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Today’s Running Truths

This will hopefully be an ongoing segment in this blog (woefully neglected this summer).  Since I’m trying to make running a weekly habit, I thought I’d keep a record of some of the thoughts that run through my head as I pound the pavement.

There is a house that I pass along my running route: my perfect, kind of fantasy house.  It is a ramshackle old house, and looks like a couple additions have been made.  The lot is HUGE, probably three typical parcels of land for a modern construction, and it’s filled with vegetable gardens, fruit trees, a big play structure for kids, and beautiful wild-looking roses and sunflowers…and then I get to the huge sign attached to the front gate, with the fairly damning hellfire and brimstone Bible quote hand-printed on pencil-drawn ruler lines.  I think, every time, “how can someone who lives someplace so beautiful put something so ugly on their front gate?”

I cannot think of a better place to stretch after running than my deck, lying on the ground, watching the clouds drift overhead behind the tops of the evergreen trees.

A quote from some sort of meditation track used in one of my favorite albums: “If you can love enough, you will become the happiest and most powerful person in the world.”

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The Obligatory Weight Loss Blog Post, Part The Second

Here we go, finally, the climactic ending!

…

…Where was I, again?  Oh yes…

Jules, my old Weight Watchers leader, was staring at me from outside the diner.  A huge grin crept across her face and she raced for the door.

“Allison! It is so good to see you!” She remembered my name.  We actually went back to before Weight Watchers, when I had worked for a women-only gym and she had been one of my members.  When I joined Weight Watchers a while later, she happened to be working when I attended my first meeting, and so her meetings were an obvious choice for me to attend.

“Oh, eh, hi Jules! It’s nice to see you, too,” I stammered. I gestured to my daughter and weakly joked, “I guess you see that there’s a pretty good reason I haven’t been coming to meetings…”  I was embarrassed.  By this point I was pretty unhappy with the direction my weight had taken, and was starting to experience health problems because of it as well.  For Jules, who had seen me at the lowest weight I’d been at that point, to see me like this was hard.

Jules was appropriately enamored of Jade and talked about how much she missed seeing me.  She didn’t say a word about my weight, for which I was eternally grateful.  She hugged me and told me it was great to see me and she hoped I’d come visit her, just to say hi.  And she was off on her merry way.

I went home.  My knees ached on the walk home, and I thought about my mom’s two knee replacement surgeries, and my grandmother’s hip replacements.  I wheezed, and I thought about my dad’s lifelong asthma and breathing problems.  I sweated pushing the stroller, and I thought about the time when I could work out for an hour or more, five days a week, and not bat an eye. And then I thought about my little nine month old daughter, just beginning her own journey in life.  How would she see her mom? What would she learn about food, and exercise, and self-respect, and health from me?

It struck me that if I continued this way, I would be teaching Jade all the things I didn’t want her to learn – how to self-medicate by eating with abandon, that exercise was torture to be endured, that physical health didn’t matter. That I didn’t love my own body enough to take care of it. From that moment on, it wasn’t about being a dress size.  It wasn’t about being a weight.  It was about becoming a living example.

The weight loss was me saying to my body, “You are worthy. You deserve to be properly tended.”

You deserve to be loved.

So back I went to Weight Watchers. And I started moving more, fitting in the exercise here and there, only doing things I enjoyed. I took my vitamins, drank my water.  And then, funnily, I started thinking about my mental health. I started asking Mike to watch Jade more on the weekends, so I could have more time to myself.  I got out and saw more friends. I started going back to church. I knitted more, read more books, watched the news. And it took me until this winter, but I finally admitted that I needed medication to be emotionally sound.

The place I’m at now is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced as an adult.  I’m proud of myself.  I feel good. I make good choices most of the time, and when I don’t, I forgive myself and move on.

I like to think that the weight I dropped was really emotional baggage.  I’ll say it again: losing weight did not fix me. It worked more like this – fixing me caused me to lose weight. Even if I never dropped a single pound, I would look at myself and the way I behave now, and feel that I was a success.

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The Obligatory Weight Loss Blog Post, Part The First

Here it goes, guys.  The whole world has been waiting, I know, on pins and needles.

When is she gonna talk about the weight she’s lost?!

All right, all right, I fully realize. You all have lives outside of Facebook and you most certainly have not been waiting with bated breath for me to talk about my own personal journey.  But I do figure that some of you might like to hear the story – how things got started, how I lost the weight, what’s happening now.

First off, let’s clear up a few things:

  1. I’m not selling you anything. Nothing at all. I’m not gonna tell you that you, too, can have the same results as me for the low, low price of only $20 a month for the rest of your life. Different strokes for different folks and all that rot.
  2. I do not believe that thin = happiness. Let me be the first to tell you: life is just as weird and screwed up when you’re a size 6 as it is when you’re a size 18. Excess weight might be a symptom of unhappiness, but it is almost never the true cause of it.
  3. I also do not believe that thin = healthy. There are plenty of thin people who eat like shit and never exercise.  Likewise, there are a lot of heavy people who eat right, exercise, and just don’t see the pounds falling off. If you like how you feel and look, GOOD ON YOU.

Okay, then, now that we’ve got things cleared up…

Jade was born in February of 2010. I had gained almost sixty pounds while pregnant, going from a reasonable 165 lbs to 220 lbs.  My wonderful OB never mentioned my weight gain in a negative way, even though I knew that I had gained far more than I ought to.  I’ve said before that I am not graceful in pregnancy, and I got pregnant after a long period of attempts at weight loss, so I took pregnancy as my carte blanche to eat as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted.  Candy, ice cream, fast food, pizza – it’s a wonder I didn’t get gestational diabetes.  There was more than one day that I baked a batch of cookies and then ate every single one myself.  It was my therapy, my way of coping with the maladies of pregnancy and the emotional freakout I was having about impending motherhood.

They say that breastfeeding can help take off pounds, and they were right! By the time Jade was four months old, I was within ten pounds of my prepregnancy weight and wearing my old jeans.  I had been eating a little more sensibly, and the extra calories burned by making so much milk helped a lot.

Those of you who know my kid know that she basically didn’t sleep for the first year of her life.  It was worst from the time she was 4 months to the time she was 9 months, and during that time I pretty much ate to stay awake. I was also suffering from hardcore postpartum depression, although I was in complete denial about that fact.  In that five months, I gained back twenty pounds.  A couple of friends got married that fall, and I looked at a family picture taken by a friend and thought, “Who IS that?” I was pretty much gobsmacked by the person I saw in my place.

The real moment of truth came when I was sitting in the window of our local brunch joint, drinking coffee and sharing a waffle with Jade.  A woman passed by the window and suddenly stopped and STARED at me.  I realized that it was Jules, my old Weight Watchers leader.

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A letter to my daughter, on an unremarkable evening

Dear Jade,

Some of my favorite mommy-blogging friends tend to write letters to their children on important dates.  My friend Megan has written her son a letter almost every month since his birth more than two years ago.  Kate has written her three children a letter on their birthday every year since I’ve been following her blog.  I really admire their ability to mark those occasions with wonderful, endearing words of adoration.

By this time, you have probably figured out I am not one of those mommies.

So I wanted to take the time, on this unremarkable Tuesday in January, to tell you how much I love you and what a joy you are in my life.  You’re not yet two, and yet your sense of humor, empathy, and perceptive nature are sometimes so well-developed it frightens me.  The other day we were driving in the car, and you were smiling up at me from the back seat.

“You’re smiling, Jade. Are you happy?”

“Mommy happy?”

“Yes, Jade, Mommy’s happy.”

“Mommy happy. Jade happy.”

It seems like such a sophisticated concept – that you would be happy just because I was happy – but I realize now how much of my time with you, I have not been happy.  It’s not that I didn’t love you or enjoy your company, but my brain wasn’t working correctly and it made it very hard for Mommy to be happy about much of anything.  I hope that you will never understand how it feels to be depressed like that, but I know that given our family history you have a good chance.  It took Mommy almost thirty years before she admitted that her brain needed help to feel happy, and now, I can truly say I am.

Which is why, on this unremarkable Tuesday night, I found myself entranced, watching you play and playing with you.  We built block towers. You dubbed yourself “Super Grover Jade” and we flew through the air like Superman, capes and all. You told a story at the dinner table about the dog licking peanut butter off your fingers at lunchtime.  You cooked “happycake” with Popsy after supper, serving it to Daddy and me in my running shoes.  And you kissed us goodnight approximately eleventy bazillion times, alternating between us until we were all giggling and Mommy started crying from the sheer intensity of her love for you.

Honey Bear, you are becoming one of the most beautiful souls I have ever had the privilege of knowing.  I know you have made me a better person.  Mommy is happy because you made me need to be happy.  I couldn’t let the rest of your life go by without being able to enjoy you.

Love you, Tater.

Super Mommy

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Well, that was unremarkable.

Umm, yeeah. About that whole NaBloPoMo thing.  Damn, I really tanked on that, didn’t I?

To be honest, I had a really tough month.  I sank into about the deepest depression I’ve ever encountered, and it sucked serious balls.

In positive news, however, thanks to the work of a very kind family physician and the wonder of SSRIs, I am back to the land of the living and smiling.

More to write later. I’m off to bed.

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Skynet becomes self-aware

Okay, here is your toddler hilarity for the day:

Yesterday, Jade and Daddy were watching some videos on his laptop. We have had an obsession with mice lately, so he found this video:

If you don’t watch it, it starts with the mouse and then it moves to larger and larger animals, until it’s finally an elephant. When the elephant reaches the top of the clock, there is ominous music and then the clock crashes to pieces under the elephant. Cute, right?

As soon as the clock broke, Jade cried out, “OH NO CLOCK!!!” and was truly distraught. We have a huge old grandfather clock in our living room, and she had to be shown the clock to convince her that it hadn’t been broken by the elephant.

After her nap, she found her toy elephant and was carrying it around and worriedly saying, “CLOCK! CLOCK! NO!”

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Snarl

I’m in a bit of a snit tonight.  I’ve been thinking about the wonder that is the internet.  It’s absolutely incredible that we have such a tool for sharing information and viewpoints.

And completely unsurprising and pathetic that we choose to use it primarily for watching videos of cats and telling one another how stupid we are for our opinions.

I’ve had a couple of different friends that I actually had to give internet “time-outs” – cutting off all contact with them online – because the kind, intelligent individuals they were in the real world were completely enveloped by the assholes they became online.  It’s like all the hearts and brains flew out the window and they became some kind of subhuman – a troll, if you will.

The really frustrating thing is that I didn’t disagree with them all that often.  Most of the time I truly agreed with their opinions, and I secretly thrilled at the verbal thrashing they were giving their opponents.  But once in a while, they even turned on me, and I realized how awful that feels.  Do I really want to align myself with someone like that? Even just online?

There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and I have some definite opinions on the whole shebang.  But I just don’t feel like a thoughtful, moderate opinion is welcome – or perhaps more likely, is uninteresting.  And that is kind of sad, because it makes it seem like it’s just the zealots on either side of the spectrum screaming talking points at one another.

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Summer of SAHM

(for those not in the know, SAHM is an acronym commonly used online for the phrase Stay At Home Mom)

So my mom and dad are out of town for the next week and a half, visiting my brother and his family down in the Land of The Snowbirds.  This leaves me with sole responsibility for the care and feeding of my daughter, plus their dog and our cats (and my husband, I suppose, although he’s a big boy and even makes his own lunch these days).  Given that I had been tending Jade on my own for the first nineteen months of her life, and playing house with Hubs since we moved in together WAY back in 2005, I thought, “No problem, guys! I got this.”

Clearly, I have lost my edge, and having another grown-up to help me run the household for the last couple months has made me totally soft.  I was in tears this afternoon, frustrated and exhausted and SO tired of having nobody to share a coherent thought with.  Even if that thought was only about the ridiculousness of Kim Kardashian’s divorce and how even NPR can’t seem to pull themselves away from that black hole of sensationalism.

I was thinking about how the heck I must have made it through the days back in Virginia, and I realized just how much of it had to do with the addition of the dog.  Although he is a big old loveable galoot, he really is just a second toddler, albeit with fewer words and a total lack of table manners.  Also, this house is a lot bigger than the old apartment, and housekeeping just takes more time.  Still, by the end of the afternoon I found myself relaxing a little more and beginning to find my stride again.

Just thought I’d throw a plug in here for my friend Tonya’s blog.  She’s doing NaBloPoMo, too, on top of all the amazing work she does as a knitting teacher, designer, and mom to two adorable little guys.

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Writing, and other forms of torture

NaBloPoMo.

Nah. Blow. Poe. Mow.

God, that sounds awful…one would think that the folks behind National Blog Posting Month could find a better abbreviation than NaBloPoMo.

Anyhoo, I was inspired by my friends who are once again braving the battle of NaNoWriMo and thought that the least I could do would be to spare a few minutes a day to write a blog posting.  You few faithful readers who have checked my blog in earnest since August, hoping for another shred of my special kind of “wisdom”, this month is for you.

I was thinking a lot about the topic of writing today, in preparation for this entry.  And I started thinking about how much of a chore it can be to write something like an essay or term paper – besides the hours spent behind the keyboard actually writing the damn thing, there’s also the mountains of research, and the exhaustive process of mapping and outlining the whole thing.  Then follows the paranoia of checking one’s margins, citations, punctuation, spelling, grammar, even font size and spacing, before holding your breath as you click “print” and hope to God that the paper doesn’t jam or the printer doesn’t run out of ink.

It’s remembering those moments that’s keeping me away from any kind of school environment these days (those, and the lovely monthly bills from Sallie Mae).

But a blog – yeesh.  It’s supposed to be fun!  It’s supposed to be creative! An expression of your personality! Your sense of humor!  I love the notion of having a blog, much like I always loved the idea of keeping a journal or diary in high school.  But in execution, I haven’t been the best at regularly writing.

Theoretically, I love writing.  It’s something I’m good at.  It’s a helpful tool for someone who has a lot on her mind and never seems to be able to articulate it vocally.  I, who spends hours after an altercation thinking of the witty things I should have said, should truly be a fan of writing for the way it lets me express myself precisely.

And yet, thinking about writing something often puts me in a cold sweat.  I imagine it is just my rampant perfectionism talking, but there’s something so permanent about writing my feelings down.  There’s no room to tap-dance around the ideas I just voiced.

I guess this is why stuff like NaBloPoMo exists – to make you do it and stop worrying about how “right” it is.

I remember, during my undergrad, an afternoon in composition class with the wonderful Dr. Mark Polishook.  Most of the time, those classes were less about correcting poor compositional structure and more about the philosophy of composition, and I remember one of my classmates lamenting how hard it was to write music.

“Come sit here, at the table,” Mark said.  “For the next five minutes, while the rest of us talk, I want you to fill that page with as many notes as you can.”

“But I can’t write music that fast!” the student lamented.

“Yes you can. You just can’t write good music that fast,” smiled Dr. Polishook.  “But how will you find the good music from the bad if you don’t write it all down?”

Here goes my five minutes.