HAPPY NEW YEAR

Okay, it’s been a while. A long while. I suck so bad at blogging. But. It’s New Year’s Day 2011. My 45th birthday. (jesus i’m freaking OLD) I AM SICK AND TIRED OF BEING FAT. I CAN’T STAND WHAT I SEE IN THE MIRROR. And there is NO reason I shouldn’t be able to lose wight. Well, actually there are a bunch of reasons (medicine, sleep apnea), but I can overcome these reasons. So, S and I have decided to do try the “slow carb” eating plan. It’s pretty paleo, but with one big difference: THE CHEAT DAY!!!!!!! For many metabolic reasons, you have a day where you eat whatever you want. If you are following the diet pretty well the rest of the week, the cheat day should actually HELP your weight loss. If I could lose 20 pounds, I’d feel SO MUCH better and be psyched for more intense exercise. Right now it’s yoga and swimming and some hiking when it’s not snowy and cold. I’d like to be able to more intense stuff. But feeling to fat and out of shape for things like zumba and snowshoeing.

Anyway, Tim Feriss, author of “The 4 Hour Body” says if you eat this way, you can lose 20 pounds in 4 weeks. Well, that would be awesome.

The “eating plan” is pretty simple… protein, legumes, and veggies at every meal. NO dairy (except for cottage cheese), grains, sugars or other processed carbs. And one cheat day a week. Okay, I’m game. I’ll try it for 4 weeks.

Here’s my menu for the next week or so:

Salmon and lentils, brussel sprouts and carrots
Turnip and sweet potato mash & sausage, garlic-y broccoli
Rosemary and garlic white beans, chicken under a brick, and garlic-y greens
Meat and bean chili, mixed veggies
Chicken and tortilla soup, guac and raw veggies
“Salsbury” steak, cauliflower puree, mixed veggies
green bean, cauliflower, sweet potato curry with toasted cashews
cobb salad
red lentil dal and mixed vegetable curry

One thing I am hoping: this way of eating helps S break his intense sugar addiction. I will try and report how things are going. But you all know how much I suck at blogging.

 

why were those men so mean to me?

i went to the grocery store to return my sigg water bottles. i recently learned the “old” bottles contained BPA in the liners. i could have returned them to sigg for a replacement, but since the store i bought them at is usually really good with returns, i decided to take them back there. the girls at the service desk said because it was over $25 with no receipt they had to speak to the manager on duty. okay. no problem. this guy comes over… a 30 something year old black man, and before i can even say anything, he starts giving me serious attitude…. “let me get this straight” he says… acting like i am asking him for the sun, the moon and the stars… “you want me to return the bottles you bought at a different store 2 years ago, because they have WHAT in them??” like i am some crazy idiot who is foaming at the mouth. not once does he offer to reconcile the situation or ask me what would make me, the customer, happy. i refrain from telling him what a piece of dog shit i think he is and tell him that i have a long list of shopping and i will come back afterwards and if he can help me out, great. i shop, come back and he tells me he was looking online and since this is a VOLUNTARY recall by the company, i have to take it up with them. i put my bottles in the cart and leave.

the next morning i call the service manager at the store. we chat on the phone about what happened. he is respectful and calm. he apologizes for the other manager’s behavior. i tell him, it’s not about the bottles, it’s about how he treated me. he thanks me for calling and asks me to describe in detail what the other manager said. he tells me not to worry, he will replace the bottles whenever i come in. he is not mean, he is the opposite of the other manager. i feel better.

i go back to the store this afternoon. the store manager comes over, even though the service manager left a note for everyone that they have apparently discussed this issue with sigg and they are happy to replace my bottles. this manager is a 40 something year old white man. he is gruff with me. he speaks to me in a loud and annoyed tone of voice. i feel i have done something wrong. i don’t know why he is being mean. i try to joke a little with him, he continues being mean. finally i just ask him if we are done and i leave without saying thank you. i don’t know if i should call eric back or not. i think a while about what the difference was with these men.

the difference i think is that eric could not see me on the phone. he did not know i am 40 and fat.

i know i have reached the age where i have become invisible to men. (except the the sweet black guy next door. apparently he is so happy someone sober is living here, he is in love with me!) this doesn’t really bother me much. i’m not really interested in men and unless you are an attachment parenting/homeschooling daddy, i don’t have much to say to you anyway.  i like watching the soccer team that works out in the pool at the Y when i am there with the kids… but that’s about the extent of my interest in the opposite sex that is not my husband. it is clear that beyond my own husband,  i am pretty much a non-person to all men except my friend’s husbands. they like talking to me because i am not “the wife.” i am a mommy, i have a lot in common with them, but there’s no baggage there, so they are safe. and it works for me too. so other then “the husbands,”  the men i speak the most to are the gay guy who runs the cash register at the corner bistro and the redneck dairy farmer i get my raw milk from. yup, that’s it.

my conclusion in this episode is that those men were mean to me because it’s culturally okay to be mean with women who aren’t potential sexual partners. at 43 and 40 pounds overweight i have become a whipping “boy” for men. and that’s all okay with them. imagine how much more mean the republicans would be if Hillary was in office rather than Obama.

Don’t even know what to call this

What do you call it when you are going through an emotional thing and you don’t even know what it is you are going through? 

I picked up a book to read for R. It’s called “Right Brained Kids in a Left Brained World: Unlocking the Potential of your ADD Child.” Is R ADD? I have no idea. He has no problem whatsoever focusing on things he wants to do. I have seen him spend hours working on amazingly hard computer games with his father. (or alone) I have seen him spend hours putting together lego or k’nex projects, or playing in a sandbox or watertable or the bathtub. And he never had problems finishing a project with the teacher when I took him to Spanish Art class. But he hates “bookwork” or any kind. Hates writing or reading outloud, or doing math workbooks with me. HATES IT. I guess if he was in school they’d call him something. ADD or *something.*

So I got this book and started reading and realized IT’S ME HE’S TALKING ABOUT IN THIS BOOK. ME. All the weird big and little quirks in school that made some teachers hate me. Made some teachers tell me I was lying when I would speed read through books, that I was working below my potential, that I was lazy, and a disgrace to my parents. It was all in there. EVERY STRANGE LEARNING ISSUE  THAT MADE ME FAIL MATH AND SPELLING FOR YEARS… made school a nightmare for me…. all there in black and white on the page. I always knew I had a learning disability. Some time around age 12 I read an article in Life magazine about learning disabilities and there was dyscalculia, defined in black and white on the page. But I never realized I might have ADD. I never even suspected it. I graduated at the very top of my class both times in college. What the hell do you do with such jaw dropping info as THAT??? But when I look at the characteristics, they match my life perfectly. 

I cried when I read the book. I felt shocked and upset. I didn’t even know how to talk about what was happening inside of me. I felt really mixed up and confused about trying to wrap my mind around this information. I still feel like somewhere deep inside of me I am reeling. 

A lot of things about me make sense now. But I’m not relieved, instead I’m upset because now I wonder if I can overcome how I am. I hope there is a way to make things better. I have ordered two books from the library about how to be organized if you are right-brained. 

In the mean time I tried some of the suggestion in the book for helping R and of course he didn’t want anything to do with any of them. I think I am going to have to start bribing him. Although I joined a homeschooling group for right brained kids and they tell me that it is normal for RB kids to not start getting into learning stuff until the age 8 or so. I feel like I have been waiting forever for this kid to care about learning.

mother’s day 2009

So, i think that Mother’s day itself probably isn’t such a bad idea. But I think all the hype around it sets many of us up to have unrealistic expectations. Thing is, if your H is the kind of guy that cooks and cleans and cares for the kids with little complaint, he’ll likely do the same on Mother’s Day. If, like my H, he’s a slacker dad, he’ll likely be a slacker on Mother’s day too. My cousin’s ex-H used to tell her “you’re not my mother, why should i do anything for you on M’s day?” Notice i said ex. I made sure the kids made cards for the grandmothers, that the grandmothers got called today and we had the craft kits for the kids. 

We had a nice day planned, H and I. He was going to make breakfast. I even printed out some simple recipes for him. We were going to make stepping stones with the kids and then we were going to take a little hike in “the 1000 acre swamp” just outside of town. There is a nursery nearby and so we were going to go over there to let the kids pick some flowers for me for the garden and then come home and plant them. 

Things started going amiss first thing in the AM though. I awoke with the baby and coming downstairs discovered S hadn’t finished the dishes last night. There were dirty dishes everywhere. So, after I fed the cats and took care of C, I did the dishes and ran the dishwasher. S stayed up way too late last night and so when the kids finally roused him, he was sleepy and cranky. He wandered aimlessly around the kitchen for half an hour, picking things up and putting them down and staring at the recipes and barking at the kids. Finally, with my blood sugar around 11, I made my own breakfast. Instead of S saying “don’t worry hon, I have lunch covered!” he got mad and refused to cook the kids anything. So, I made them breakfast too. Then he and R started fighting over using the wii and finally when I nagged about getting going, we did the stepping stones with the kids. C wiped some of the concrete powder in her eye and of course she cried really hard and so that made things pretty stressful. We did that before lunch and then the next thing I noticed, S went upstairs and took a nap. Just disappeared. 

So I cleaned up from the stepping stones and fed the kids (and myself lunch) and did the dishes (again), while C played with playdough (I helped) and R watched something on the computer. I switched the laundry (which I started earlier), picked up the living room from last night. 

So here it is 2 PM and we haven’t gone anywhere and S is still sleeping and I started thinking, this really isn’t any different than any Sunday. I rarely get to do the things I plan and I am the one who ends up being really flexible so others can do what they want. At least I put up such a fuss 6 years ago that he puts the effort into making sure I get at least one card from each kid, handmade please. 

And he’s buying me dinner tonight if it’s the last thing he does on this earth.

The Point is……

FREEDOM is a human need. 

Okay, how did this whole line of thinking evolve? It started with some posting on the local AP group about Consensual Living. So few people “get” what CL is all about. Discussions start with “well, that do you do in ABC situation?” It’s not about the how to. It’s not about how you stop kids form arguing, it’s not about get them to cooperate. It’s all about the relationship. But, it’s more than that. First I posted this: 

one of the things i mentioned lately on the CL tribe on MDC is that CL is less
about “how does that work” for specific situations, and more about the quality
of the relationship with the child. the more you work on the relationship and
trust part, the less focus issues like this seem to have in families. kids work
this stuff out, they cooperate, they look for their own answers, or they don’t
and mom or dad intervenes, but this stuff just doesn’t have the juice it has in
families where there isn’t CL.

somehow CL just takes away the intensity of these issues over time, make them
less of a problem… not that they don’t come up, they do, everyone is human,
but something about CL makes them less problemsome.

i don’t know why this is… maybe because in CL you really really get into a
place where what you feel and do is about you and no one else. and then,
interestingly enough, you stop taking your kids and H’s behavior so personal.
and then the kids and the H learn to do this too and so things just come to a
different place in your home.

So there were a few different responses… one about being happy to not have to control her child and one from a Mama who couldn’t imagine what CL might look like in her house. My response was, in part, this: 

i think that since so many adults don’t feel free, (free to make their own
choices), it’s so nearly impossible to understand what it might be like to have
a relationship with a free child. it’s just mind-boggling. we talk about the
needs of children, but we almost never talk about “freedom” as a need.

L was the only one who responded to this. She agreed that her own freedom came from realizing that she was free to choose whatever she wanted in her relationship with her son. 

So that thread stuck in my head, since the freedom piece seems to important… Mama’s perception of freedom directly affects her ability to interact with a free child. 

Then we moved on to unassisted childbirth. Well, this created lots of negative comments. Lots of judgmental language. Over and over I talked about the need for a woman to “birth on her own terms.” This seemed to fall on deaf ears. 

To put it in perspective is this quote from a friend who had two unassisted births after a section. 

I think too to put things in perspective that my history puts me in a position to need complete control over my birth. I was raped as a teen and then Jacobs birth was so horrendously violating that it was like being raped again. I wouldn’t go through a hospital birth again unless I was 100% positive it was the only way at least one of us would come out alive. 

Then all the pieces seemed to fall into place when I read this piece on NPR this morning. 

My friend and neighbor Catherine Royce died recently. It was her well-considered choice.

Choice was important to Catherine.

“I believe I always have a choice,” she said two-and-a-half years ago in her NPR essay. “No matter what I’m doing, no matter what is happening to me, I always have a choice.”

Freedom comes from choosing. Notice I didn’t say freedom is about having a choice. We always have a choice, no matter what. It’s exercising that choice that makes us free. And it’s all about that. All of it. Consensual Living, Unassisted Childbirth, death on your own terms. That’s what it means to be human. Humans *need* freedom, it’s as basic as breathing and loving. 

 

 

Temple of My Familiar

“Temple of My Familiar” by Alice Walker is one of my very favorite books. It’s in the top five for sure. I am rereading it. It’s been a while. There is a character in the book who’s husband cheats on her with her own mother. When one of the other characters describes her as “a body of pain. Nothing else, just pain.” I couldn’t help but think about the bio-mom and the ex-housemate. How they both betrayed me and how much pain it caused me. Which of course lead me back to the ex-friend and the ex-housemate. The big betrayal there was NO ONE in my househodl wanted to talk about what happened. No wonder I slid into depression for several years.

What is one supposed to do when two people who are so important to you betray you? In a usual “cheating” situation… the “other” person is usually (but not always) someone you don’t know and so it’s just one person who is betraying you. But really, what could Carlotta do when her mother and her husband had sex and ran away to Mexico with each other? The two people who she loved most in the world had left her heart. Eventually she rebuilds her relationship with her H, but not based on a sexual or marital relationship, but as a co-parent. I don’t know really what I can base a relationship with G on. It always seems so…. murky. I guess because I simply can’t trust her and so I really don’t want a relationship with her. But I really do miss her at the same time and wish she could be a bigger part of my life. I doubt it will every really get much easier with her. Or me. Pricky thing I become when I am betrayed.

No more nursies

Well, apparently C is weaned. She hasn’t asked to nurse for 2 days now and before that it was pretty minimal. I don’t even know how I feel about it. R drove me nuts with his nursing. Not only was it constant, he was always all over me. It made me crazy. I always told people my dirty little AP secret was I never loved nursing. I didn’t hate nursing C. she could sometimes be a marathon nurser, but was rarely all over me. She never did “fly by standing up nursing” like R. She rarely asked in public and almost never bit me. There was just that horrible pinching thing she did. I did hate that. Easily solved with a sock though. I was relieved  when R weaned just after his second birthday. C just turned two also, but I am not exactly happy about this. On the other hand I can be more aggressive with my ND and treating my hormone imbalances. 

The thought of never nursing a baby again breaks my heart. Even though she really isn’t a baby anymore.

February 25, 1925

On Wednesday my dad would have been 84 years old. My dad died when he was 56 years old from a heart attack. I was 15 and a half. That was a long time ago. Nearly 28 years ago. Almost twice as long as I actually knew him!

My dad was born into a very poor Jewish family in New York city. He was born at home and the doctor used forceps to pull him out. My grandmother blamed this fact for my father’s terrible temper. Actually my dad was a “Good Guy.” He had lots of friends, some of them really close. He was generous, always helped people (even when they didn’t want it!) and was never proud enough to deny the suffering he had seen during World War II. He was never romantic about the war. He thought it was a horrible horrible thing and did everything he could to make sure my brother never joined the Military. Actually, he had the soul of an artist, stuck behind a desk as a tax accountant. He wrote poetry, acted, sang, painted, drew, did wood work, invented cool things, even made a matching mosaic coffee table and  curtains for our living room all before we were born. And he sat all day in a dingy, dark state office five days a week for 27 years. And on the weekends he sat in a basement office and ran my mother’s father’s insurance business. I don’t think the forceps were what made him angry. 

I don’t have a lot of positive memories of him. He sought (like any good father of the 1960’s and 70’s) to control his children with force. I also don’t think he realized how my mother’s emotional absence affected his children. We were needy and fearful and he wanted us to be independent and self sufficient. He seemed to me to be always battling with everything. I don’t think he was always like that, but I never really knew him as a person. 

I rarely miss my father. But I do sometimes wonder how things might have been different for me if he hadn’t died so young. Or if he wasn’t always so angry. I wonder what kind of grandfather he might have been. What him and my mom might have done with these last 28 years. There’s a lot of wondering there sometimes. 

Happy Birthday Dad!! I hope your next life was a more joyous one for you.

Janufeb

I hate Janufeb. Seriously. Even though C’s birthday is on the 6th of Feb., I still hate this time of year. I should say I hate  Novdecjanufebmarapril. Since the weather really does suck from Halloween till May. So happy we have managed to escape from Byron. Not happy it wasn’t to some place warm. Phase two of the escape plan is going to have to be starting an internet business. I have a good idea, but S vetoed it. I think because he found it boring.

It was warm today, but everything is dirty and muddy and overcast, so I didn’t go out anywhere. R wasn’t interested in taking a walk, so I stayed in and cleaned. And put books away. And took things into the basement. And did lots of dishes. And made Valentines with the kids. And cooked. And read books and watched Little Bear and the Wiggles AGAIN. 

And you know who is awake, again. So, i have to cut my complaining short.

love hate relationship

Okay, so I love and hate mostly everything about our new house and living here. Interesting.

My new kitchen is beautiful. I love the granite countertops. But I am really fearful of staining or scratching them. I love my new wood (!!) cupboards. But I hate the deep pantry where I can’t see anything once it goes into the dark recesses beyond the front row. A new fridge is great, but the freezer is on the top and I hate crawling on the floor to get into the crisper drawers.  I really did love my bottom freezer fridge (which I sold yesterday). I do really love my new dishwasher. It’s big and holds tons and washes really well. But there seems to be no place for my corelle rice bowls (which we use all the time), and I can’t turn it off to prevent the baby from starting it. Yesterday it was full of clean dishes and she started it and by the time I figured it out and cancelled the cycle, all the dishes were wet. And there isn’t anyway to just run the dry cycle.

I am going a bit nutsy trying to figure out how to fit everything into this kitchen in a funtional way. If it’s not funtional, what’s the point? It’s useless.

I love the size of the house. It’s cheaper to heat and light, less to clean and forces S to get rid of a lot of his crap collections. But it’s frustrating to not have places to put certain things.

I love where the house is located. I went to a “late season farmer’s market” last night for goodness sake! But just when I make a decision to lose 30 pounds, I see that there are nearly 10 interesting and yummy looking places to eat within walking distance of the house!

I love that there is someone right across the street who is an AP mama and a localvore like me, but worry about her judging me. I drive up with the my huge Ford Explorer and carry in my Walmart bags and wonder if she is tsking her tongue at me in disapproval. In the country I was free to be as crazy I wanted and no one was there to see me or judge me.

I was thinking about last time we moved… it was almost January and it snowed for 2 weeks straight and we didn’t go anywhere (R was 5 months old) for a long time. Stuck in the house, looking out the window at all the white white white as far as you could see.  Now it’s winter again and we are having an “Alberta Clipper.” Temps are in the single digits and here we are stuck in the house again!! All kinds of places to walk to and it’s so cold I can feel my nose hairs freezing when I go outside to get the mail. History repeats itself. Heh.

Apparently everything in my life is an apparent contradiction. Why does this not surprise me?