Midlife Matters

I thought, when I started this journal, that it would help me lose weight. I thought that its appearance in public would force some accountability on me.

No such luck. While journaling has indeed helped me to keep up with my (almost) daily walking and has, therefore, probably kept me from adding any MORE weight, the truth is that I've only lost about 10 pounds since last winter. Not much more than a pound a month. Although, since that's about the rate at which I gained it, maybe I should be pleased rather than discouraged.

Losing weight is a complex matter. For those of us with food issues, what we eat is entwined with everything we think, feel, or do, and trying to gain control over it reveals endless layers of complicated behavioral patterns.

I am going to have to give in and pick apart the emotional baggage that I think has led me to pack it on. And, as I look back over the past few decades, I think that my struggles have a lot to do with my feelings about whether or not I am living up to my unarticulated and unacknowledged ideas about what amounts to a successful life.

I was a slender kid, teen, college student, law student, and young professional. I started to gain, just a tiny bit, when I began to struggle over career issues having to do with traditional images of success as opposed to the nagging feeling inside that I should be doing something to save the world. Or, if not to save it, at least to contribute some tiny little bit of something. I dealt with that remnant of the 60s by taking a midmorning break for a candy bar every day.

As a new mother, I was skinny beyond belief. Puking your brains out for nine months followed by several more as a nursing mom will do that for you. Vomit five or six times a day for months on end and you give up vegetables. Nurse twins and you can eat all the ice cream you want. By the time my third and youngest child was a year old, I had developed eating habits to challenge the best that any school of nutrition graduate could offer.

My eating problems accelerated rapidly when I became a fulltime mom-at-home. Don't get me wrong -- I made a conscious choice and I was, on the whole, happy with it. I loved spending time with my kids, I loved hanging out with other moms, and I soaked up each stage of growth and changes that my children presented. I had lost my own mom when I was seven, and I was always aware of what a privilege it was to see my children grow up and to share in their daily pleasures and challenges.

But, in retrospect, I think I lost a bit of myself in those years. How could I not have? At 30, I was hopping on planes and striding down Corridors of Power, wearing classy suits and silk blouses, carrying a briefcase and expecting people to listen to what I had to say. At 35, I was pushing swings in the park, wearing jeans and t-shirts, carrying an extra dipe and wipes stuffed in the pocket of my jacket and well aware that two-year-olds don't listen to what anyone has to say. I think that I found more of myself, too -- a more patient, gentle, and open self, and a self that was hopelessly in love with three children -- but that doesn't mean that I didn't also grieve, perhaps unconsciously, for a part of me that I had discarded.

In the years since, I've lost significant amounts of weight during periods of extreme and unrelenting stress, but have gained it (and more, of course) back each time. There's no question that now I eat when I am happy, sad, relaxing, stressing, cheerful, angry, loving, hateful, planning something, doing something, remembering something, alone, with friends, reading, watching tv, working, playing on the computer and yes, sometimes, even when I'm walking!

Perhaps I can write this now because I am moving into a part of my life where I occasionally have a sense of accomplishment again. I've restarted and changed my career, and that seems to be working out. I have older teens, who present many more challenges than they did as preschoolers, but with much of the resolution out of my hands. (The worry, however, is tenfold.) I have a bit more control over my days than I have had in two decades.

Maybe there is a little space in here to redirect the way I handle things, away from food and toward...what?

I guess that's the question.

So...another request for a picture! This one from an AOL journaler who wants to make a poster of everyone as part of the Great Journaling First Anniversary Celebration.. Terrific idea, really, except for those of us trying to avoid being photographed.

I was thinking I could pull one of my photos of a cemetery sculpture. A lot of those ladies look pretty good, in their classical poses and flowing Greek robes.

But here's the idea I came up with instead, and posted on the original journal site:

<<Hmmmm....I don't do this but I keep getting asked to. Anyone out there want to create a graphic of me? Short and straight brown bob streaked with blond (well, it will be by tomorrow, anyway) and extremely sophisticated and wordly-wise face. Terrific earrings, too.>>

So if any of my thousands of adoring fans want to make a graphic for me, I would be thrilled, and you may have...hmmm...eternal credit for your artistic creativity. Or at least as eternal as AOL journaling lasts.