No Compaints

After the first three postings I really felt like a complainer. I considered that this might be because my mother always treated me that way when I confronted her about our combined dieting past. I put a sign on the bulletin board by my desk that says "Don't Complain." I talked to my friends about it. And over a period of weeks I stopped feeling the need to do it.

I put another sign on my bulletin board "What you focus on Expands." This is a quote from the book "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind" by T. Harv Ecker, which I came across one day while browsing at the bookstore. It is unrelated to the topics of this website but that line applies to everything. It really applies to my body.

Since my last post I went on a two-day trip with my mother, during which, she steered the conversation over and over again to weight loss and her current favorite weight loss cult (hint: it begins with the word "weight"). About an hour from the end of the trip she said that she realized that she wasn’t supposed to talk about this with me (I have asked her to stop bugging me about diets about once a year, for the past 20 years) and that she was sorry. She went on to say that for some reason one of her very favorite subjects was my weight. I said that no one else’s weight was any of her business and that maybe if she were to really understand that it might free her from some of her own weight issues. She then spent the remaining hour of the trip hounding me about what I was going to do about my weight. Her mind is kind of like a colander- things just flow through.

I was really angry at her for a while but didn’t say anything because you can’t reason with a mind like that. Thanksgiving weekend she pulled me aside and apologized and said that she had figured out why she was so interested in my weight. She said that she was afraid that my weight would affect my health and that she felt like if she didn’t “fix me” she would be responsible. She said that once she realized that she was able to accept that I am an adult and that she is not responsible for me in that way. I congratulated her and said that it must be very freeing for her. I wonder how long she will remember.

Diet for a nine year old

When I was nine my mother initiated me into her eating disorder. She had been bulimic in college and managed to stop throwing up “one day at a time” with the help of my father after she told him about it. Her obsession with skinniness remained and she became a perpetual dieter. So one day after school I went to her studio to check in and instead of the usual conversation about how school had been that day she told me that I had gained some weight and needed to go on a diet. She said that she also needed to loose some weight so we could go on the diet together – wouldn’t that be fun. She explained that it was important for girls to learn how to diet because when you get older, if you are fat you will never find a boyfriend. I don’t remember the rules of the diet other than that at the end if we were both successful we would get to have steak for dinner as a reward.

After that I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what about me was fat. There are no pictures of me over weight as a child so I assume that I actually wasn’t. Before this I had never really looked at my body. I now spent time each day looking in the mirror, assessing each detail of my body and comparing it to other girls at school. After a while I decided that the thing that made me fat was my stomach because it wasn’t flat. I then started assessing my mother because I had never thought of her as fat. I realized that her hips and thighs were a bit bigger than some other women and decided that her hips were what made her fat. In a matter of days both of our bodies ballooned in my mind until I looked in the mirror and looked at my mother and saw fat and ugly.

I don’t remember the much about the first diet. I don’t think we ever had that steak. I know that after that, taking second helpings got me a disapproving look. The next diet was to be rewarded with a giant banana split at an ice cream parlor in the next town over. Over the years we did share a couple of these monstrosities but they were as rewards for good grades and not for diet success.

By the time I started High school I knew all about counting calories (I got 300 for breakfast and lunch and 450 for dinner), food combining, weight watchers, over eaters anonymous (she went and brought the wisdom home), grapefruit, ten days of vegetable soup, and the evils of fats in any form. I also knew that I was fat and a failure at diets because I kept gaining weight, (and getting taller). I was sure that I was utterly unattractive.

My mother started pointing out examples of people who were roll models of how to be thin. My aunt and uncle were on the Pritikin diet (which they interpreted as no fat) and they were held up as the shining example self-discipline and correct eating. I was disturbed by their unhealthy appearances and reports of dry skin and hair. The mother of one of my sister’s friends was stick thin. Looking back now I suspect that she was anorexic. She told my mother that she enjoyed the feeling of being hungry. My mother said that we should learn to enjoy hunger. I still do in a way.

In junior high I began to rebel against my mother with sugar. We didn’t have desserts very often so we were always looking for opportunities to eat it. There was sugar in the house so I would make sugary foods when no one else was home and eat them. I learned to make a “single serving” of chocolate frosting in a few minutes and made it regularly. I also took to eating sugar out of the sugar bowl by the teaspoon.

Some time around the end of Junior high one of my friends told me that what my mother was doing wasn’t right. She said that I wasn’t fat and that my mother didn’t have any right to tell me that I was. I realized that she was right, at least about what my mother was doing not being right. I asked my mother to stop. She agreed and stopped for a few days. I kept telling her to stop in more and more uncertain terms until one day when I was 16 and feeling pretty OK about my self she came up to me and said that I had gained some weight and that she could see it, just a little bit under my chin. I told her that my weight was none of her business and that if she mentioned it again that would be the last time we spoke. I weighed my self later that day and found that I had gained 3 lbs.

Shortly after that she started in on my sister. As soon as I found out I told her that if she did to my sister what she did to me she would never see me again. As far as I know she stopped.

At some point during my teens I swore off dieting because I didn’t want to be like her. I thought I could really mess with her by becoming vegetarian. Being vegetarian had several benefits as I saw it. It forced my mother to do extra work. It gave me a sort of moral high ground- I think to her it looked about as good as Pritikin. And it kept her form trying to share her diets with me. She was delighted and cooked separate meals for me until I moved away from home. By the time I moved out I was only vegetarian when I was home or around people who knew her (I had uncontrollable cravings for meat) but I kept it up at home just for her.

Trashy Bed

I should start by taking out the trash.

One of my many regular childhood chores (aside from the weekend lists) was to take out the trash. This is not unusual and not difficult. I tended to procrastinate on this one chore. I didn’t like carrying the trashcan because it was awkward and smelled. I lived in the country the big trash cans were pretty far from the house so the trash had to be carried much farther than it would be in most urban or suburban homes.

One week when I was in grade school (age 7 or 8) when trash day came I procrastinated all afternoon. My mother reminded me and I said that I would do it when I finished what ever I was doing at that moment (which in all likelihood was another chore). She reminded me several more times and every time I said that I would do it in a few minutes. That night when I went to bed both of my parents came into my room, which was unusual. I pulled back the covers on my bed and found it full of stinky wet garbage. They said that this was to remind me to take out the trash. I put the trash in the trashcan and took it out side in the dark. When I came back in I didn’t want to get into my bed because the sheets smelled and had wet spots. I don’t remember if I complained about the sheets or not but I know that I slept in them and that they were wet and smelly and there were small bits of debris still on them. We took baths at night so I must have gone to school with that stuff on my skin the next day.

For 20 years after that incident I assumed that it was my fault for not doing my chores. During that time I never told anyone about it. When I eventually did tell someone about it I found it hard to say. The person I told said that it was child abuse. Years later I shared this in a group therapy session with some other women. The reaction from the other group members made me think that this might have been a more serious thing than I had let my self think.

I can’t help but wonder if my current house keeping practices are somehow related to this event. I procrastinate taking out the trash now even though it is only a few feet from the kitchen to the trashcan. I procrastinate until I have to balance things on top of the pile and things are falling on the floor. I even procrastinate about putting things in the kitchen trash. I put things on the counter until they pile up and then I realize that I just have to put them in the trashcan three feet away. I feel like a disgusting slob. I guess I am. Maybe this is just who I am. Maybe the trash in the bed had nothing to do with it.

First post ever

The question I keep asking my self is “How do you let go of the crappy things that happened to you as a child?” It is one thing to recognize that they were wrong, that you weren’t at fault and that they have affected the way you function as an adult. They say that knowledge is half the battle. Unfortunately it is ONLY half of the battle. With out the other half you can’t possibly hope to win it. So what is the other half? I have always hoped that I would meet someone- a therapist or some sort of healer maybe- who would help me untangle all of the crap and show me the key to learning some huge lesson and moving on with out the pain and misery to become fantastically happy and successful. It seems reasonable that since someone else was responsible for my childhood someone else should help me recover form it. Doesn’t it?

I am really angry with my mother for her unwillingness to take responsibility for her crappy behavior as a mother. When I have talked to her about it her response is that she is sorry that I am unhappy but that I should let go of it (actually “stop hanging on to it”) since we are all responsible for our own happiness. When I was a kid she always said that no one else can make you mad, you allow your self to get mad because of something someone else does. So you can choose not to allow yourself to get mad. I guess her stand on child abuse would be that the child should choose not to have her feelings hurt by the abuse. Well, the reality is that she isn’t going to help and there is no one else who has any reason to try unless I pay them. But they don’t have answers. They can help me to see what is there- that first half of the battle- but they never know what to do with what I find. If I had a dollar for every time someone has told me to fake it until I believe it or to use affirmations…. These people are missing the point. I have gotten to where I am by faking it. What I have inside is mostly shame, including shame about the shame so I put on a mask and hope that people can’t see through it. Faking it is killing me.

So I am the only one that can help me. Thinking about it isn’t enough. I have such a tangled web of emotions and memories that I can’t keep track. I hope that if I write it down I can see the way out of it.

So what, you ask, is it? I am going to make a list of every thing that I think I need to let go of or otherwise resolve. Then I will write about each one and see what happens. Here is the list:

• My parents dumped the trash in my bed when I forgot to take it out.
• My mother put me on diets starting at age 9 because she was afraid that I would grow up to be fat (I wasn’t ever fat as a child).
• My parents broadcast the general expectation that I would go to college but my father laughed whenever I had an idea of something I might want to study.
• I was bullied by kids at school on a regular basis for 12 years. Neither my parents nor my teachers ever did anything to protect me. When it resulted in my injury I was held partially responsible.
• My father gave me lists of chores on weekends that were to long for me to possibly complete so that I would work all day Saturday and wake up Sunday still feeling like I wasn’t finished. Sometimes my mother would intercede and I would be allowed to play but the result was that I never finished anything at home and have a difficult time with it still.

I must be forgetting things. I know there is more than that. Or maybe I am all screwed up over five things that probably happened to thousands of other kids.

After writing that list I feel like a big complainer. Looking at this list it hardly seems unique (except maybe the garbage in the bed). I wonder if there is something wrong with me to be so upset by what now look like trivial things. But the reality is that I am immobilized by this stuff. I can’t get a job because I assume that everyone – especially interviewers- hates me or at least thinks that I am stupid. I can’t seem to finish anything. I constantly doubt my abilities. I can’t keep my house clean. I don’t make friends because I expect to be rejected if I reach out to anyone. On the occasion that I feel brave enough to reach out I figure that I should invite people to my house, but it is so messy that I am embarrassed to let anyone see it.

So I will write and see what happens. You don’t have to read it.