Nov
15
November 15, 2006
Did anyone else watch the documentary Thin on HBO last night? Man, I haven’t quite been able to get it out of my mind since.
The movie focuses on several woman in the Renfrew Center, an eating disorder clinic in Florida, and follows them through their recovery process. Some girls restrict food, some purge, one has a tube connected to her body that is supposed to force-feed her, which she uses to suck food directly from her stomach.
They all seem, at times, to be normal young women who sneak cigarettes and have screaming giggling fits while they throw themselves onto a bed; at other times they look like prisoners of war, their faces reflect an internal battle they are losing every day.
One girl, Brittany, was only 15 at the time this was filmed. Her eyes are ringed with dark makeup and her hair hangs in lank strings in front of her face. She looks incredibly young and lost, and we learn that her mother has an eating disorder too (when Mom shows up to pick at the cafeteria food in front of her daughter, we see exactly how pathological this is). Brittany says she and her mom used to “chew and spit” bags of candy together, and how it was such a good time.
Later, she sobs uncontrollably, “Why can’t everyone just let me die?”
I don’t know why these types of stories resonate with me so much – I’ve never had an eating disorder, nor have I ever been at an unhealthy weight. I guess because it’s such a pointless tragedy, this self-inflicted harm, and even though I’ve never gone down that particular path it’s all too easy to imagine the slippery fall from our society’s “normal” amount of body obsession to becoming one of those pitiful little girls with bird-bone shoulder blades and fragile, protruding spines who look into the mirror and see monsters, who want to physically peel the imaginary fat from their bodies until they disappear completely.
If the point of this movie is to reveal the chilling reality of people suffering with eating disorders, I think it does an amazing job. There certainly is no happy ending to the film, and I wonder about the filmmaker’s choice with that. It’s true that recovery is an elusive goal, but it is heartbreaking to leave those girls with so little hope for them.
I wish I knew how Brittany was doing now.
Nov
14
November 14, 2006
Here is an odd realization I had recently: my office job is currently the most relaxing thing I do. From the mostly solo commute time when I can blare music at top volume and set my brain on Standby to my three days a week of email, meetings, and phone calls, compared to toddler-wrangling it’s all one giant stress-free bubble bath.
It’s not that my job has changed, or my environment – there are still last-minute projects, poorly planned activities, and colossal miscommunications (although, nothing that’s particularly unique to my own workplace; if a job exists that doesn’t occasionally flail around in its own dysfunction I’ve yet to find it), but everything, literally every single thing, is one hundred times easier than taking care of Riley.
I’m not saying it’s preferable (although it sometimes is), and I’m definitely not issuing some blanket statement about parenting being harder than career work, I’m just saying that for me personally, the same job that used to cause me to grind my teeth and wake me up at 3 AM to stare at the ceiling and compose long-winded monologues I would never actually deliver, is now akin to a thrice-weekly spa treatment.
Who would have fucking guessed that, huh?
Perhaps you can tell I had a bit of a challenging weekend. As I mentioned, Riley and I went to visit my family in Port Angeles (my aunt deserves some kind of nationally-recognized medal for driving us there and back), and let me tell you, by the time I got home on Sunday afternoon all I could do was turn on an Elmo DVD, collapse on the floor, and pray fervently for bedtime to arrive. I think the boy is teething, as evidenced by the bucketloads of drool constantly cascading from his lower lip, and that was maybe a contributor to his general…uh, cantankerousness the last couple of days.
I don’t know, I guess I sort of thought things would get easier as he got older, but each stage just raises the bar. There are so many times when I don’t know what the hell to do in any given situation, and it’s frustrating; I wish there were hard-and-fast rules, I wish I had more confidence in my own parenting abilities.
I look back on some of the journal entries I wrote when he was a younger baby and I miss some of the feelings I had back then; I was starry-eyed about almost everything (“O the miracle of your poop! O the angelic chorus of your cries!”). And I was proud of myself for stepping up to the tasks at hand.
Now it all feels more…like the pretty Gaussian blur has been removed from the job of parenthood. It’s harsher and everything moves faster and the yelling is much, much louder.
In some ways the rewards are greater, too. Watching my son grow and learn is a brilliant gift that makes me happy every single day. His little face never fails to make my heart feel full, my soul lifted and given flight. He responds in ways he couldn’t before, in ways that shatter me and dissolve all the bleakness I’ve ever carried. He makes me feel like the world is inherently a good place; that life is, by default, a wondrous and magical thing.
But it’s also so hard, and so relentless. I know that sounds whiny as hell. I know. I wish there wasn’t so much second-guessing, and plain old guessing (Is he teething? Hungry? Tired? Possessed by demons?), when you’re stressed out and exhausted it sucks to play Mental 20 Questions over and over. I hate worrying about vaccinations and being asked which schools we’re looking into (Um…schools? What? You mean ‘the one that’s closest’ isn’t the right answer?) and whether or not it’s okay to still let him drink from a bottle and what to do when he has a complete and total meltdown in public and jesus, this is nothing compared to all the shit we still have to face, and I just want to do the exact right perfect thing that will ensure his happiness, well-being and safety, forever and ever, is that too much to ASK?
Which is all to say that this year, preparing for the Macworld Expo in January is a goddamned breeze. A tropical fucking breeze filled with salt-tinged air and little paper umbrellas. Bring on the nightmarish deadlines and botched print jobs, because, and I think this would make a fine T-shirt slogan, trade shows are easier than toddlers.
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