SHALL I POST IN ALL CAPS SO YOU CAN HEAR OVER THE JACKHAMMER?

Ah, the glorious sound of a jackhammer! There's nothing more beautiful at 7:00 in the morning -- when you're sick and tired of using the shop vac in the basement, that is. The basement problem is finally fixed. Or at least they say it is, and if it should happen to leak again, it's under warranty now. Yippee! Rain, you skies! Rain! Rain, I tell you!

Oh, and a sheepish thanks to everyone who commented on my last highly pitiful post. I did go see my grandmother and a friend yesterday, and I've emailed some friends, too. Eh, I get stuck in a rut sometimes, and I just need to kick myself in the butt to get started again.

Now if you will excuse me, I must go do the dry basement dance.

In Hiding

I keep people at arm's length. It's one of my many faults, and it has taken me a long time to figure it out because I can tend to be all here's my life story and everything about me sometimes. The arm's length part comes after, when I'm feeling naked about having spewed my life story. It's a balancing act, sharing too little, sharing too much, trusting too little, trusting too much.

Tonight I told a friend why I haven't been calling. I haven't been calling because I'm a bit stressed out and, frankly, a little depressed. And, honestly -- okay, I didn't tell her this part -- feeling as if I've told her too much and she'll figure out I'm not fun to be around. Winter does this to me. I'm not the kind of depressed that warrants any intervention, just the kind of depressed that makes me leave my kitchen in a hellish, crusty mess for days at a time and makes me tell myself I have been too busy to return phone calls. I'm not busy. I'm hiding, covering my nakedness. And I told her today -- mostly because she hasn't known me long enough to know not to take my sudden and unexplained distancing personally.

It's not only friends, and it's not only in the winter, and it's not only when I'm feeling down. Generally speaking, I'm afraid of being judged. I haven't spoken to my "best friend" in over six months -- not an email, nothing. Yeah, she lives very far away, but still, six months is a long time. It's not that I don't love her to pieces. I just feel inferior. She is (recently) thin, has a great job, parents with tremendous patience, and is practical and unemotional. I'm the opposite of all of that. But the truth is it wouldn't matter if I were thin or had a great job or any of those other things. I would still find reason to feel inferior and judged.

I have been avoiding my grandmother. Not even consciously, but I've been doing it nonetheless. I should have visited her last week, but the kids had colds. I didn't call her, though. I just let her figure out we weren't coming. I know I have let her down -- and not just about my failure to call or visit. I've let her down with my failure to be a good Christian granddaughter, my failure to raise Christian grandchildren. And so, when I'm near her, I can think only of what a disappointment I am to her.

Last week I went to a moms' night out with some other women in the area. One of the women there was a friend, and the others are just acquaintances. But during dinner I realized that the other women were making connections amongst themselves. Their kids were playing together, they were talking on the phone, etc. Hey, what about me? Oh, yeah, I haven't extended my hand in friendship to any of them. Mostly, with that group, I feel inferior because of my stuttering. When we are all together, my speech is atrocious. So I say to myself, "Eh, why bother?" But, as I said before, if it weren't my speech, it would be something else. Like the fact that I'm the only fat one in the group. Or that they seem so much more together. Or something. There's always something.

And so there you have it. I'm a weirdo. I can't stand that I'm like this with people. Tomorrow I'm calling my grandmother. And I might even email my best friend. But I doubt I'll be able to do it without wishing I could hide instead.

That's Me!

I've been reading a book called Live Large: Ideas, Affirmations, and Actions for Sane Living in a Larger Body by Cheri K. Erdman. Stuart Smalley affirmations aren't typically my thing, but I found the book at the library, and I like to read size-acceptance stuff whenever I can. While many of the affirmations are predictable, the section about "creating your body image" caught my attention and has me thinking.

When I look in the mirror or see a picture of myself, I am less surprised now than I used to be. I have been working on looking at myself in the mirror, studying myself objectively, and trying to keep my thoughts neutral. The goal is, as one large lady on a message board I used to read once said, to see myself in the mirror and think, "That's me!" Just a neutral declaration, no cringing, no flinching, no sucking in the gut. Just, "That's me!" I have come a long way toward that goal.

And yet, when I go about my day -- when I walk my son into his preschool, when I grocery shop, when I dance, when I shovel snow, when I do yoga, when I am intimate with my husband -- I see myself as much smaller than I am. I imagine myself as "normal." It's not a forced imagining. It's just how I view myself when I'm not thinking about it and when there's no mirror to prove me wrong -- as an average-sized woman. This completely unrealistic body image has caused me some discomfort as I've tried to move toward the "That's me!" mentality. I even tried a while back to picture myself as I really am while I was kissing my husband. It ruined the moment, and so I quickly switched back to my unrealistic self-image.

In the book I'm reading, I found the following on the topic of an unrealistic body image:

When we larger women underestimate our size, we are not in denial, or crazy, or
anything like that. We are actually responding to a sick culture in a
psychologically healthy way: seeing ourselves as smaller allows us to act as if
we are a smaller size, which in turn allows us to move through life less
encumbered by fat stereotypes. We can act as if our size is not an issue. Having
a creative body image is really a tool for living a quality life in the bodies
we already have.

Wow. So no more guilt about it. It's a coping mechanism. A way to make myself feel "normal" when the world tries to tell me I'm not. Cool!

I'm reminded of how much better my current view of myself is than the one I had when I was a teenager and a size twelve. When I was a freshman in college, I briefly dated a guy who would later sleep with my roommate. But before any of that happened, I pushed him away with/because of my negative body image. One day he kissed me and put his hand on my waist. I panicked, thinking only that he was touching an enormous, grotesque roll of fat, thinking how if I couldn't stop him from touching me, he would figure out just how hugely fat and disgusting I really was, because somehow he had failed to see it. I pushed his hand away. He tried several more times to touch me (he was an eighteen-year-old male, after all), and each time I pushed him away, preferring only our lips touch. Obviously, that relationship was doomed to fail. He was not right for me in many ways, so the story isn't a tale of "the one that got away." It's just a strange memory from a place very far from here.

Sure, it would be great to have the body I hated back then. Yet I'm so much happier now, finally looking like my old body-image, while my new body image is that of the size twelve body I never appreciated.

Big Pants

Until my previous post, it had been a long time since I'd posted about fat. You might have been wondering, even, if I'm still fat. The answer would be yes. Yes, I am. As I was scrubbing something sticky off a pair of my jeans this morning, S said, "Those sure are big pants." So there you have it. The three-year-old tells it like it is.

I think the scarceness of fat posts is a good sign. Negative thoughts about my body don't consume me the way they used to. Sure, I still get down on myself, and I would love to be smaller, but this is the healthiest I have ever been in terms of self-acceptance. Granted, I still dream about weight loss when I exercise. I wish I didn't.

I am trying to make exercise fun. I like to move my body. It's only when moving gets all tangled up with thoughts of getting smaller and starving myself that I dread exercise. I got an mp3 player and some free downloads for my birthday (no dishwasher -- long story for another day), and I've been downloading some music that's good to exercise to. It makes it fun. If I rotate the music every few days, I stay motivated and look forward to it.

My mind wanders, though. I begin to think, "Gee, I wonder if I lost a pound today." "Will my pants start fitting me looser?" Or, after a recent bout with the flu, "I wonder how much weight I lost?" These are destructive thoughts for someone like me, and so I try to stop them. I go look in the mirror to remind myself who I am. I am still fat. I am a fat woman who likes to move her body. I can even like myself that way. I'll probably never be thin. I have to make that okay.

"Those sure are big pants," S says.

I smile. "Yup, they sure are."

Baffled Again

Years ago when I read Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, I remember stopping midway through to re-read the back cover, where someone or other was quoted as saying the book was hilarious. I began to think I was either missing the point of the book or something was wrong with me because I didn't find it amusing. It was well-written and moving and downright sad, but I would never have called it funny.

I had almost forgotten about that until I read Fat Girl by Judith Moore, a book that has been called "a nonfiction She's Come Undone." Each time I tried to comfort myself with the thought that it was only a story, I remembered the book is nonfiction. I won't give anything away for anyone who might want to read it, but I'll just tell you that the story is not a happy one.

Then I noticed the quote by Augusten Burroughs on the front cover: "A slap-in-the-face of a book -- courageous, heartbreaking, fascinating, and darkly funny."

Hm. I'm all about the slap in the face. And the courage. And the heartbreak. And okay, I suppose it might be "fascinating" to some people. And dark, definitely. But Augusten and I part ways with the "funny" business. I didn't laugh once, and while I was willing to accept that perhaps I had just missed the point in She's Come Undone, I would be willing to bet Judith Moore wasn't giggling, or hoping for giggles, as she wrote Fat Girl.

Out of curiosity, I looked up She's Come Undone on amazon.com and read the editorial review. The review contained several fat/overeating jokes. My favorite is, "Whether you're disgusted by her antics or moved by her pathetic ploys, you'll be drawn into Dolores's warped, hilarious, Mallomar-munching world." Yeah, "hilarious Mallomar-munching world." Fat girls eating candy bars are just hilarious. There was another remark about how her gluttony was "rivaled only by Henry VIII." Hardy-har-har.

Are these books funny to people because the world from a fat and abused woman's perspective is so shockingly different from their own that they can't begin to empathize? Do the publishers say "funny" on the outside of a book just because people will only read about fat women if they think they get to laugh?

Sorry, but I don't get the joke.

Grab a Book

I've been tagged by Meredith!

Here's the meme:
1. Find the nearest book.
2. Name the book & the author.
3. Turn to page 123.
4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
5. Tag three more folks.

I grabbed Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven, a novel about the West Virginia coal mine wars.

He wouldn't listen.

"Them coal operators aint angels, C.J.," he said. "You got to reckon
with it."

Hm. I believe there's truth to that statement even today.

Anyway, this was a nice, quick, easy meme -- just perfect for a day when S. has abandoned all thoughts of napping and is now taking off his shirt and throwing everything off the couch so that he can stretch out, lift his chest up off the cushions, and sing like Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

And now for the tagging. Okay, Teej, Writergrrl, and Susan, grab a book if you're up for it!

Two Concerned

People kept staring, sometimes glaring at us, the other night when we went out to dinner. L's speech has been the worst yet over the last couple weeks, and right now when she speaks, her voice gets very, very loud when she is stuttering. Very, very loud. So loud that it interferes with other people's dining experiences. If she were just loud, we could shush her. But she's not loud when she's fluent, only when she's stuttering. Granted, she's stuttering almost all the time these days, so it was fairly consistently loud that night, and she right now stutters in a way that the average person might not recognize as stuttering. ("AHHHHHHHHHHH-AHHHHHH-AHHHHHHHHH-AAHHI WAAAAAAAAAAA-WAAAAAAAAAA-Want water." Did I mention she is VERY loud. And yet, it's not as if she can help it.

We just did the best we could, tried to ignore the looks others were giving us, tried not to let L see that we were flustered, and tried to keep the kids' behavior at its best so people wouldn't mistake her loudness for misbehavior, or our failure to shush her for bad parenting. The good news is that L seems to be completely oblivious to her stuttering now (although the SLP seems to think if she's getting louder, she is aware of the stuttering on some level, but she's not crying and asking for help at least). And honestly, I would much rather she be loud than frustrated or ashamed.

Now if we could just work on our frustration -- our inability to help her, the constant loudness of this family what with not only the very loud stuttering but also the very loud three-year-old who likes to make fire alarm noises and the very loud crying and the very loud electronic toys and the tendency of both kids to talk over everyone else even though we've been working on that, really, we have. I'm a stutterer myself, and even so, I am sometimes at a total loss for appropriate ways to deal with L's speech. I am surprised at my frustration, and ashamed of it. I confessed to my husband one night how frustrated I was. A look of relief washed over his face, and he told me he was terribly frustrated, too, but was ashamed to tell me. I can only imagine how lost and frustrated and guilty non-stuttering parents must feel when their kids stutter.

In the study of stuttering, there's a history of blaming the parents for the onset of the problem. These days the parents are blamed less (or at least less overtly), although they still might be held accountable for not providing a relaxing enough home environment for the child's improvement. My parents were blamed for my stuttering. A psychologist who had never met me told my father I stuttered because I was afraid of him. My father was understandably upset, and he spent years blaming himself. The research these days exonerates my parents. They didn't make me stutter, except in the hereditary sense. Their reactions to my stuttering might not have helped me to deal with it in the most positive or constructive manner, but they didn't cause the problem.

Now, as a parent myself, I am particularly sensitive to implications that the parents are at fault. A few days ago I began reading A Stutterer's Story by Frederick Murray, a stutterer and speech pathologist. The book was published in 1980 -- not so long ago, really, but far enough back that the parents were still getting lots of blame. And so we run across gems like this:

Sometimes, especially when there is a family history of stuttering, adults will overreact when a child is going through this normal disfluency stage. The danger then is that, by making an issue of his repetitions and prolongations, the adults will make the child self-conscious about his speech and actually encourage the development of abnormal speech problems.

So the thinking was that adult stutterers make their kids stutter by having a cow when little Johnny says a sound twice. It couldn't possibly be that the stuttering family members are the first to pick up on the subtle difference between normal disfluencies and the beginnings of tense/abnormal/stuttering-like disfluencies, could it? I'm convinced that stutterers have a radar for other stutterers. Sometimes I can pick them out before they actually stutter. Once, in a room full of speech pathology students, I picked up on the professor's stutter weeks before they did. They thought I was crazy until one day he blocked in class.

But back to the book. Only a few pages later, we have another gem:

Parents sometimes respond to the development of a child's stuttering by wondering what they have done to him to make it happen. This question is probably unjustified; furthermore, when it does arise, it can influence parental behavior that will work against the child's improvement.

Interesting. So even though the world of speech pathology is required to wonder if the parents are to blame, the parents themselves must not wonder such things, for such wonderings will cause more damage than the parents have already caused.

I am so glad when I read those passages that so much has changed since that time -- for example, the studies on biological children of stutterers who were adopted by non-stuttering parents and how those children were more likely to stutter than were other children regardless of who was parenting them; or the research by the Human Genome Project that found a very strong family tendency in stuttering despite the lack of any one particular genetic code for the disorder. I am glad to be raising my children in a more informed era.

And then I read the following from the handbook the SLP gave me on the program we will use with L:

[This program] accepts for treatment any child whose parents are concerned that the child is beginning to stutter. We do this for two reasons: One reason is that the parents are almost always right. We have only seen two cases where the parents were worried and the child was actually not at risk. But our second reason is that parents who are worried about their child's speech react differently to it. The disfluency may make them upset, nervous, angry, or depressed. These reactions are perfectly normal, in most cases, and usually stem from the parents' love and concern. But often, in spite of their good intentions, the way the parents react to disfluent speech communicates inadvertently to the child that disfluent speech is to be avoided at all costs. So the concern of parents may end up contributing to the problem, and we treat it as a risk factor.

It bothers me not so much because I disagree about the parental frustration being a bad thing for kids, but because on L.'s initial speech evaluation, the SLP wrote that I was "a concerned parent." Now, NOW, I know what that means: she didn't think there was a problem, but since I was concerned, she would humor me. It makes me angrier than it should. I realize they admit that "concerned parents" are usually right, but still, the implication is that if the child is showing only normal disfluencies and the parents show worry about it, then that could turn the normal disfluencies into true stuttering. The idea is still out there that parents sometimes create stutterers out of perfectly normal children.

And I admit I can't stop thinking of that label "concerned parent." I admit that I am thinking about how frustrated I felt at the restaurant the other night. I am thinking that maybe L saw through my feigned patience and maybe has been reading my worry and concern all this time and maybe, just maybe, I have driven her to stutter so severely. It makes no logical sense, I know, and I don't think I really believe it. I don't think my husband really believes he is at fault, either. But I know he thinks about it, too, and remembers the quiet, tearful conversation we had on the couch the other night, in which we shared our feelings -- in which we confessed our guilt.

Why Does She Cross Her Legs When She Blows Out the Candles?

I don't know if urinary incontinence happens to every woman who has had children, but I surely know my share of moms who wet themselves when they cough, or when they laugh too hard, or when they are puking their guts out during their subsequent pregnancies. Which is not to say, necessarily, that I am one of those free-peeing women. Which is not to say, necessarily, that I am not.

My thirty-fifth birthday is approaching fast. By this time next week, I will be a year older. Ok, well, a week older, technically, but you know what I mean. And if ever a woman such as myself were to get smacked upside the head with a point to illustrate her advancing age, it would be a night out at the comedy club for said woman and her thirty-something friend, both of whom are wearing some sort of, shall we say, feminine protection from the wetness that could possibly present itself during a particularly funny bit. Hypothetically, you know.

In stark contrast to the sad (but possibly hypothetical) reality of having to wear a Poise pad on the first night in years I've actually been carded, I am looking forward soon to something that will make me feel so much younger and more vibrant: a dishwasher! I'm getting a dishwasher for my birthday! We initially thought we would have to get the compact kind because we have such limited space in our kitchen now. However, when the guy came to give us an estimate on installation, he discovered a way we could fit in a full-size dishwasher. Yippee!!!!

We used to have a dishwasher at our old house. I've been doing the dishes by hand for the last year and a half now, and I have to say I've nearly forgotten how easy clean-up can be. I'm going to save tons of time! And I'll even cook more! Yeah, that's the ticket! And I will try new recipes and make all sorts of nutritious stuff and make my whole family happier and healthier, all because of a dishwasher! It will change our lives! I am beyond excited! And now I shall do the birthday girl's dance of joy.

After I run to get a pad. Hypothetically, of course.

Holiday Wrap-up: Interfaith Issues and New Year's Hopes

I used to feel that sluggish, deeply dissatisfied, post-holiday let-down every year after Christmas and New Year's. I feel none of that this year. Instead, I am pleased to have the holidays over and done with. Not that we had a bad time, mind you. It's just that I'm much more an observer than a true participant in Christmas these days, and staying on the periphery like that keeps the season not only more enjoyable but also more in perspective.

We had a nice Hanukkah together -- it seems like ages ago by now. A note on Hanukkah, if for no other purpose than to remind myself for next year: Those really cheap gifts purchased for the last six nights of Hanukkah should be even cheaper next time. Like three for a dollar cheap. Or homemade cheap. The kids will get plenty of stuff from other people before January rolls around, whether we like it or not.

One more Hanukkah note: The super cheap Hanukkah candles we bought were cheap for a reason. They were not only slightly small for our menorah, but they also were not straight. They looked as if they needed Viagra. And anything that causes me to think of genitalia during holiday candle lighting, no matter the holiday's level of religious significance, cannot be good.

Now on to Christmas. All in all, things went very well. My mother's behavior toward my husband was friendly. I think she was in a particularly good mood because the kids and I visited her church with her on Christmas Eve morning. Sure, my son spent most of the service either crying or plugging his ears (he's not big on loud music and new things), and he asked loudly, "Can we go yet?" every time there was a quiet moment. But my mother still seemed happy.

In the parking lot of the church, another interesting thing happened. I overheard that my mother's best friend had converted to Islam. Although I had suspected she had been wanting to convert for a long time (her husband and children are Muslim), I was surprised to hear the news from someone other than my mother, especially since I ask about this particular friend frequently since the death of one of her children. Later, I asked my mom if I had heard right. Yes, she said. Her friend had converted over the summer. "Interesting," I told my mother. "I saw that coming a while back." My mother said nothing.

My mother's silence wasn't disapproval of her friend's conversion; it was apparent from the conversation I had overheard that my mom was supportive of her friend and perhaps even a bit protective of her. So why had she not mentioned it to me? And then it hit me. Whether my mother saw her friend's conversion coming or not, she's not so blind that she can't see the writing on the wall now. I think she suspects I will convert and fears/dreads that day; she wasn't about to mention another interfaith spouse's conversion to me and push me further in that direction.

Hm. So while I still worry about hurting my mother, I no longer worry about shocking her.
The topic of interfaith marriage and religion had already been brought up, so I asked my mother whether the people at church knew my kids were Jewish. I was surprised when she said yes, she had told the other women in her Sunday school class. Somehow I figured she was keeping that fact to herself, hoping we would change our minds. My mother is generally a very private person, so I find it comforting that she has confided in these women and has a support network. I feel more free to make the decisions I want to now that I know my mother won't suffer in silence.

And that leads me to New Year's. I'm not one for resolutions, really. And so I will stop short of pronouncing that I will most definitely speak with the rabbi. I will say I'm more inclined to now than I was. And I'll avoid all those eat right/exercise resolutions as well, even though I would like to be healthier. I was ready to join the Y even, until I found out the price. (How in the world do people afford to go there?) So I'll have to come up with a better plan.

I started off the new year at a friend's brunch this morning. There were so many bright and articulate people there, and all of them friendly. My speech wasn't too hot today, and I found myself keeping to myself, reading books quietly to the toddlers who seemed all to converge on my ample lap; somehow that was safer than the grown-up conversation. It didn't help that I hit my head on the dining room's chandelier as I was filling my plate, causing a very loud clinking and clanging, and voila, yours truly, right there in the spotlight. So I wasn't quite ready to open my mouth and and feel foolish again. There'll be plenty of time for that, though. It's only January 1st.