Just ordered her from Totally Scooters in Toronto! Yes, she looks suspiciously like a Vespa but half the price (come on, we're talking scooters here, not Ducatis!), and I really dig that color, which is actually rather close to my hair color, I think. Somebody asked me if I had a name for her, but I don't yet. Naranja?
Of course, I'm not vain or anything... but I was madly scanning the web for accessories, wanting to be the perfect scooter girl. But then it hit me. I was sittting in a 12 step meeting having just whipped there on my bike, and I realized that what I was wearing on my bike would be just fine on a scooter. It's not as if I'm cruising the highway on a big beefy cruiser, I will be just scooting around town! I already own three old leather jackets and some sturdy boots, and I even have my old motorcycle gauntlets kicking around from when I owned my Kawasaki 440 ----gulp--- 25 years ago. Oh my lord, it actually has been a quarter century since "diverted" a year's tuition into buying a bike, completely without telling my parents (I always was a sneaky rebel). I kept the helmet but I need a new one, definitely, but the gauntlets have come in handy when it was time to prune those extra thorny old fashioned roses.
A friend of mine finished a reading on handling stress the other day with the saying "Some days you're the pigeon, other days you're the statue..."
I still cannot believe the way my brain works. I started today with the best of intentions for dinner this evening. I would make some tasty and fairly quick curries (chickpea with spinach and butter chicken, with most of the seasonings coming from jars of Pataks...) for an impromptu potluck with the family of best friend/next door neighbour and the family of her partner's best friend. Got that? Sort of a chosen family dinner. But it quickly got complicated: suddenly, they were hauling cute as a button hors doeuvres out of freezers and putting them into ovens: escargots, brioche, fancy cheeses, shrimp with garlic butter, salmon pate... it was like being mugged by Ina Garten, aka the Barefoot Contessa, Friend of Martha, etc.... Mrs. Stewart, I blame you for this!
So a simple supper got way bigger than I wanted. Food, food, more rich food. Stir in a soupcon of my ever present social anxiety because I don't know the other family all that well, and my hunger rises up to roar "moooooooorrrrrre!" The one thing we didn't make was dessert. Well, the grownups other than me were drinking wine. And we made coffee. But I realized that my insides really were expecting, nay, demanding a rich fancy dessert to go with the rich fancy dinner. Never mind that I probably ate enough extra calories just in butter between starters and main course for an extra meal! That gaping hole in my psyche was demanding more.
I ate a couple of marshmallows that the kids were eating, and had some of my usual dark chocolate and three silky Iranian dates with tea after we went home. Which was fine. Again, the episode was another reminder that my stomach does not work like that of others. So what else is new, huh? Once again, I feel like the statue, but I'm not quite as surprised finding myself in that position as I used to be. It's my reality, and while that craving is pretty darn irritating, after a while it lessens, kind of like a mosquito bite. Like a bite, I know that if I scratch it, it will only become more inflamed. I acknowledge I'm having an adverse food reaction and try to live well anyway.
BF's father, a recovering alcoholic, told her that for him, the first drink is always the easiest one to turn down. When I have those keep-eating cravings, I have to remember that stopping will not be easier after the next bite, but now, before the next bite happens.
Ok, so I'm going for a run. It's a beautiful Sunday morning, Fuzz is out of town, and I phone my running buddy to try and bludgeon her into running with me. She can't. Or she won't. What I suspect, no, what my stubborn brain believes in every inch of it's little codependent soul, is that she is too busy doing for others to do for herself. Running with me today might mean she wouldn't be so damn exhausted when we meet again on Tuesday for our engraved in stone running date. I am totally convinced she is self sabotaging. And I resent her for it.
Well, ya know, what my brain is doing to me is just as bad if not worse than what I imagine she is doing to herself. Here I am over in her yard, perceiving that she has more and uglier crabgrass than in my yard. And what do I really know about her, anyway? She may indeed have better things to do than heavy breathing with me. I get so pissed off and exhausted by the rage generated by my mental gymnastics, no wonder that most evenings it seems that the only answer to all this misery is collapsing on the couch under an afghan armed with a bag of Miss Vickies and back to back episodes of House, another real sane example for me!
Truth be told, I wish I had the company to run. But if I really really wanted her company, I could wait until this evening. But I want to run now when it's cool and fresh and then have the slightly achy but oh-so-superior feeling for the rest of the day when it's done and can happily collapse at a local Starbuck's patio with my 2nd iced americano of the season. But I ain't going nowhere unless I get myself out of my friends back yard and just mind my own business. I ain't the boss of her, and when I really truly learn that, maybe I'll feel better.
What a beautiful day! Sun! Finally, it's stopped snowing and the dregs of that late few inches we had Monday have disappeared. I walked downtown with a light jacket for my final post-op check with the plastic surgeon who did my panniuclectomy. This guy does not have the greatest bedside manner, perhaps he has a touch of asperger spectrum disorder because you get the feeling he's talking to himself and you just happen to be in the room too.... It's a bit like having Eeyore for a doctor. He looks at my incision scar and said, ehhh, not bad, a little puckery here and there, a little uneven here...and I realized he wasn't critiquing me, but his handiwork! Then he told me that he could fix the unevenness in the scar in office with a local, but my tummy wouldn't be completely flat unless--- and then he grabs the skin on either side of my abdomen and pulls it back!--- we did a bigger operation with incisions that basically go almost all the way around my trunk!
No thanks. I'm quite happy with what's happened to my tummy, it's flatter than on most women my age, and the scar will fade, even on my white white rehead's skin. And the only one who sees the scar line is Fuzz or maybe the other chicks in the locker room at the Y. Geez Louise, I'm going on 46 this year and I'm very happy that I'm not 300 pounds any more. I'm not going for a bikini tummy, I feel rich having a whole rack of size 8 0ne pieces or tankinis to choose from. I'm just happy to have the flap gone along with the constant rash. Another benefit was a numb area of skin that never recovered from my hysterectomy was removed, and sensation in the new "landscape"seems to be pretty good. And I look pretty damn good in a pair of jeans!
That being said, I'm feeling strangely down. Is it the after effects of dealing with Dr. Eeyore? A feeling that life should feel more perfect than it is? Tax season? Studio anxiety? Just a bad case of life? What do I do? Maybe go to the studio any way. I've got over 3 hours before I meet my running group, I guess I could give it a go. I'm getting sick of the painting (a copy, just to get my chops up again) I'm working on so I should keep going on that, finish it up and get on with work that actually means something to me.
Sometimes ya just gotta keep going, even if it feels sucky. Oh yeah, I have to call my shrink...
Bless Oprah. A few days after I was complaining that the Appetite Awareness Workbook author didn't seem to understand my binge eating, I turned on Miz O (during lunch, of course) and she was having one of her semi-regular programs about addiction. After another one of the heartbreaking stories of one of her guests whose drug habit won out over their family, Oprah commented that the guest was obviously not stupid, to which the guest replied that intelligence didn't have any relevance to her cravings for the drugs--- they were beyond intelligence, beyond logic.
And then I had another one of those lightbulb moments when I thought, yup, that's how it is with me and food: my three university degrees and all the learning about nutrition, exercise and mental health got me close to nowhere. My cravings are not assuaged by my knowing that they aren't related to actual physical hunger. Fat people are not stupid! Knowing that the gnawing desire for cookies in the evening soon after a good meal is emotional in origin knocks the craving down by about, oh, .5%.... I learned I was an emotional eater around 1975 when I first joined Weight Watchers. It didn't really help with the diet and weight rollercoaster I rode for the next 30 years.
It wasn't until I started using the addiction model to describe my pattern of eating that I actually got anywhere with changing it. In the beginning I had trouble describing myself as a compulsive overeater. Yeah, I'm an overeater, but compulsive? Sounds too much like a form of mental illness. But then I realized that my behaviour did seem compulsive: my reaction to almost any life event or feeling was to eat. Celebration? Eat. Mourn? Eat. Bored? Eat. Feeling creative but going into the studio and painting too scary? I could create an elaborate chocolate dessert, earn praise of family and friends, and then eat 4 helpings of it in one evening. Repeat ad infinitum all the way above 300 pounds...
Paradoxically, it wasn't until I admitted that my eating issues seemed to be best described by using the model of an uncontrollable disease, was I able to get some help for them.
I bought a new book the other day. Sometimes I think I need a twelve step programme for those addicted to self-help books, and I'm having particularly severe buyer's remorse about this one. It's called the Appetite Awareness Workbook and I'm steamed, because after 4 chapters of this I'm gettting that creepy feeling that the author doesn't know what, or rather, who she is writing about, despite the claim touted on the cover that it has been clinically proven... on what? Rats eating junk food? Nah. Actually, the author does have some experience at an eating disorders facility in Colorado. However, for a book aimed at people with binge eating disorder (which I think I am), it is striking a rather hollow note with me. Hollow. That's how my stomach always feels...
The homework in this early stage of the book is to write down after every meal and snack how hungry you were and if you stopped when you were full. Well, it's been two days and, naturally for someone with an eating disorder, I have absolutely no clue when I'm "really" hungry. Other than, well, duh, I'm always hungry! The only time I know for sure when I am authentically hungry is when I'm really past a mealtime and I'm so ravenous I get nervous and cranky. I tried to "feel" my hunger before I started my oatmeal this morning. Nothing. No rumbling, no discomfort. I even, as suggested, and feeling like a dork, placed my hand on my tummy (you remember, the part that's still numb from surgery... making it feel like even more of a futile gesture) and thought... does this abdomen feel empty? No response. Not even a teensy growl. But I polished off my usual hearty portion.
The other question is, did I stop eating when I was moderately full. This one is also a real headshaker. The only way I know for sure I'm full, is of course when I'm really full, or stuffed. And that doesn't kick in easily. Maybe after a large bag of chips and a pint of ice cream, and a hamburger with gravy on the fries, but oh boy, there's chocolate...
For crissake, IF I COULD FEEL WHEN I WAS FULL, WOULD I BE BUYING this STUPID BOOK?!? So, I'm disconnected from my stomach feelings. I'm just not feeling too confident these people understand the nature of my beast. I'm feeling like some new species of animal just discovered by science, being observed in a lab by people with clipboards quizzing me in gibberish. I think this is a classic case of failure to communicate. I'll bet these "experts" even have cookies in their cupboard at home that go stale before they polish off the box! Mars and Venus, baby, Mars and Venus.
On the other hand, I went to my usual OA meeting on Saturday morning. Now they are talking my language. They know my disease, better than they want to, because their demon is my demon.
It's funny that as recently as a year ago I thought I was fine with my stomach. Let me clarify: that part of my stomach that, due to gaining and losing weight many times over 40 plus years, had lost most elasticity and hung like an apron over my pubic area. Doctors call it a pannus, but people with it commonly refer to it as their apron. I thought I would just live with it, but when I found out that I had to have a hernia repaired in that area, I also did some research with a plastic surgeon and discovered that because of the nearly constant rash and skin irritation I had under the pannus, our provincial health insurance would cover the surgery. If I wanted it.
Did I want it? Well, surprisingly, the answer wasn't initially "Hell, yes!" I really had resigned myself to living with it. I looked at my apron as one of my battle scars, along with the stretch marks, and flappy or saggy bits on other areas of my body that showed the war I had been through. I was not a twenty something twig, I was a middle aged woman who had lived and fought and kept going. But the rash was not going away and I would arguably not likely be in any better shape to recover from a surgery than now. And of course there was that part of me that wondered what it would be like to have a flat tummy. Why not enjoy it now? In fact, while I was waiting for word back about whether the province would cover the surgery, I decided that I would be willing to find the money to pay for it myself if they didn't. Better now than years from now when I could be old and weaker with and the rash compromising my health more.
Does it sound like I'm equivocating here, just justifying a vanity choice? Perhaps, but really there is no black and white answer to this. Vanity entered into it, but also my health was a concern. And, as the surgeon said, having the two procedures done at once is less risky than having than having another surgery later and another 6 weeks of recovery time. Drat, I hate grey! So much of life falls in that grey area. One of my big problems in life, dealing with those dratted greys.
So, it's been about 8 weeks since I had the surgery. Healing pretty well, but the scar is very long, like someone drew a rather uneven happy face from one hip bone to the other. It will fade. I got a brand new navel in the process, a teeny little cute one because the other one had sagged so low the surgeon removed it with the skin and gave me a new one, except I can't feel it. I'm still pretty numb all across my abdomen in that area, but sensation is coming back slowly. My gp, who herself has had a cesarian and hysterecomy cautioned me that some sensation could take a year to come back, and some may never. To which I responded, oh well, guess I can't cook in the nude any more! All together now: "EEEEEEEEUUUUUUUUU!!!"
Sometimes the area tingles, like when your foot is falling asleep. And the wierdest feeling, which I've only started experiencing this last week with the return of some sensation, is the one of "feeling" the missing pannus. It might be a little like phantom limb sydrome. Not painful, but occasionally it feels as if I still have the pannus. I'll roll over and bed and almost feel the skin that isn't there any more shifting.
As Count Floyd used to say "Spooky stuff, eh kids?" Wierd. But neat too.
