am clean and presentable, to pick the spinach out of my teeth, and to get those eyeliner wings even.

I will not calorie count, meal skip, or restrict "just to see" how much weight I can lose with this extra nutritional deficit.

You know why?

Because it makes me feel horrible.

It all makes me feel just awful, and I mean physically, mentally, emotionally.

Dude, I am ex-hau-sted!

I am up all night long with this teething babe.

If I wake up and I want to put whipped cream on my coffee. I am gonna fucking do it, and enjoy it, because I deserve a treaty cup of coffee after getting through a night like that.

If I wake up and i want a big ass smoothie with three scoops of peanut butter in it, I'm going to make it and drink it and enjoy every sip because I know bananas and peanuts are full of potassium and protein, two nutrients my body is horribly depleted by when the babe nurses.

If I gain ten pounds when I wean the baby, I am going to relax because my clothes will start fitting me better again, I will stop feeling cold all the time, and I will be sleeping through the night and getting the rest that I need rather than being run ragged through the night by my poor little guy.

People tell me all the time:
  "You lost the baby weight so fast!"
"You look better than ever!"
"Motherhood looks good on you!"

And none of it is real. In fact, it's toxic.

 I wonder what people would say if I told them the truth.

I am currently not at a healthy weight.

I am not comfortable being this thin.

It is temporary, and I will be bigger when you see me next. What will you say then?

Anyway, this story might not help anyone...maybe it's just for me.

Or who knows, maybe you've been sick and lost weight without trying, maybe you went through a growth spurt and despite eating everything you could, you've gotten thinner, maybe you've had horrible anxiety or personal trauma that has kept you from eating properly, or maybe you're one of the millions of people who can't afford to eat properly and you had to use your grocery money to pay an outstanding bill.

Regardless, nobody should tell you that your worth is based on your weight, whether it goes up or down, because it will.

We are living creatures and our mass will change over the course of our lifetimes countlessly.
We live in a society that makes us believe we should have control over it and evaluates our worth based on how much control we exert over our forms.

I used to buy into those lies.

Now I recognize them, call them out, and listen to what my body tells me is right for it.

And I can only hope that you do the same. I know it isn't easy, holy shit, sometimes it is the hardest thing I can think of, but it is so worth it, to release yourself from the guilt and just take care of your body. I know I owe my body so much. It's the least I can do.

Not Shit All the Time

Today is the first day in about eleven that the babe hasn't woken up ten times in the night choking on congestion, snot streaming from his nose in two little rivulets, crying because his mouth hurts more than anything else in the whole world.
Today I got up at six fifteen instead of five in the morning.
I made coffee, I made banana waffles and the babe ate them happily instead of taking a few bites and then getting frustrated because eating when you are snotting that much is really no fun.
I got pooped on.
Yup.
Smelled that smelly smell that indicated it was time to change the diaper, and when I picked him up, the diaper exploded like a loaded pinata, except in this case instead of candy it was...NOT CANDY.

And you know what?
I laughed it off.
It's amazing what a full night's sleep will do for you.

Last week, everything felt like the end of the world.
Between the two of us, the snotting, the screaming, the crying, the inability to console the babe or to tell him that it was going to be okay and molars are total bitches, and every day being about forty degrees and pouring rain I began to lose my grip on reality.
I probably cried every single day last week.
Which isn't to say I didn't try my best.
(hello double negatives how are you?)

I did.
I really did.
I made waffles last week too.
I paid bills, went for walks in the rain, took the babe to the library to run off steam, and tried really hard to make the best of things.
But by about three o clock in the afternoon, every day, I'd have had it.
The babe would be so tired and ready for his long afternoon nap, but he would also be so uncomfortable that he couldn't settle down, and I would be holding him, rocking him, nursing him, singing to him, on three hours of sleep myself, feeling terribly guilty that I wanted him to go to sleep just so I could get a break, feeling so frustrated that I couldn't explain that his discomfort would not last forever, and then secretly wondering if, in fact, it did last forever, how long before I killed myself?

Finally something small would push me over the edge, I'd nag my toe, the babe would head butt me so hard I saw stars, or I'd just not be able to take anymore screaming, and I'd put him down in the pack and play and leave the room, sit on the toilet, and cry my heart out.

Nobody tells you that it's okay to do this.

I will tell you.

It is okay to do this.

Your kid won't die just from being left alone in a safe place (crib, pack and play, carseat, etc) while you have a little breakdown. They might cry. They might scream bloody murder because you aren't paying them attention, but they are okay. I promise.
And you need this.
You need to just have a minute to yourself to feel your feelings because so much of our lives as mothers we push our needs to the side. We drink the coffee cold. We eat the leftovers. We take the 90 second shower and we don't wash our hair. We give our ice cream because their fell on the ground. We spend the afternoon fixing everything because if we didn't, the world would surely end.
So we get to take those minutes to cry.
We get to take those minutes to call our own moms and say "I don't know how you did this?"
We get to give the babies to the Daddies when they get home and say, "I'm going for a walk, by myself. I'll be back in forty minutes."
It doesn't make us shitty.
It makes us better mothers.

Mothers Day brunches are fine if you're into that sort of thing. Flowers are nice, and of course all the hugs and kisses and homemade cards are priceless, but we should give ourselves the gift of feeling our emotions, safely, and securely without guilt EVERY DAMN DAY.

Yesterday, I got chocolate. I got to go out with a friend for a cocktail. I got kisses and hugs, and I felt loved and appreciated, but it was this morning when I woke up to a non-screaming, smiling kid who clapped his little hands when i put a waffle down in front of him, that was my gift.
It was reassurance that the hard times really don't last forever, and whatever you have to do to survive them is okay.
As long as everybody is fed, cleaned up, and safely in bed at the end of the night, it does not matter what you had to do to accomplish that, and you should never  feel ashamed if part of getting things done, meant screaming into a pillow while your kid sat safely in his high chair gnawing on a wooden spoon.

Today, I showered poop off myself and shrugged it off.
I never thought I'd say this but I'll take a happy kid who ruins my outfit over a sobbing kid any day.

And that's how I know I am getting better at this motherhood thing.

Toddler Time Out isn't about my kid.

What is the point of giving a toddler a time out?

Will it actually change their behavior?
Teach them that what they did is not okay?

Probably not.
Will it keep me from losing my shit?

Yes.

And today I need that.

People, it has been almost eighteen months since I had my child, and we are still breastfeeding.
It's good for the most part. He gets over colds faster, it's a wonderful way to comfort him when he's teething or scared or sick, and it's helping to fortify and build his little system to defend itself long after our bfing days are behind us.
But my kid is cutting molars, and he's got a cold, and I have a cold, and we are not sleeping, and he is biting me, and the chairs, and the tables, and he's having total freak outs when I stop him from doing things like shredding antique books, or taking actual bites out of the kitchen table.

Everywhere I read that this is all normal toddler development, but I am not dealing very well.

For one thing, I still haven't gotten a period since I got pregnant. Yup. Menses-free for twenty five months now.
But according to the super low bc hormone pills I am taking right now, I should be getting my monthly this week, and maybe it's all psychological, but for the last couple of months, during my would-be shark week, I've had bloating, fatigue, mood swings, and cramping.
No blood.
But everything that usually leads up to it.

This puts me in a really crap place.
I'm anxious (of course) that my body is broken.
I'm also cranky, hungry (seriously, there is not enough food in the entire house to keep me full right now), and because of teething and congestion and the magic of toddler breastfeeding, we are also not fucking sleeping either, so I am ratchet.

Is that how the kids use ratchet?

I don't know.

I feel like I started out this blog to document the highs and the lows, but I don't have time to write anything. I don't have the perspective to document the emotional roller coaster I am on.

I barely have the cognitive ability to know that if I don't put my kid in his pack n' play for ten minutes and ignore him that I stand the very real risk of throwing him out the window.*

So I do.

I put my screaming, crying, miserable child down in the pack n play, by himself, and I ignore him.
I make sure there are no toys with strings, or blocks he can stand on, or bits small enough he can choke on, and I leave him in there while I go the fuck away.
Sometimes I just go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea.
Sometimes I put on headphones, and listen to three songs.
Sometimes I go to the bathroom and I cry my stupid heart out.

Because there's still all this other stuff to do.
There are still classes to plan for, bills to pay, errands to run, meals to prepare, dogs to walk, cat boxes to clean, trash to take out, laundry to do, and everything else imaginable.
And I can't fathom any of it if I don't reset.

Good Days

I feel like a lot of my winter posts have been miserable, and I deal with so much just by writing it out that this blog bears the brunt of my struggles with any and all things, so it is important to take inventory and to remark upon the good days.


Or even the days that just don't really suck.


In typical eff you New England weather style, March came in like a lion and is leaving like a swamp rat. It's cold, damp, frequently rainy, muddy and kind of gross. No flowers are poking out of the muck, and there are those delicious wads of dying snowbanks that are ninety percent sand and chemical salt limning driveways and brown, crushed lawns.
This means that I am still trapped inside with the boo boo more often than not.

The war, however, is finally beginning to turn in our favor.

I've begun having post-dinner dance parties with my fifteen month old.
After our super early five o clock dinner, we have about two and a half hours before bed time.

My Beard typically doesn't get home until about six thirty or seven, so there's an hour of "what the hell do we do now?" time between the last supper and the moment I get to throw my kid at my man and hide in the bathroom for twenty minutes pretending I'm peeing, when in fact I am just shakily breathing and looking at my reflection, taking an extra long time to brush my teeth, or plucking my eyebrows-and-hey fuck you random chin hair!

For that hour, I am just about all out of creative ideas of what to do with the bairn.
I am also, looooooaaaaaathe to give in and watch television, because guess what? I've probably already watched an hour or so with the kid after lunch or even let him watch sesame street while I took my shower, and I don't want to depend too heavily on the screen.

So I turn on a playlist of my most random, get up and shake it music, and we dance.
We dance like crazy people.
I pick him up and I swing him around as he giggles hysterically.
I hold his hands and we bop around the carpet.
I chase him across the room and then let him run between my legs, and we generally freak out and scare the cat for a while.
It's really becoming a lovely little thing we do together.

In all honesty, I began doing it in the hopes that it would tire him out and get him ready for bed, but it shows no signs of affecting his energy levels. Instead, it has made me fall head over heels for this ridiculous activity.

I love seeing him shake his butt and run around and giggle madly.
It reminds me how good movement is supposed to feel, that exercise isn't about trying to look a certain way or beating your own PR, it's about joyful physical expression. It's about having a wonderful time letting adrenalin move you and endorphins psyche you up. It's about playing at a time and in a world that really discourages letting go and being uninhibited.

It's also about having a good time.
Just a good old time.

Pep Talk.

Dear Dad,

I forgive you for not understanding how damaging your remarks  would be to my self esteem when I was still a child.

I forgive you because you were damaged in your own way, because you ultimately loved me, because you did the best you could.

I forgive you because staying angry at you only makes me hate myself, and I don't deserve that.

I never did.

You wonder at my low self esteem, but you built it. You didn't know it, and I forgive you, but I do not forget. It is not my fault that I struggle to see worth any time I look in a mirror. It is not my fault that I catch myself treating my husband the same way I had to treat you; as though his needs matter more than my own, as though his struggle is always harder than mine, as though his mistakes must be forgiven while mine can linger and radiate shame.

Dear Mum,

I forgive you for never taking a compliment seriously.
I forgive you for chattering on about how much you hated your body in front of me, how sad you were that pregnancy had changed its shape, and that you were disappointed in it.
I forgive you for the control top panty hose you started giving me every Christmas starting when I was twelve, because I had a tummy.
I forgive you for making me and my sister silent in the face of my father's tantrums, for never making him apologize for his unkind remarks. I forgive you for holding us hostage to his needs because you made them matter more than yours...or ours.

Dear Me,

I forgive you for eating that chocolate earlier.
You did nothing wrong.

I allow you to process your stress, your emotions, your anxiety however you need to. If that means eating chocolate, that is healthier than many other ways you could stifle your feelings. Just let yourself feel the feelings as well as eat the chocolate.

Know that your worth is not eclipsed by anyone else's. Your needs are just as important as your partner's, your mother's, your father's, your son's.
Know that it is okay that you felt bad about your body. You learned to be. Know that it is okay for the process of unlearning to take a while.

Forgive yourself for holding on to those insults, those examples. You were a child, and these were the adults you loved and trusted more than anything else in the world. It is not your fault that you accepted what they told you without even realizing it.

Take back your worth, your value, your space.
You are allowed to push back when pushed.
You are not a doormat.
You are someone worth fighting for.

Dark Days

The reason I haven't been writing much is because I am experiencing a bout of depression.
You can call it postpartum.
You can call it anxiety induced.
You can call it Seasonal Affect Disorder.
It doesn't really matter what the source is.
What matters is that right now, I am having trouble sleeping.
I can be exhausted beyond belief, but the moment the baby falls asleep and I'm alone in the dark with my thoughts, my brain begins obsessing about death, suffering, the meaninglessness of my life, the pointlessness of having brought a child into this cruel and horrible world.

I lie there for hours with my brain running this indoor track marathon.
When I do fall asleep finally, it's often into nightmares. Sometimes it's into anxiety riddled dreams that I technically wouldn't call nightmares but certainly aren't restful.
For the last month, I wake up just as tired as I was when I went to bed, and it has nothing to do with the baby.

During the day I feel my brain scrounging through itself for creativity like  a spoon scraping the concave, glass sides of a peanut butter jar. Is there anything left? I ask myself. Scrape scrape scrape...
A tiny rind of an idea comes up, and I attempt to execute it. Often, it is thwarted by the baby's schedule, or the cold weather, or transportation, or money, or simply as soon as I get started I decide I don't know what I was thinking trying to do anything to begin with.

A lot of times this is even when I try to play with Baz.

I want to dance with him, so sing songs, set up fun imaginative activities, but he is still so little everything gets jammed in his mouth and he either fights me to smash things, rips apart whatever I was trying to build, or stuffs things in his mouth and I either have to shove my fingers between his teeth and get bitten several times to save him from poisoning himself or choking, or I have to accept that whatever he just swallowed is either going to be okay or warrant a trip to the hospital.

Lately it's a cycle of horror.

I can't help but feel like with the current political climate we are all going to die.

Climate change, missile launches, terrorist attacks, nuclear arms races, oil conglomerate battles, pollution, all of it.
Everything I read basically leads me to the conclusion that at any moment we could go up in a ball of fire and if we're lucky, we'll get maybe twenty more years before we wish we had.
It all leads me back to the same questions over and over.

What am I doing?

How do I help?

How do I protect my kid?

What if it's already too late?

This is where I am right now.

I don't have the answers.

How is anyone getting any sleep right now?

I feel like no matter what I do, I'm doing it wrong, and yet if we're all about to die, shouldn't I be living life to the fullest? Shouldn't I be taking Bastian on all the adventures there are to have? Eating ice cream for breakfast lunch and dinner? Dancing and screaming and playing until we fall down?
And yet I can't.

It hurts too much.

It hurts too much to think of how beautiful this world was at one time, and how he's never going to see it like that.

And right when I've stopped crying long enough to actually engage with my child, he starts trying to electrocute himself on the computer printer, or pull the shelves out of the bureau down onto his head, or goddammit what did he just put in his mouth?!

I keep fighting to keep my kid from killing himself, but then I just don't have the will to do anything else because I don't know why I'm doing it.

People tell me its' always been this scary.
People tell me there's no getting over it, we just have to.

Well you let me know how that's going, will you? Because I'm still over here, not sleeping.

The Thing About Intuitive Eating

...is that it sometimes is the most liberating wonderful thing I have ever done, and I am so amazed at the relief I feel when I approach food and hunger and fullness now in comparison to how I approached them for about twelve years before.

The other thing is that sometimes it gets all twisted up and it's really difficult.

Why, you ask?
Well, apart from the obvious disassociation from body cues that comes with disordered eating, our culture is designed to revolve around the idea of excess.
It's nothing new. We're constantly bombarded with the idea of keep progressing, keep going after things, keep progressing, excelling, fighting our way to be the "best version of ourselves" but that's just the newest sheep's cloak the wolf has donned. It's a new package for the same old adage that "You aren't happy unless you have what we're selling" (we can thank those dickheads on Madison avenue in the '60's for this).

How does that apply to intuitive eating?

How could it not?!

When it's so insidious that our society is saturated with the idea of "higher performance" and "living our best life" that just listening to our bodies and shutting out all the nonsense is not only going against the grain, it's bloody revolutionary.

Diet culture, the idea of self denial, the concept of cheat days and cheat meals, all of it is a way of ignoring what our body is telling us and making the very act of giving our flesh machines the nutrition and movement best for their survival into a fucking game.

Here's something you might not know,
when I was the skinniest, and the most unhealthy in my anorectic days, my mantra was not
LOSE WEIGHT. I knew I was thin. I even had the notion that perhaps I was a little too thin. I wasn't concerned with losing more weight.
The thing that kept me scribbling down every crumb I put in my mouth in a food diary and then tallying up the calories so I would make it under my goal; the drive that had me cradling my screaming, roiling, empty stomach at four in the morning when I was so hungry I couldn't sleep was that I didn't want to GAIN THE WEIGHT BACK.

So many of us who fall into truly disordered eating do so because we are only taught how to lose weight. Once we achieve our supposed goal, we may have the notion that it's okay to stop losing weight, that we might have gotten where we wanted to be and can stop now,
BUT THERE IS NO PROTOCOL FOR JUST MAINTAINING.
They call that shit "plateauing" and warn you against it.
They call it, "a crucial time for backsliding" and warn you against it.

You know why?
You know why society and diet industries won't celebrate or congratulate you for reaching some weight loss goal without encouraging you to KEEP FUCKING GOING?
Because then you stop funneling your money into their garbage products and terrible self care mindset.
You stop buying into their industry built on an elusive, impossible ideal of perfection.

I didn't know how to just eat anymore, so I just kept losing instead because I figured that was better than gaining. You know, because in our fucked up culture ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN GAINING WEIGHT EVEN IF YOU NEED TO.

GAHAHAHAHAHA.

This is the stuff that makes intuitive eating really good on most days.
It feels revolutionary to shut out all those voices.
I know you're a stay at home mom whose contributing to your income by peddling the wraps or the teas or the shakes or whatever, but your instagram pics and faux motivational posts are incredibly damaging.
I know your fitspo, or supposed body positive hashtags are getting you more likes as you whip yourself into shape for your wedding and encouraging you on your way to whatever dress size society told you it was acceptable to be on your big day (let's not even go down this rabbit hole), but it's also psychotically cruel to troll women with disordered eating histories who click #bopo hashtags looking for encouragement and bodies we can identify with, and instead are bombarded with pictures of how many calories you burned on the elliptical this afternoon.
This is the kind of stuff that people tell each other is supportive, but the only thing it supports is the "not good enough" mindset that keeps you trapped in the current of disordered eating, ignoring your body's cues, and drags you back out to sea if you don't seek actual support to deal with it.

Right now I find the best thing I can do to support myself is give voice to my cues.
Because so much of my disorder was built on secrecy and silence, saying the words, "I'm hungry," or "I need to eat now," are both terrifying and liberating for me.
I never got to say them before because hunger was a prized sensation that I clung to for validation that I was doing the work.

Now I say shit like,
"Hey, will there be food there, or should I pack a snack?"
And my bag overflows with snacks! It's not just awesome as a mother to have an unending supply of biscuits, apples, single serve peanut butters, and trail mix in my bag, but it's awesome for me too! It's there. The food is there for me if I want it! I don't have to get into the mindset of starvation and freak out later (or all day in fact) because food is not a scarcity anymore.
I have it in abundance.

Sometimes it's still difficult.
Recovery is never linear.
I have days where I just can't bring myself to eat breakfast.
I try. I make something and then I just can't put a bite in my mouth.

There are other days where I eat and eat and eat. I stand in my kitchen with the cupboards and the fridge open and I turn into a food wrecking ball.

But afterward I look at the situation with "curiosity over judgement" which is something I learned from Kylie over on Imma Eat That, which is her incredible blog.
(Maybe sometime soon I'll do a round up of the body positive blogs and babes who have really helped me? Is that something y'all would like to see?)

Anyway:
Curiosity over Judgement was a huge step forward for me.

Now, I check in myself.
Am I hungry?
Do I want to eat?
If the answer is yes, then I think, what sounds most satisfying and delicious right now? Toast and eggs? A smoothie with nine hundred vegetables? A cookie? An apple with peanut butter?
And I keep suggesting things until I get to something that I get excited about.
Then I make that, and I eat it, and I enjoy it. I force myself to taste it and to slow down. The easiest way to do this, is to share it with the baby. I find if I'm telling my bairn how delicious something is, I stop and taste it more. Then we enjoy it together. It's wonderful. It's teaching me so much more about unabashedly enjoying food because he doesn't give a fuck.
If he likes something, he eats all of it.
If he gets full, he stops.
Another incredibly magical thing that he has taught me is that shame is not a natural behavior around satisfying hunger. I love seeing how much he delights in his food. I seek to be as happy as that in my eating.

In those situations where I check in with myself and the answers are not simple, the curiosity over judgement credo is even more important.

Am I hungry?
No.
Am I really hungry, but I don't feel like eating?
Yes.
Why is that?
And then I think about what else could be going on to interfere with my desire to eat. Am I nauseated? Sick? Sad? Too anxious to eat? Each of these has a remedy, and sometimes the easiest one is just time.
Okay, I say. It's okay that you're hungry but you don't want to eat.
Let's wait half an hour and check in again.
And then I do.
Often, the feeling of not wanting to eat has changed, and I am ready to eat and I do.

Sometimes the conversation gets muddy and more complicated.
Am I hungry?
No.
Do I want to eat?
Yes.
And then I do.
And maybe I just eat one chocolate and it satisfies me and that's okay.
Or maybe I eat a whole chocolate bar and follow it with a packet of biscuits and an entire quart container of yoghurt.

The Curiosity over Judgement conversation is never more important than it is at this moment, because my disorder used to immediately berate and shame me and it would start a starving cycle to "make up for" the transgression.

After a binge, I'll ask myself,
How do you feel?
Overfull. Uncomfortable. Out of control. Ashamed.
That's okay.
It is?
Yeah. Truly. It's okay. Nobody's going to judge you here.
But didn't I fuck up? Aren't I a failure?
Failing at what? Fucking up what? Who is there to impress. It's just us, and I already told you, it's okay. You did nothing wrong.

Then I breathe.
And maybe the conversation progresses.
Maybe I have to reassure myself that I don't have to make up for the binge.
Or maybe I just keep asking myself questions until I figure out why the binge happened.
Because I don't know about you, but I binge when I'm lonely. I binge the hardest when I feel like I don't matter, like nobody cares about me, and that nothing matters.
I seek comfort in food because I am not finding it in any other person or outlet of my life.

Once I identified those triggers, it got easier to forgive myself for bingeing.
I have even managed to stop a binge halfway through, which I used to think was impossible.

The superpower of intuitive eating is being gentle with yourself and treating your "food brain" like a tender little hurt animal part of you because that's what it is.
It's a beaten down, broken little creature that society has all but destroyed, and this is you being bigger and kinder than diet culture and rescuing it.
It is worth saving, just as much as your life is worth saving.

Especially in these times where we are being told to manage our bodies more because if we aren't tying up all our time with exercising and counting calories then we aren't calling our senators or signing petitions or protesting (think about that for a second: What has your ED kept you from doing that might be really important? What's the first thing you would do if you didn't have to worry about it anymore?).

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you my own experience with intuitive eating because too many times I think people make it seem easy and straight forward and I always felt like it was something I could never do. I could never actually trust my body because society told me my body was a liar.

And then I started to stop listening to that shit and start caring for the little creature in my brain that wanted me to love myself, and as it heals and gets stronger, so do I, and that is more motivation than any stupid hashtag.

If you do nothing else,
Be kind to yourself today.