What if your Fairy Godmother never comes?

Yesterday I looked in the mirror and decided, "You are too big."
My hips spread like red velvet cake rising.
All the little bites I thought didn't count added up to my pants being tight.
They do count.  Especially when they are bites of forbidden food.
Most days, I don't have forbidden food.   I know it doesn't work.
I do best when food is not the enemy.
But when I'm scared that my grip is slipping, everything becomes a threat.
I become a 5 year old girl deciphering shadows in my dark bedroom.
They are all monsters, and the longer I stare the taller they loom until they hover right at my toes.

So my solution yesterday was to eat only yogurt...which I failed at, of course.
And today the monsters linger even though the sun is up.
I don't want to fight.  I want to trust.
I want to tiptoe into my Mom's bedroom and whisper, "I had a bad dream."
Then she will remind me of the truth.
Those monsters are not real.  They can't hurt you.  They are only in your mind.

When I was little, she would tell me to pray if I had nightmares.
It didn't work.
I wanted it to.  So badly, I wanted to be good enough, to pray "hard" enough...whatever that means.
I wanted to believe what I heard in church.
If you pray with a contrite spirit, with an honest heart, God will answer your prayers.
God will give you what you ask for.  Right at that moment...like the fairy Godmother.
But it doesn't work that way.
We do God and fairy Godmothers a disservice by claiming this to be true.

I still want it though, even at 34 years old.
I want someone else to deal with my fear for me, while I wait at the sidelines in my skinny dress.
The truth is, no one is coming to rescue me.
God, Grace and fairy godmothers do not do this.
Husbands do not do this.  Children don't.  Friends don't.
Even as a child, a dependent, no one could save me from my own mind.

I see this with Sophie, my 11 year-old gymnast.
When she competes on the balance beam, I can do nothing but watch.
It is her mind, her body and her breathing.
There is only room for one person in that 4 inch space.
She is having her own experience of walking through fear.
I am there, on either end of the beam.  I tell her I believe in her.  I tell her I am amazed by her.
Each time she survives that 16 foot walk, she grows stronger.  She believes, "I can do this."

I have done this so many times.
This kind of morning, where I wake up afraid of myself, afraid of what I am going to eat.
I wake up believing that I earn the label of "good" or "strong" if I don't eat.
I wake up determined to change myself into something I have been in the past.
I wake up, but I am not awake.  I am still dozing, waiting for someone to rescue me.
I am smiling now, at my nightmare.  The lights are on.
I know I can walk this stretch.
I can eat and live and food can fall silent like a dead bad-guy from a video game...
an apparition of pixels so easily squashed.

It is 7:07 a.m.
I have the whole day, not to grind through, but to relish.

We need some new love stories

I went running yesterday in the soup of inverted air corroding Salt Lake Valley, and the sun was glorious.
I decided the two cancel each other out.  For a brief moment, I imagined myself wearing one of those surgeon's masks and trying to suck enough air through a coffee filter membrane.  They are masks worn by people who believe they can defeat their environment with a flimsy paper film, and I filled my chest even deeper.   If this is life today, then I will take it all in, even the smog.

Yesterday I also bought music.  I rarely do this, but I wanted to remember.  Isn't that why Art is so precious?  It houses pieces of my life like a jewelry box, and to hear a song is like taking it out and holding it in my palm again.

I bolted straight into the sun with the lyrics swelling in my chest,
"Never knew I could feel like this...
It's like I've never seen the sky before."

This is how it felt with Andrew, in the beginning.  I'd listen to this music.  I'd drive in my car and let it saturate me.  I was 26 years old.  My hair was long.  I was newly sober.  I was an art student.  I was a single mother.  I was terrified of the stretch of life that came next.  I lived in my Dad's basement.  I went for long walks and talked to Andrew on the phone at twilight.  I'd sit on the hill overlooking the valley and smoke and listen to stories about his grandpa.  Every night I'd pray and say thank you to Grace for letting me feel this again.  I would cry and get into bed alone.  I'd curl up around the possibility that I may get another chance at having a partner, and that it may be Andrew.

Some nights, a dark voice would find me.  Lydia, I called her.  She is sleeping now, and I hope she never wakes up.  She would hiss up from my sheets,
"How dare you hope for this!  What do you think will happen?  That he will love you like this forever?  That you won't grow to hate him?  And that he won't see you in action?  Have you ever been with someone whose heart you did not crush?  If you love him, you should leave now. You are not fit for this.  This cannot last.  It is impossible, and you know it."

Then a different song would resonate in my stomach.  It would make me sick.

"The saddest part...of a broken heart...isn't the ending....so much as the start."

"I want to be a good woman, and I want for you to be a good man.
This is why I will be leaving.  And this is why I can't see you no more.

I will miss your heart so tender.  And I will love this love forever.
This is why I am lying, when I say, I don't love you no more."

But I decided to trust.  I trusted myself, that I was not crazy and broken. I trusted him.  I trusted him when he said, "I am here, and I want you.  I know that. Now the choice is yours."
I trusted that I could choose.
I trusted in the force which pulsed between us, the energy neither of us created, and that was clearly more powerful than our prudence.

It is easy to fall in the beginning.  All the big love stories blast us with this power of new bliss.  Romeo and Juliette, what did they ever have to prove?  There is less than one week between when they meet and the time they die.
Cleopatra and Mark Antony.  Same ending.
Rose and Jack on the Titanic.  Not a long story there either.
Casablanca.  She gets on the plane at the end of the movie.

We need some new stories.
It has been almost 8 years now, since those twilight phone calls.
I have been asked to live up to my choice over a thousand times.  I have embraced all of him, all of me.
Each time, I have been able to remember.