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.