Pretty Scary

I am getting ready to embark on a completely different way of eating.   It is pretty scary.  The question always is with my eating disorder, can I stick with it?  Can I keep it up?  I have two very large motivators to keeping up with it.  One is hormonal, and the other is weight management.  Honestly, the hormonal part is a larger motivator than anything else right now.  I also have a feeling that once I get the hormonal part fixed, some of the weight management part will manage itself.  Maybe not, but research indicates some of that.  I have a week until my half marathon this year.  I am so not ready.  It makes me nervous.  The most I am really ready for is maybe 10-11 miles.  That last 5k might do me in.  My BFF says that walking is fine if we need to, but I really hate to do that to her. 
We are in our last 2-3 weeks of my son's baseball.  I am going to miss it. It will be nice not to have to run around town 3 days a week, but it has been great to be outside so much and to watch baseball games and to be around other adults at the game.  There are a lot of nice parents there.
Emotionally, I am feeling ok.  I am not happy with my body.  That is not helping.  It has been a rough week for the hubby and I.  We are very out of sync and it is not looking favorable to get back in sync.  He thinks that physical connections will help that.  I need the emotional connection to even think about the physical stuff.  Men tend to go down the wrong path.  I do not get it! 

Madness

I feel like every time my life spins out of control that I am two steps away from the flip side of my eating disorder.  Yes, part of me would like to lose a few pounds, but that side of the spectrum scares me.  I do not want to lose my hair.  I was blessed with great hair.  It is my only physical gift.  I do not want to ever lose it.  when the disorder and chaos hit, though, I do not want food.  Normal stress sends me to my food addiction and stress eating.  The madness and chaos send me to the other side.  Peanut butter, my favorite food, has no appeal today.  I have to run tomorrow so I will need to eat something at some point.  The good news is that this phase is usually quick.  Then I go back to stress eating.  Joy. 
Do you ever wonder why things turn out the way that they do?  I wonder from time to time why I was saved when I tried to kill myself .  That does not mean that I want to die now.  Quite the opposite actually.  I fear death.  I have so much left to do, but I do wonder if there was a reason I was saved.  I think that is normal.  Perhaps it makes me look for a purpose to life other than just doing the things that I want to do.  I do not know.

Love

Why do we love those around us?  I do not mean our kids or friends.  I am talking more about our spouses and partners.  Why do we pick those people?  I understand that there is the whole idea of attractiveness, but what we find attractive definitely varies over time, and the reality is that beauty fades so what is it that makes us love someone else?  Is it some kind of chemical reaction that goes on in our brain?  Is it some sort of survival instinct?  Sometimes I wonder....
My battle with food addiction is not going well today.  The last few weeks have been better than most, but today has been bad.  I blame it on my period and stress at work. I am hopeful that tomorrow will be a better day.  Ok, there is some blame on a bad lunch due to the fact that I forgot that I was almost out of almond milk and let me assure you that puffed kamut and very little almond milk DO NOT go together well.  Speaking of almond milk, this excluding dairy thing seems to be helping a bit with the hormones.  Maybe it is just luck or just a better cycle, but so far so good.  I actually ovulated this month which is a huge relief!  Maybe, just maybe, my hormones are getting better. If that is the case then maybe this summer will not be so brutal.  Brutal that is with the bleeding.  My feelings about my body still plague me. Will I ever be satisfied with the way I look?  I often wonder.
Last time I went to therapy I wanted to talk about my issues and feelings of competence at work.  That did not happen.  We got side tracked on some family issues.  I need to talk to her about my feelings about work.  I keep meaning to make an appt to go back but it never seems to happen--that or calling the dentist.  I need to do that too.  Baseball is taking up most of our weeks, but I am not complaining about that.  I still love it.  I realized that we only have 8 regular season games left and I know that I will be sad once it is over.  

Sun

Where is the sun?  I wish it would come out.  I need the sun and the warmth.  Warm days have been overcast and sunny days have been cold.  Not winning!
I did sign up for a 5k/10k race in late April.  I cannot wait.  It excites me a good deal which is great for the running.  It helps.  I am losing weight too which is a good thing. Consistency is key and fortunately, I have been able to maintain that.  I am looking  forward to more days running outside as the temperatures continue to creep up.
My panic attacks left for about two months.  I thought that they were gone for good and left as quickly as they came.  They arrived back like crazy the other night.  I had 6 over the course of a night and worse yet, they kept waking me up.  I have had several since.  I am hoping they stop sooner rather than later.  These daily attacks are exhausting.
This year has brought me back to baseball which I love.  My son is playing and I love being out there with him and just watching.  It is wonderful.  I forgot how much I love baseball.  It has been a gift to have it back.  I am hoping this weekend's games are not canceled.  Hopefully!
So I talked to my mother the other night and realized how desperate her need for drama is.  It is how she keeps control.  She tried to guilt me into thinking that my brother was upset with me for something silly.  I did feel guilt when she made a big deal out of it, but then realized the following day that what she said was her need for comfort and not how he really feels.  She needed to control the situation and the easiest way for her to do that was to inject some negativity between my brother and I.  When I realized, I was mad.  I have wonderful siblings and it is that poison that keeps me from getting close to them.  They are still too tied to her.  It honestly makes me sad.   Very sad. 

Outpouring of some stuff

My therapist told me this week that I am hurting myself.  I knew that, but hearing someone else tell me that resonated with me.  There are some things I need to get out.  I know my husband will read this and I want him to know that this is not to make him feel bad.  It is not to create guilt.  The only outpouring I have of these things as they have bothered me come in waves of anger directed at him.  Why?  Because I cannot deal with the sadness so I focus on the anger when the feelings get too overwhelming.  I ask him to look at this as an outpouring of sadness, not anger or rage, but more about what I have held in for a long time or a short time depending on what items I hit. 
The marathon...every Sunday that I ran long, I thought about finishing that race.  Hell, some of the time picturing that moment was the only thing to push me through another 15+ mile run.  I pictured it more times than I can tell you.  Each time it brought a smile to my face.  The day came and went and no moment happened.  The truth was that by mid-Oct I was burned out on running, a lesson I will remember this year going into the marathon.  I still planned to run and would have finished.  The best way to explain what that moment to me was that it was supposed to be a moment that would allow me to maybe relinquish some of the self-loathing I do.  I felt like if I could defeat the marathon then maybe I was not as weak as I thought, or insignificant, or insecure and incompetent.  It takes a lot to push through 15 miles and then 20 miles and then 26.2.  Having that ability meant something to me and meant that maybe just maybe I was not as bad as I believe I am.  The most I ran last summer and fall was 23.2 miles.  It was broken up into 2 sections, but the rest in between was only about 15 minutes and I still did over 23 miles.  Me, the girl who never ran in PE.  The girl who was always picked last, and the girl who eventually learned to sit on the sidelines rather than out in front.  You see, I used to be this great outgoing person who was not afraid to shine.  Something changed my senior year of high school.  That was when I felt the change happen.  I was dating David Tanner at the time.  I don't think it was he.  I never really liked him all of that much, truth be told.  It was a long progression that went through my first year of college.  By the end of my freshman year, I was this quiet, compulsive, miserable and awkward person.  It took another 16 years to finally lose some of that misery.  During that time, I endured many things that I would not now.  I lost 75 pounds that I gained my sophomore year of college along the way, I got married, I had 2 kids, and I built a wonderful, amazing career.  Even with that of that, I was still just treading water.  Every now and then something happens that pushes me to yearn to swim upstream.  I spent a good part of my 35th year doing just that, pushing myself and learning to enjoy life a little more.  Most of my 36th and 37th years were spent with setbacks from that.  I have gained 10 pounds and felt more tired and miserable than I had in a long, long time.  I felt the awkwardness in everything.  It keeps me from talking to people and doing some of the things I want to do.  I desperately want to be like the girl who was not content to sit on the sidelines, the girl I remember before my senior year.  I don't want to be her, do not get me wrong.  I am older and much wiser.  I want part of her to merge with the woman I am now.  I do not want to be afraid to shine anymore.  I do not want to worry about everything I say or do or worry about the way I look so much.  The marathon for me was that moment to shine, and I guess I had hoped in that moment, maybe it would carry forward.  Maybe I could hold onto it and take it further so maybe I could find that girl in me and get part of her back.  That is why I am sad about the marathon.  I do not know if I go into this year's that hopeful.  I worry more that with my foot issues that I will not be able to run that far.  It stresses me.  I did not have a beautiful, wonderful, and amazing wedding.  I never wore a dress that I felt a princess in.  The birth of my first child was a sad not a happy occasion.  I let myself down in a dozen other major ways.  I want my moment.  That is what the marathon was about, my moment.     

Therapy

So this book I am reading about mothers who cannot love suggests you write your mother a letter with a few major points covered.  I am not sure if I plan to do that yet, but it does mention how the book will bring up old sores in that relationship.  It certainly has done that.  My plan is to roll through some of the items that have come up over the next few weeks.  Today will be my period issues when I was younger.  I got my period when I was 11.  It was mixed up from the start.  I know that it cane take years for a cycle to settle, but mine never did.  At 13 years old, I was having very painful periods and went 9 months without a period.  I was not sexually active.  Then I went through 4 weeks of bleeding with large clots.  I was bleeding through pads overnight so much so that the blood ended up all over the floor.  (I was sleeping on the floor at the time.  Long story there--had more to do with comfort than anything else.)  Because of the blood on the floor, my mother finally took me to a doctor.  He told her that it was normal.  Keep in mind that he never even did an exam or pap smear.  That is not normal for anyone who had not had a baby....  She believed him because it was easier for her to do so and she was too wrapped up in my sister's life to worry about me.  It made me sad that she did not help me.  Fast forward 2 years.  Again, still not sexually active.  I am still having incredible pain during my cycles.  She finally relents and takes me back to a new gynecologist, one she later admitted to me that she did not like.  He was about 55 and came in coldly, did the exam, and then left.  The nurse later gave me an prescription for a birth control pill to control my hormones.  I started taking it and a week later, I was in even more pain.  I am a tough lady.  I went through child birth without drugs.  The pain was so terrible that I was crying.  My mother did nothing.  Allegedly, my sister called the nurse who told her that the pain would go away in a few months as my body got used to the hormones.  There was no way I would continue taking the pills the way it hurt so I stopped.  I had desperately wanted my mother to help me at that time and to call the nurse and demand they change my pill.  It was the 90's.  There were a million pills out there!  She never did.  Fast forward another year.  I was sexually active with my boyfriend and got pregnant.  Yes, my mother was great when she found out I was pregnant and did everything she could to help me put my daughter up for adoption, and I am by no means suggesting that I do not want my eldest daughter in this world, but the reality is that my mother could have prevented that hardship in my life simply by helping me with the doctor when the pill made me sick.  The reality is as I was later told that I likely had endometriosis and that having my oldest child helped to correct it, but the pill could have done the same thing.  I take responsibility for having sex at 16.  I will say too that I did go to planned parenthood and get on the pill about the time I got pregnant.  I was just a week too late.  I know that my decisions are not my mother's fault.  I understand that, but what makes me sad is that she did not protect me or help me when she had the chance.  It makes me feel neglected.  How do you not protect your child when she is suffering and I was suffering.  That is my sore for today. 

Life has been ok...

I have finally stopped gaining weight and have managed to move the needle down a little.  It is not totally what I want, but it is better than going up.  I have thrown up once in the last 30 days which I consider a victory.  The control over the food has been a constant battle, but some days, I win it so I am happy about that.  I am still not able to exercise the way I would like, but I should be back to pre-injury state in the next 30 days which is good.  Today I did 8 miles running on the treadmill and did speed intervals at the end.  The fact that I did them at the end, makes me feel good.  I did the last mile at 1 mph faster than the previous 7 which makes me happy but also tells me that I am not pushing myself enough as I run.  I definitely need to challenge myself more.  My foot hurts on and off.  Sometimes, the pain and tightness goes back to my calf. I keep hoping it will go back to the calf and just stay there.  I am working on strengthening the gluts and hoping that will help.  NASCAR started last night which makes me happy.  It feels like spring might be coming in sooner rather than later.  I look forward to the start of racing because it signifies the end of winter for me.  A little over a month to go now.  I think I can make it. 
Interesting enough, my hubby bought a mirror for me for Christmas so I can look at myself full length.  In it, I look thin.  How sad and amusing it is that I think the image is due to the angle of the mirror and not how I really look.  It is true.  Not quite sure how to fix that or what to make of it, but it is real. 
I decided that I am going ahead with the tummy tuck.  I see the winners on the Biggest Loser and I know the secret they hide, the extra skin that hangs from their weight loss.  It is time to get rid of mine.  I want to do it while I am still young enough to enjoy it.  This year is the time. 
I am watching my daughter more and more and seeing how she perceives the world.  I have to be careful not to pass on my issues about body and self-image to her.  Right now she thinks she is amazing and wonderful and I hope she spends her lifetime feeling that way.  I started reading a book about mothers who cannot love.  My own mother is defined in that book over and over again.  I cannot do some of the exercises in the book that are supposed to shake the feelings of inadequacy that come from mothers who cannot love, but the book has made me think more and more how the excuses I always provided for my mother should not prevent me from feeling anger over the things that she did.  I struggle these days with how to maintain a relationship with her and what I want out of it. The reality is that I cannot have the relationship I want with my mother, and because of that, I don't want one with her.  I would honestly prefer to cut her out of my life, but the guilt pulls me back constantly so I try to keep her at a large distance, but the hassle of even dealing with her on a very limited basis sends me into a tailspin of stress.  It would just be easier not to deal with her at all.  What bothers me even more is that I would love to have a relationship with my siblings, but that would mean engaging with my mother more and that is something I am not willing to do.  I don't know what the answer is.  All I know is that I am tired of feeling guilty, afraid, and worried.  My children want to go ice skating today.  I keep worrying that they might fall and hurt themselves.  It is almost enough worry to keep me from taking them.  I do not want to be afraid.  I loved ice skating as a child.  I want them to go and enjoy like I did growing up.  I don't want to be afraid.