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