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.