Dance Class

Wow, new computer.  So fast.  It feels like Christmas morning.
I laid with eyes shut, trying to go back to sleep.  But my feet swung out of bed and onto the floor.
I had no choice.  The appetite for writing has never left me.
And I knew my new box was down here, just waiting.

On my way through the kitchen I stopped at the cupboard and lifted a wad of peanut butter out of the Jif jar.
I do this often.  Especially if I go to bed hungry.  I am still learning.

In the book Women Food and God.  She offers eating guidelines.  One of them is:  eat what your body wants.  She then clarifies, Not what your Brain tells you to want.  Eat what your Body wants to be Alive.
Years ago this advice would have been quarantined and starved out.  Geneen Roth.  She is the same woman who wrote the book Intuitive Eating.  
"Intuitive Eating!  If I did that I'd either inhale a whole Costco chocolate cake or restrict to coffee and  cottage cheese.  What an idiot!" 
I was petrified by the combination of food plus myself.  I couldn't allow intuitive eating to inhabit my mind as an ideal.  It was far too loose, like letting stoned hippies feed me.  This body cannot afford free love.

Yesterday I tried it.  I would reach for something, and then look at it again and think, 'My body doesn't want that.'  Golfish crackers.  Halloween candy.  Orange and Black tortilla chips.  Beckam's old 1/4 of a peanut butter sandwich.
I saw how compulsive my hands are.
I am so afraid to starve myself, that I eat random food without thinking.  I have believed it is the only way I can allow myself to eat. 
In the book she describes this guideline as taking lead boots off.  I no longer have to trudge through quicksand in their weight.  I can glide...or dance. What did I choose to eat for breakfast?  A tall steamy cup of roasted tomato soup and a hunk of whole wheat bread.


"Dance Class" Despicable Me



I took Pepper to "Dance Class" at the rec center.

She got this from the movie, Despicable Me. 

It isn't actually a dance class, but to her, it is.

While she there, I did a gentle run for my sore back.  I stopped and streteched and ran and stretched and walked when I needed to.

I went to pick her up at Dance Class.  Pepper was the last one there.

She didn't see me for the first 4 minutes.

I watched her answer questions and stand on tip-toes.

Her face turned a bit to the side with her thinking mind.

She sees me, "Mommy!" 

She skitters across the wood floor to my lap.

"Look at my magic wand!"

She shows me how she flew like a bat with red scarf wings.

How can you say no?

Her face is pulled up at every corner with a glorious smile.

She really is flying.

I wish her dad could see this.

Just before bed, she asked me to take her to dance class again.  I told her, 'your teacher is sleeping.' 

Today I get to take her trick-or-treating.

I don't know why it took 4 1/2 years of eating disorder recovery to get to this place.

In this place, I can allow a guideline like, eat what your body wants.  I can hear it and let rest with me.  It is sitting right next to me now, and I am not appalled by it's smell.  I welcome it.

I know I could always get lost again.

I could forget what is true, and go screeching through days with bloody heels and eyes sealed shut.

But I can't let that stop me from trying.

Me laughing at Pepper on a walk to the state capitol by our house.  joy.

The Metal bikini

I am writing this from my phone.  It feels like a text message to the universe. The click of  iPhone letters make it sound more like an s.o.s.

maybe it is.
I don't want to eat. It's all because of the Princess Leia costume.
I thought I was stronger than the metal bikini.
But I am not.
I spent two afternoons clipping and sewing and hot-gluing my fingers together.

Now it is finished.

And I am afraid of what my stomach will be.

Silly.

I do not have the stomach of  a woman who's carried 3 children.

No stretch-marks.  I should be grateful.

But "should" is no match for a lifetime of programming.

And I've been on this ride enough times to know - it is not about what is reflected.

So here I sit, telling myself the truth via black and white...yet again.

The truth. 
Peace does not come from zero calories. 
Peace does not come from weight loss.
Peace comes from releasing my white nuckles from the reigns.
Peace is a quiet belly, not an empty one.
Peace is now...not tomorrow night.

Why do I wait so long?  Why do I hold on? 
Why...because.  Look at that belly!  Looks pretty hungry to me!
What have I done to myself?!



I have confused a hungry belly with a quiet one for so long.
It is hard to tell the difference.
I looked up Carrie Fisher now, and this is what I found:

http://www.carriefisher.com/

"actress,author,failed anorexic"

I guess we have more in common than I thought.

Everything I searched was about her fall from Grace. 
How dare she go from sci-fi-sex-icon to doughy-overweight-mentally-unstable-drug addict? 
The media slopped her in the trash and took a picture.  They posted it everywhere.   Disgusting.

This is why I'm afraid.  This is why my knuckles get white.  Because no matter what self affirmations I offer myself, I would be just like her.  If I went to the dark side and ate all day every day people would be just as harsh to me.  No matter what ideal we "should" adopt about accepting people for who they are.
I've done it.  I've eaten myself from a size 2 to a size 14.   This fear sits in my belly still.  I fear it less, but it is there.  Maybe it always will be.  Sometimes I think it will go away completely.  Then I see the halo where the original spill happened. 

I am still reading, Women Food and God.

The author says, stop the war with my body.
She also says I orbit in loops of old stories.  In order to stop the war I have to cut the loop.  I stop believing it will be repeated.  Just because I eat one blueberry muffin, it does not mean I must gain 40 pounds.

The word God is in her title, and that's the tricky part.  I need help from Grace, right?  Or God if you prefer, but I don't.
The only way I know how to let Grace in is to tell the truth.  So, here it is.  I will be hungrily awaiting her arrival.

synonym for prison

Breakfast = 2.6 cups of coffee - 1/2 cookie - 3 bites of Beckam's pancake - 6 bites of Pepper's oatmeal with a baby spoon - 1/2 cup of whole milk (full fat for Beckam's brain development)...is that really all?
Yes.  So far.
I know what their needs are.  I go days without realizing mine.
_________________________________________________________________
A friend gave me the book Women Food and God.
I read it this morning while Beckam was in the bath.
There is a wooden step stool by the sink.  Pepper uses it to brush her teeth.  I perched my butt on it like a clown in a tiny circus car.  I read for a whole 10 minutes before being interrupted by her chirping.

I read that my beliefs about food reflect my beliefs about the world, about myself.
The author claims at some point I was let down.  I was abandoned by people, love, safety i.e. God, and food came rushing in. 
Maybe she's right.  I don't know how much that matters now.
I remember not having enough money for food.  I remember being on welfare from the bishop's store house.  I remember concocting strange meals with my siblings of home-made frosting and graham crackers.  We scavanged the neighborhood for apricots and cherries in the spring.  Like animals we hopped fences and took what we could gather. 
At 13 years old, my family unraveled.  The blanket which had muffled the outside world's screams, her reality, her cold, fell from my shoulders.  At first I cowered.  Then I grew thick.  My callouses took on the guise of philosophy, education, sex.  I decided.  I will have no needs. 
Of course this is impossible.  My pendulum swung wide and fast. 
I need nothing. 
I need it all. 
All the food.  All the speed.  All the warm blankets fresh from the dryer. 
Then I'd curse my weakness, shlep backpack onto shoulders and head straight out into the cold again.

But I already know all this.
What I struggle with is trust. 
Why should I put the gun down?  I am in a draw with life, and for good reason.
If I surrender my weapons I may be fatally wounded.
Yes.
Life is one long, drawn-out fatal wound.
I can preserve nothing. 
So I stop trying to preserve my weight.
The dillusion that I am able to dominate.
I used to hear people say,
"Eating disorders are about control.  Food and weight is the only thing a person can control so they become obsessed.  It's not about how much they weigh.  It is an attempt to gain authority in their own life."
'That's so stupid,' I'd think. 'I just don't want to get fat.'

synonyms for Control:


"Restraint" pastel drawing 2007



 authority, bridle, charge, check, clout,

          ___containment___

                      curb, determination, direction,

discipline, domination, dominion,

                                           force, government, guidance,  jurisdiction,

                      limitation, management, manipulation, might, oversight,

             predomination, regimentation,

       regulation, restraint, restriction,

rule, supervision, supremacy, sway,  weight

I could use every one of these words as an ideal I've held for myself.

For how I need to approach food, exercise, and what I see in the dressing room mirror.

Myself.

I was afraid of myself.

Of my impulse to run.

My ability to be lost.

I still get scared.

So why trust? 

Why welcome humanity?

She is destructive, gorgeous, unpredicatable, irrational, and heart-breaking.

Because I am going to die anyway.

My painting professor used to say, "In the end, all art is a response to the fact that we are going to die.

It is an attempt to avoid it or come to terms with it."

He would seem to be correct.

I wish I could have understood this stuff when I was actually in college.

Better late than never...

a dream for Judy

I am confused by the thin person I see in the mirror.
I don't know how I want to be.
When I am not thin, I long for it.  I want to see a hint of ribs and long branch of torso curve up into my armpits.  But I know this is not IT.  I cannot be defined by this body anymore.  That is the whole point of recovery, right?
At the same time, I am afraid to eat and mess it all up.
I know if I don't eat, it will get worse, and my distortion will grow.  I will get thinnner, and more confused, more driven to eat less.  Many people I know read this blog, people without eating disorders.  I get embarassed to reveal these thoughts.  I'm afraid they will think I am crazy, but I am here to tell the truth. 

At 4:12 a.m.  I rolled from my bed.  I kissed Andrew and put on my cozy clothes.  I made a cup of sugar-free hot chocolate and came to nest at the computer.  Now it is 2 hours later.  I am comfortable here, in this writing voice. 
I don't have to know anything. 
Be anything.
I just get to observe.
Then I record what I observe.
That's all it is.  Writing is noticing.

I studied art in school.

My best professor said, "I hope by the end of this class, you have learned to see in a new way."

It was a figure drawing class.  He said nothing about drawing.  Only about seeing.

Writing is the same.

It's my observations that reveal truth.  Just as a kid will draw what they think a cat looks like rather than an acutal cat.  I could fall into writing what I think I feel, or see, or do. 

When I shed all that and just record what is in front of me, a beauty is distilled.  I don't know how it happens.  It's like magic every time.  And I find, once again, there is enough.  Right here, there is enough.  I don't have to run ragged searching.

My favorite song as an 8 year-old girl was Somewhere Over the Rainbow. 

Now I am 33.

I am not waiting for a land from a lullabye where bluebirds fly and dreams come true.

Not anymore.  I liked this song because it was about transcendance.

Even though I was a kid, I knew. 

I knew none of this actually defines us.

I won't be satisfied by getting stuff, or keeping stuff, or becoming a title.

I bounced from thing to thing, never finishing.

I didn't attach myself to anything, anyone, at least not for long.

I screamed at life to show me something worth my time.  My heart.  My hope. 

That's how the eating disorder grew.

I thought, "I'm always going to be hungry.  It is never-ending.  So I may as well just not eat.  At least then I'll be skinny."

No needs.  That seemed the best way.  It still feels true sometimes.

The only way to contentment is an absence of appetite.

______________________________________________

I just got up and ate a tuna sandwich.  Odd breakfast.

But the truth is, I do care.

I do have things to eat for, to live for, to ache for.

Judy Garland died from an accidental overdose of barbituates.  She had cirrhosis of the liver.  Her whole adult life she felt inadequate.  Too fat.  Too crazy.  At 18 she began seeing a psychiatrist because of an emotional breakdown.  She started juggling amphetamines and barbituates to manage weight and mood.  Her weight not only fluctuated, but it was caught on film within the space of one movie.   She was married 5 times.   Her first suicide attempt came at 25 years old.  The same age I got sober. 
Here our paths veer apart. 
She suffered for 30 years and died at 47 years old in her bathroom.
I have been in recovery for 7 1/2 years, and it is worth all my time.  I live with my whole self today.  I am not crazy or separate or fat.  I am in.  I am all in.

bonsai ultimatum

I am missing the control I used to have.
I cannot believe my body deserves to be starved anymore.
With this new health comes a vulnerability I sometimes wish to shed.
As if my skin never saw sun, and has no defense against light.
I feel everything, and miss my leather.

Even on the days I wake up and shout, "Enough is enough.  No more eating today!"
This resolve melts into the silky under-belly, making me soft.
I don't want to be soft.
But I find it is necessary if I am going to live a life worth living.
I cannot rotate in the same circles maintaining - keeping small - clipping my bonsai.
I am much larger than that and sometimes I get embarrassed by my huge sound and the lengths over which it resonates.

"I've been reading your blog."
I hear this often, and am surprised at the audience.  Then delighted.

I don't want to hide.
Not really.
I can't have both. How can I tell the truth if the truth is a series of lies I chose to believe?
I have a choice now, and I cannot easily forfeit that.

In our photo album is an image of me 6 years ago.
My stomach is a serpent curving up and over my hips pulling tight and refusing to release.
I remember that time.
The days of dating my husband. I was terrified for him to see me gain even one pound.
Tight.  The serpent had me convinced.  There was no room for one deviant leaf.  Not one bite of cake.  Not one day of running missed.  The bonsai ultimatum.

Today the same training is entrenched and I aspire to outgrow it.
I fear what I will grow into.
Mostly I fear that I will grow too big, and be a slave of a different nature.
A large and grotesque one.  I fear I will loose control in the other direction when the pendulum swings.
But my softer voice tells me the truth,
"There is no control.  There is only acceptance of your own humanity.  You can trust this.  You can fall into the arms that have held you."