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Archives from 2002-2006

While I have been struggling a bit to find the holiday spirit lately, Dylan is the Dahoo-Dores singing Dilly Lou Who to my inner Grinch. He has such faith in Santa I’ve found myself in at least one awkward conversation about whether that factory at the North Pole really makes every present a kid gets, like even Amazon gift cards? (Me: “Uhhhhh so I think Santa has some ummmm strategic partnerships with certain retailers and manufacturers, in addition to elf labor …”), and he seems to one hundred percent believe that a stuffed elf is moving around on its own each night.*

Dylan’s pure joy at seeing a familiar ornament or re-watching A Christmas Story or driving around to marvel at neighborhood lights or placing gumdrops on the roofline of a gingerbread house or arranging the stockings just so, because that’s how they hang every year — if there is a bit of a meh-shaped hole in my ho-ho-ho this year, he is for sure the antidote.

I don’t know how much longer he’ll the true believer he is today, but I hope his love for tradition lasts forever.

(*Speaking of That Damned Elf, I did this idiotic and possibly/probably immoral thing the other day where I took a picture of it while holding its fey little body, which, if you have one of these elves, you know is a big no-no — no touching allowed lest you drain its powers with your stupid muggle fingers, or something — and then I forgot about the photo until Dylan was flipping through my phone and was totally horrified, like, “Mom, is Relf in your hand??” at which point I snatched it away from him and quickly deleted the image while insisting that no, no, of course not honey, that was just a photo I’d taken that morning of the elf sitting in our tree, because he was just so adorable up there, and then I distracted him with a YouTube video of a sneezing Pomeranian. Christmas: a time for magic, a time for gaslighting.)

Declaring it publicly to boost my commitment: I have embarked upon a sugar/processed crap moratorium. I mean, I decided this over the weekend — the old “diet starts on Monday!” Jedi mind-trick that allows you to really go nuts with that final ice cream binge — so today is, by god, the First Official Day of Eating Like a Moderately Sane Person Instead of Someone Trapped Inside a Vending Machine.

During my first days of being sober, I had this mantra: whatever it takes to get through today. Then it was whatever it takes to get through this week. Then month. You can see how a person could keep going, until knocking back a bag or two of Combos first thing in the morning seems like a perfectly acceptable way to get through the decade.

The tantrumy 3-year-old part of my brain feels a great sense of unfairness about my goal of putting the brakes on the junk food. Like, what the fuck, you’re taking away something else? It feels like deprivation, as though being in a constant state of foggy cravings is doing me any good. Yes, nothing like fatigue, crappy skin, an endlessly upset stomach, and crashing mood swings to really promote that inner serenity.

Even if eating the way I have been wasn’t so blatantly bad for me, I recognize the danger in trading one escape for another. As a short-term coping mechanism, no big deal, but the longer this goes on, the longer I’m not doing the real work that will keep me in recovery.

Meaning, it’s time to learn how to sit in my shit. Experience feelings like a big girl, whether that’s anger, loneliness, boredom, depression, fear, social anxiety, self-criticism, whatever the hell, without using something to check out. Swedish Fish aren’t typically recognized as a drug of choice in support meetings, but take it from me, it’s all the same thing. Especially when you find yourself blindly mainlining about seventy at once like some candy-guzzling pelican because death by gummy is preferable to experiencing a normal human emotion.

I have switched up my diet a thousand times, because I keep coming back to this rut of compulsive eating, and I’m usually motivated to make a change because I hate the weight gain. This time, though, the stakes feel higher. It’s not about my waistline, it’s about finding better ways to cope. Because this road runs so closely to the drugs and alcohol one. Eventually, they become indistinguishable from one another.

It would be nice if you could just do something NORMALLY for once, the 3-year-old says. Yeah, me too, but it is what it is: I stopped one substance, I launched directly into another. I gave myself a month, almost to the day, and now I need to right-size myself again. Because being alive and part of the world is a package deal. You can’t throw away part of it without eventually losing sight of the whole thing.

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