Getting What You Want

I've been thinking a lot about how my postpartum body differs from my pre-baby body as of late.
Specifically the fact that my post baby body weighs a great deal less than my body did before.
Now, i am not here to fake complain about the weight loss and compare myself to mothers whose bodies react more typically to pregnancy and breastfeeding, which is to hold on more readily to their weight. I am here to discuss how this situation i am in is affecting my recovery from fifteen years of disordered eating.
And it brought me to the following realization:
In the past. I have liked my body the most, when it looked the least like my mental image of myself.
Take a minute and think about that.
Do you look at pictures of yourself on fb or ig and un-tag yourself from them if they are unflattering?
Do you use umpteen filters on any selfies you take?
Do you look at your female friends and relatives and compare yourself to them? Or worse, do you convince yourself that you cannot be as happy as they are because your body does not look like theirs?
I have done all of the above, and i was doing it long before my behavior became what would be defined as textbook ED.
I am currently twenty lbs less than i was two years ago before getting pregnant with my son.
Back then in 2014, i was convinced I would be happier if i was the weight i am now. I associated this lower weight with success, stability, control over myself and therefore control over what other people thought of me. I aligned this concept of my lighter self with a better version, a more fulfilled and balanced person who did not obsess about food. I was certain that if i could just get out of my cycle of binging and restricting and putging, i would magically be not just lighter in my worries and cares but lighter physically as well. One did not come with the other.
When i thought i was getting my shit together, all it tookwas a badly lit photo that highlighted my poochy belly or a moment in the mirror where i realized my cheeks made my head look "too wide". And i would go spiralling into a sea of self loathing, where i ate because it didn't matter what i did, i was never going to look in the mirror and see Giselle or Beyonce. I was only ever going to see me.

Here i am. I look in the mirror and i see what I thought i wanted so badly two years ago. And you know what?
It's still me looking put from the mirror.
I lost the weight, and i still have wide cheeks and a belly roll, they're just a bit smaller. I didn't magically grow a luscious booty or clearer skin. My distribution of fat is exactly the same, just slightly less than.

My disordered brain knows that most of my weight loss is due to breastfeeding, and that when my baby weans, not only will some (if not all) the weight come back, but so will all the hormones that have kept most of my cravings in suspended animation for the past year and a half.
This state my body is in is temporary.

Epiphany:
The state of your body and its shape is always temporary.
We are constantly fighting to be the healthiest version of ourselves.
For me, that may mean i gain those twent pounds back.
My job is not to fight it.
My job is to continue to listen to my body when it tells me what and how i should eat and move and rest it.
My job is not to get on the scale every Tuesday, a bad habit i picked up while pregnant. My job is to be proud of the belly that grew my baby and which continues to care for me by housing my organs and yes, some extra fat that is there for me to stay warm and fed.
I could lose another twenty pounds. I did it before, and i know what happens.
I am cold and cranky all the time.
I stop menstruating.
I don't sleep properly, my skin turns to garbage, and i get lightheaded easily.
I will never grow a defined jawline no matter how little i weigh. I will always have big cheeks.
I will never have six pack abs. That's just not what my body is designed to look like.

I am not happier or more in control at this weight than i was twenty pounds heavier.
I am just as insecure, just as emotional, and just as neurotic.
I am not more successful or magically jetsetting into the next phase of my career.

You know what else?
I still enjoy sunsets.
My mouth still loves the bittersweet residue dark chocolate leaves behind.
My legs are strong, and i love walking by the ocean feeling my wide cheeks getting rosy from the salt wind.
My arms are so good at picking up my son and holding onto him as he wriggles like hell.
My lips are fantastic as kissing his perfect round cheeks that are Just. Like. Mine.
My body
Your body
They don't magically get better at doing their jobs when they weigh less or more.
In the same way that a car is still going to get you somewhere no matter what shape it is or what color.
As long as its parts still work it doesn't matter what it looks like. It's still a great car!

So look in the mirror.
Take the unfiltered selfie.
Buy the dress.
Eat the cake.
Kiss the human.
And treasure everything about your glorious body as it is, in this moment, that it allows you to experience all of this whether it is twenty pounds (or thirty! Or forty!) more or less than it is now.
Stop looking for someone else to look back at you. You're perfect, bloody beautiful, just as you are.

Getting Back to it.

September flipped the switch on Fall weather this weekend.
We went from three weeks of (I know I hate the phrase too) Indian summer, with sultry days and thick, humid nights that had me completely confused when Halloween stuff started showing up in the stores (albeit DELIGHTED).
Then it was as though someone drafted a memo on the 22nd and Mother Nature adjusted her adorable little pince nez and said something to the effect of "Oh goodness me! It's Autumn! Oh I am running behind!" and with a whooooooooooosh! Those thick swaths of humid air were shucked out to sea, and our  neck of the woods got dressed up in proper Fall garb. Cool, crisp mornings; low, gloomy sunsets and drawn out twilights; freshly laundered air that smells ever so slightly of decay and bitter wood smoke.
All this to say, I feel you Mama Nature, I feel like I can't catch up these days either, but when I do, I'm going to remind everyone I still know what I'm doing.

Equinox

For all those of you out there who balanced brooms, hung wreaths, or lit candles yesterday, I envy you.

It is here. My absolute favorite time of the year.
And I'm already doing it wrong.

I remember this time last year as I waddled on my daily three mile walk, I would place my hands on my belly, finally visibly pregnant after almost six months of looking like I'd just overdone it at lunch, and I would whisper to the fishmonster within about the changing colors of the landscape, the rolling moods of the ocean, the smells and sounds and wonderful magic of Fall. I would wonder about how I would feel a year later, with a baby during this most delicious time.
Here I am.
Yesterday was the first true day of Autumn, and I spent it walking the baby to sleep mostly. His sleep schedule is...well...we'll use the word "erratic" right now, as it's the kindest version of what I want to say. We've been sharing the family bed for almost two weeks now, and last night was by far the worst since we got off the floor of the tv room.
All the elements were in their correct positions...
He was full. He was clean. He'd done some serious diaper business earlier in the day. He'd even had two very long, very effective naps.
We went to bed around 7:45pm. The sweet spot.
We slept pretty well uninterrupted until around ten thirty or eleven when Beard came to bed.
And then the flailing began.
I have never known The Baby as flailer. He's usually curled up or spread out, and neither the twixt shall meet, but last night, every thirty minutes, his limbs began circling like an electrocuted frog's. He even tried sitting up, and the whole time, faaaaaast asleep.
Usually I can nurse him back down to a nice calm position, but there was nothing for it last night. I got up at midnight and hung out in the tv room for a bit, watching terrible BBC shows. Did the baby flail on my lap? No. He slept on, still as a stone. We came back to bed at one. I hoped the atmosphere had changed.
Nope.
Four hours later, the twice hourly flail-fest continued, and I finally bundled up the babe and brought him out to the rocking chair, where he and I both dozed (ish for him, not at all for me) until six, when I thought it acceptable to get up and start the day like normal (HA!) people.

Last night, before we went to bed, Beard was gently dancing Baz down in the other room, so I lit my Autumn candle. I looked at it, placed my hands around its warmth and took a deep breath. I prepared to think about all the things I wanted to project for the season, the things I wanted to put away for the winter months that no longer served me, the projects I wanted to begin, the creative vein I wanted to dig into for the darker months. I didn't even get that far. As soon as I took the breath, in came the herrband with the baby. I hurriedly blew out the candle and as the wisp of smoke dissipated in the air, I took the baby into bed.

Such is life right now.
Everyone everywhere tells me to be grateful, to cherish these moments because at some point I will miss them. Someday far too soon, Bastian will be annoyed when I try to kiss him goodnight; long gone will be the days we curl around and into one another and feel safe and so deeply loved.
I know.
I know.
I know.
But there is something to be said for just being a damn person too.

Maybe I didn't get to write my wishes down on individual pieces of essential oil soaked paper and burn them in a bonfire while Beard romantically strums a lyre in the backyard.
Maybe I didn't get a wink of sleep last night because the baby was busy trying to communicate, in his best, non-verbal fashion, that his bones are growing, and his skin is stretching, and his fucking teeth hurts.
Maybe today, at the grocery store, I bought the pre-made pumpkin cookie dough that I can't eat* for my husband, and then I bought three reese's pumpkins that he can't eat*, and as I walked back to my house, the baby nodded to sleep on my chest in the carrier, and I hauled the groceries, and him, and myself home in a bedraggled mess.

*various dietary ailments. Hurray aging!

Here's the thing.
LIFE IS NEVER AS GOOD WHEN IT'S HAPPENING AS WE REMEMBER IT TO BE.
That's why we live in a "live in the moment" culture obsessed with instant nostalgia.
All those instagram filters and retro throwback bullshit things we do to "capture the essence of a feeling" are all because we want to escape how shitty the current moment is.
Ready to have your mind blown?
THE WHOLE REASON OUR PRIVILEGED CULTURE IS OBSESSED WITH AUTUMN IS BECAUSE IT IS AN ENTIRE SEASON DESIGNED AROUND CHILDHOOD MILESTONES WE MISS.

Pumpkin Spice Latte?
It should be marketed as "First do it yourself Halloween Costume" or "First Hayride with Your Crush" Flavor.
Apple Cider Donut Candle?
It might as well be New Backpack or Clean Locker scent because of how heavily we associate the back to school vibes with reinvention and the chance to prove that this year, this year will be different...

If we all experienced childhoods of hard labor with scarce food and long days spent farming or logging or whatever else our ancestors did to preserve our dna strain, we'd still look back on those times fondly. It's part of why we carry on. It's why we have children, to give them those memories and maybe relive our own in the process.

Anyway, this wasn't meant to degrade into a whole rail against why millenials dig Autumn like psychopaths rant, because boy do I dig the third season. Do I ever.

I just want to experience and remember that it is pain too. The whole reason for those beautiful leaves, those ripe pumpkins and sweet cornbread, bushels of apples, and jars of preserves is because this is the dying time. It's the northern hemisphere's beauty ritual before she goes to bed. Essentially all the trees losing their leaves is the world washing the dirt of the summer from its face.

The fires, the woodsmoke, the harvesting and hoarding, the slowing down, that's what I miss most right now, because all of it is so hard with a baby screaming, clawing, climbing, and flailing you away from sleep.

Still, there are moments to be treasured.
I am going to put this child in a pile of leaves the size on an elephant in about two weeks.
And yes, there will be pictures, so he can feel nostalgic for this time too someday.

Is That All There Is?

Being a mother and working from home were never on my shortlist.

Beard and I have a wedding anniversary on Monday.
We'll be married for seven years that day.
It's strange, like my birthday, I remember counting down the days until the supposed day of celebration, and then when it arrived, nothing about my life was suspended in excitement. The baby was still colicky. The sleep was still very hard to come by. The boobs were still on call, and the plans to go out for one drink with my friends ended getting pitched out the window because of said colicky baby. I ended up nursing him to sleep while sitting on our porch with two girlfriends at hand. I drank a thumb's worth of wine, and I didn't even finish it, because I was too tired.

Usually, on our anniversary, I get Beard something horror related and nerdy, like tickets to Rock and Shock (sssshhhhh), and he gets me flowers, and something weird (like a ring that looks like a giant silver book), and we go out to dinner somewhere nearby, have one or two drinks, talk about how much we like each other, and then come home and well...have a respectable evening.

Ahem.


As we approach our anniversary this year, there's a lot about it that feels different. Not only have we been married for 7 years, but we've been together for a grand total of 10, which feels pretty momentous. Also, we have a baby, who fortuitously will be 9 months old exactly on the date of our anniversary which, whomp whomp is a Monday.

In view of my super embarrassing mama meltdown two weeks ago, I don't think it's wise to plan some extravagant event, like a party, a night at a hotel in Boston, or any of the other super rad ideas I could come up with. But I don't want the date to come and go with zero fanfare because I have this deep dark fear that when you become a parent you stop celebrating your life and your achievements and only celebrate your child's. It's one of the many reasons I didn't want kids  for so long, that inevitable loss of self, and with it all of the pleasures for which I (hedonist extraordinaire) live.

I know it's taboo. As parents, we aren't supposed to say things like, "I miss the old me", or "A Saturday night where I don't have to worry about a baby would sure be a relief". Even more verboten is the expression of such ideas as, "I don't want my kid to stop me from feeling good about myself as a writer, artist, lover, partner, friend, etc" "I don't want parenting to stop me from being the best version of myself and then expect me to bargain that it's okay because I'm living vicariously through my child." No thank you. Also, that way madness lies. That's where retired ballerinas nurture injury and eating disorders in their own progeny or former career women place unrealistic expectations on their own children's performances in school and sport to live out their competitive instincts.

I don't want that.
I want pixie dust and education and nature and curiosity and joy.

But I want that for me and for Baz.

I'd also really like to spend an evening with my husband by ourselves instead of playing,
"Hold the baby while I do the dishes."
"Okay now you hold the baby while I go pee"
"Okay now you hold the baby while I go outside and summon godzilla".

I don't have the right answer yet, and that's what kills me.
All the things I worry about, the stuff I cheat myself out of or simply find too hard, I hate the idea that I'll look back on it all in the not so distant future and think,  "Why was I such a wuss? I should have just gone ahead and done the thing!"

Except that when I tried to do the thing two weeks ago, I folded like a card table.
Unfortunately, I think I'm not going to come up with the right answer. The smart money says, Beard will say, "It's no big deal sweetie. Let's just get some Chinese food, and hang out as a family."
And I will say "Sure."
Because it is the easy answer. Because I am too tired, too hungry, too worn out from trying to work while a 9 month old gnaws on my shoulder, or tears out my hair, or screams for hours on end, and I just don't have it in me to fight.


Even if I would be fighting for myself.

Just a Number

This year I turned thirty four.

It's an age I tried not to think about for a long time. I remember sometime, somewhere, maybe high school, maybe just in the vast existence of female-ness in the united states, I learned that women thirty five and older are no longer considered "young".
There was a lot infused into that label too.
I was well into my twenties when the insanely underrated film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang came out but I remember seeing Michelle Monegan's character, gorgeous, confident, total package, correcting Robert Downey Jr's grammar in an LA bar, suddenly distracted by a foxy looking blonde with sinister eyeliner in the corner. I'm paraphrasing here, but she basically derides the woman to Jr by saying something along the lines of "I can't believe she's thirty five and still trying to make it as an actress in hollywood."
Of course Jr unblinkingly replies with, "And how old are you?"
Monegan bats her eyelashes coquettishly and sips at her drink before responding. "I'm thirty four. I'm a baby."

That scene stuck with me. Not only because she was just so fucking cool in it, but because it epitomizes the obsession with youth and beauty and the value of women as a cultural norm. Even while she is kind of acknowledging the ludicrous system, she's also buying into it, big time, and that's how I see oh I don't know, EVERY SINGLE INTELLIGENT WOMAN I KNOW RESPONDING TO IT.
It's not cool to acknowledge that getting older scares you unless you're twenty two and it's basically hilarious to everyone except you. It is however, cool to acknowledge that you are getting older, but you bear none of the trappings of your age. For example, you not only look a solid decade younger than what it says on your drivers license, but you know all the current media and pop and news obsessions without being too invested in any of them. You're tech savvy but not tech dependent, and you constantly joke about how behind the times you are while on the most current updated version of the the "app du jour".
You are painstakingly aware of the most recent hairstyles and fashion trends, but you always twist them to your own personal style, which you've obviously established since you're almost thirty? just turned thirty? thirty-ish? Hahaha, you laugh with a toss of your no-gray unless it's applied by a salon and only in a balayage ombre effect hair, as you deftly avoid the question.

You've probably noticed, like me that there's a great deal of bad news floating around. War, starvation, animal torture, massacres, violence, and horrifically backwards prejudice and injustice to name just a few. In response to this almost daily barrage of negativity, the social media controlled by the little guy is all about positivity and inclusion and love.

There's body positivity, LGBTQ activism and rights, race equality newsfeeds, motherhood support groups, and all kinds of sites, grams, and the like devoted to embracing everyone's differences and encouraging us to love ourselves for our individuality and our quirks or "flaws" which, back when I was in high school, would have gotten you laughed at and ostracized.
There's even a movement for childless, single women to be allowed to not think of themselves as broken! Whddayaknow!?

It's all very well and good, but where is the inclusion for the aging children of the 80's, who, while technically defined as Millennials, carry with them a great deal of the overbearing, unrelenting ageism of that era.
We're too young to identify with the Generation X'ers who are, in their forties, suddenly realizing they don't give a damn what the kids think of their Green Day patches and their sagging nose rings, but we're too old (and frankly too educated) to buy into the bubblegum, hyper positive, pastel everything twenty somethings.

I realized the other day that instagram is the last social media app I downloaded to my phone, and it might be the last one I download for good. I have no interest in Snapchat (or, Jeez even Snapchat's kind of old, what is everyone on right now? Vine is dead...What's next?), Pokemon Go, or whatever everyone's communicating on right now.
I realized about four years ago, when I cancelled my cable and just surrendered to the voluptuous library of netflix that I would no longer have any idea what the Kardashians were doing, nor would I know whether Justin Bieber or Drake had a new album, or who the next big thing was and why they were so big.

It was the best, most grown up decision I have made in my thirties.

I realized I never liked pop music, but I had been force-fed it, along with a diet of commercials and brand placement to the point where I had a vast repertoire of music, celebrities, television shows, and pretend-a-news taking up valuable real estate in my brain.

About six months ago, at my office, I overheard a couple of people discussing a reality program I had never heard of called "Naked Dating" or something. After a second or two I had to clap my hands over my mouth to keep from hooting in disbelief. A television show, where people go out on blind dates NAKED?! What humiliation porn is this? I have nightmares like that!

I see how I am out of the loop in a lot of things just by making that decision.
I don't watch television when it first comes out. And guess what? With some graceful social media sidestepping, I don't see the spoilers, and so when I order seven discs of Game of Thrones, I wallow in it just as happily two or three years behind you who breathlessly kept up with every episode as it came to HBO.

I am also getting more confident in my thirties. I'm confident that I've lived enough and learned enough to back up my choices. I don't balk when people question a decision I've made because I didn't make that decision based on either the thing that my best friend told me she was doing, or what that news segment on E television told me EVERYONE is doing now.

I don't listen to podcasts.
Yeah.
I know.
But I am a visual learner, and I cannot pay attention to talk radio or audiobooks either, so why even bother? I tried a couple of times, and about seven minutes into whatever I was listening to, I was always thinking about something else, or wishing I was reading.

I'm okay with it.

And I guess I have to get okay with thirty five and up too.
Because it's coming.
The big thing that I keep reminding myself in my ageism soaked brain is that someday, I will look back at my thirties and they will seem how my late teens and early twenties seem to me now: a precious time that I was at my physical and mental best that I wasted fretting about what was going to happen next.

I know there is a lot of pressure to buy a house at my age, to start a family if I haven't, to start saving for retirement, upgrade my wardrobe, get healthy, etc etc, but the truth is, I still have a lot of time ahead of me, and that includes time spent making a whole host of mistakes.

I have yet to regret doing anything in the order I have done it so far.
I got married at twenty seven and waited six years before having a kid. I waited a decade after graduating from college to get my master's, and I no longer buy clothing at Forever 21.

I collect postcards because I love physical representations of the traveling I and my friends have done.

I don't wear a ton of make up, but I can do a decent eyeliner wing if I need to, and I recently figured out how to do it while holding a twenty two lb baby on my hip, so that's impressive.

I am thirty four and a half, and I could stare down the barrel of thirty five, and that ascension to the next age bracket on the census, but I'd rather look at the many age brackets I have ahead of me, and think about what I can do now, so that when I am in the one furthest to the right, I look back at all the others and admire all the insanely awesome cool things I did in my thirties, forties, and fifties, and adjust my nosering proudly as I check off the box marked 60+ and wink to my herrband next to me as I say, "Sixty-four? I'm a baby."