{Originally published on Into the Rabbit Hole}

Tonight I put on my Express size 5/6 jeans again. I didn’t have to struggle, suck it in, or lay down to get them buttoned!

I never dreamed I would be able slide into these again. Since February, I’ve lost twenty pounds. That’s a lot, considering that I wasn’t fat to begin with. However, those twenty pounds were necessary, because now I definitely look better, feel healthier, and am more comfortable with my body.

Want to know my secret? Five simple words: “I love my beautiful body.”

Think about it! A person who loves their body will take care of it. If you were to body-sit for a loved one’s body, wouldn’t you do everything it needs, to make sure you return it happy and healthy? You’d feed it the most nutrient-rich, yummy food you could find, and you’d give it lots of exercise, and you’d never say things like, “You’re so fat,” or “God, if you could just lose fifteen pounds…” Hell no you wouldn’t say that!! If you were body-sitting, you would be kind and gentle, giving it everything it needed and telling it good things!

So, why is it that we don’t care for our bodies the way we know we need to?

I believe it’s has everything to do with how we think of our bodies. Instead of loving them, we put negative energy into our selves, wishing we could just lose (fill in the flaw)… or saying we’re not good enough until (fill in the ‘what am I lacking’)… Guess what! Thoughts like that affect our bodies.

You are what you think! And by changing the way I thought, I was able to bring forth to the outside of my body what it was that I thought from the inside of it. I wrote it in soap crayon on the tiles in my shower. I wrote it on my mirrors. Every time I turned the clasp on my necklace, I whispered, “I love my beautiful body.”

Eventually, I began to believe that. The power of your thoughts is everything. In order to break habitual thinking, or any habit for that matter, you must change that thought you express into something that is contradictory to what you have previously thought. For instance, when I quit smoking, I changed my self-perception into, “I am not a cigarette smoker.”

At first it was a struggle. “I love my beautiful body” conflicted with the original self image I had; it conflicted with the, I’m fats or I’m not pretty enoughs. That confliction is why I needed the reminders to change my thinking through out my day. I needed the necklace clasps and the soap crayons.

If you want to be beautiful from the outside, you must express beautiful things from the inside. Do not criticize your body; love it and care for it. Nurture it.

{Originally posted on From the Cheap Seats}

I was hunched over, my hands on my knees and my breath escaping in small bursts. I looked up and watched her as she continued on. She was like a machine, her arms and legs moving forward in a silent rhythm.

“She’s an elite runner, you know,” he said. His gruff voice forced me up. I held the heaving breaths and busied my shaking hands by brushing the snow from my sweatshirt. The pains in my side subsided, pushed out by an undefinable shame.

I wasn’t good enough.

I was a runner in grade school and high school. Running drove me, it fed a need I never quite understood. I had such a passion for the feel of sweat dripping down my back, the heaving of my chest, the tightness in my legs. I felt alive. And when I crossed a finish line, taking the #1 stick or reaching for the first place ribbon, I was alive. I was most definitely good enough.

College was different. I wasn’t the superstar runner. I was a struggling freshman who had no idea what she was doing. Who packed on extra weight, got a first boyfriend, lost her first boyfriend all while navigating the campus as a socially awkward entity waiting for a clue.

But that’s just an excuse. The truth–I simply wasn’t good enough.

“Some people are just born to run,” my coach continued as the snow began to drift across the track. “You’ll be a good running partner for her. Once you get into shape, ” he added smugly, mercilessly. My eyes followed her as she ran passed us, the snow politely parting for each footfall.

It was one of our very first practices of the season. My coach had already lost faith in me. I had lost faith in myself. Suddenly, I didn’t want to run anymore.

But I did. I ran because I had to. I ran because he said I wasn’t good enough. I ran because I had to show him that I was.

Every day I ran. Before practice. After practice. Weekends. I pushed my body until it begged for a reprieve–and even then, I pushed harder. There was little doubt that I was improving. But coach never noticed. He was working with the elite runners. And when his eyes did drift over in my direction, I knew what he was thinking, “Why does she even bother?” Some days, I wondered the same thing.

Short of drinking a raw egg, I was Rocky. Theme songs bumped around in my head, forcing me to push my aching body just one more mile. Just. One. More.

Trying hard now
it’s so hard now
trying hard now

{Originally published at Whatever}

I hate your politics.

No, I don’t know what they are. And no, I probably don’t know who you are, either. Really, those two points are immaterial (no offense). As it turns out about, about 46% of you are liberal, 46% of you are conservative, and the rest of you just want your guns, drugs and brothels (here in the US, we call them folks “libertarians”).

Each of you carries baggage from your political affiliation, and all of that baggage has a punky smell to it, like one of your larger species of rodent crawled in and expired in your folded underwear. Listening to any of you yammer on about the geopolitical situation is enough to make one want to melt down one’s dental fillings with a beeswax candle and then jam an ice pick into the freshly-exposed nerve, just to have something else to think about. It’s not so much that politics brings out the worst in people than it is that the worst in people goes looking for something to do, and that usually ends up being politics. It’s either that or setting fires in trashcans.

In the spirit of fairness, and of completeness, let me go down the list and tell you what I hate about each major branch of political thinking.

Liberals: The stupidest and weakest members of the political triumvirate, they allowed conservatives to turn their name into a slur against them, exposing them as the political equivalent of the kid who lets the school bully pummel him with his own fists (Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself). Liberals champion the poor and the weak but do it in such condescendingly bureaucratic ways that the po’ illedumacated Cleti would rather eat their own shotguns than associate with the likes of them. Famously humorless and dour, probably because for a really good liberal, everything is political, and you just can’t joke about things like that.

Defensive and peevish even when they’re right. Under the impression that people in politics should play fair, which is probably why they get screwed as often as they do (nb: 2000 Presidential election). Feel guilty about the freedoms their political positions allow them, which is frankly idiotic. Liberals are politically able to have all sorts of freaky mammal sex but typically don’t; good liberal foreplay is a permission slip and three layers of impermeable barriers. The only vaguely liberal person we know of who seemed to enjoy sex in the last 30 years is Clinton, and look what he got out of it.

Fractious and have no sense of loyalty; will publicly tear out the intestines of those closest to them at the most politically inopportune times. The attention spans of poultry; easily distracted from large, useful goals by pointless minutiae. Not only can’t see the forest for the trees, can’t see the trees for the pine needles. Deserve every bad thing that happens to them because they just can’t get their act together. Too bad those they presume to stand for get royally screwed as well.

Conservatives: Self-hating moral relativists, unless you can convince me that an intellectual class that publicly praises family values but privately engages in sodomy, coke and trophy wives is more aptly described in some other way. Not every conservative is an old wealthy white man on his third wife, but nearly every conservative aspires to be so, which is a real waste of money, youth, race and women. Genuinely fear and hate those who are not “with” them — the sort of people who would rather shit on a freshly-baked cherry pie than share it with someone not of their own tribe.

{Originally Published on This Woman’s Work}

I am blurry on the details. Both my parents were home, which makes me think it may have been a weekend. (My dad traveled most weekdays.) Also it was summer. I know this because I was in my underwear and a t-shirt. We were not a walk-around-in-your-underwear kind of family (not like my kids who regularly streak down the hall in little else) and I remember feeling quite daring for wearing a t-shirt and underwear to bed like my friend said she did. So I know I was already feeling a little over-exposed. And it must have been evening since I was (un)dressed for bed but I’m not sure how old I was. I want to say ten, maybe. Maybe eleven. It was before the divorce (because my dad was there) so let’s say ten.

I can’t remember — did my parents call me downstairs? Or did I come down to tell them something on my own? I also don’t remember exactly what they said but I do remember their worried, compassionate wrinkled brows and their assurances that they loved me. And I remember something vague about my dad having been a fat kid and how he didn’t want me to suffer the way he’d suffered. (But this adds to my confusion — maybe my father wasn’t there. Maybe he left it to my mom to tell me and I remember him being there because I remember my mom saying this. Or maybe she said this after this initial confrontation. It’s all a blur.)

I know they told me I was putting on a little too much weight, that maybe I needed to watch it a little because I was getting, well, I was getting chubby.

This is what stays with me: The cold, cold shame freezing my stomach and making my vision turn wide then small. My awareness of my physical vulnerability in my t-shirt and underwear. My want to disappear, pull a blanket over me. And my shock because no one — NO ONE — ever told me I was fat. No one had ever said these words to me. So the irony is that my parents wanted to protect me from the cruelty of other children but the only people who had ever told me I was fat were my parents who were telling me now. And this is also what stays with me: that spinning, empty feeling around my limbs as I realized that I did not know myself or my body. That my legs and arms and tummy were no longer close and familiar but were enemies bent on fooling me. Where I had felt strong and pretty, I now knew I had been mistaken and then I realized I had been a fool walking around in the world feeling good about myself because it was a secret from me, the way that other people saw me. And that was the shame that has, frankly, never left me. And this is a shame that I still feel around my family more than I feel it around anyone else because they were the ones to tell me.

{Originally published on Chicken and Cheese.}

Not too long ago, we bathed The Poo while chatting about all the people who love her.

We listed off all her grandparents, and then spent time explaining how we, her parents, were also children.

“Your grandma and grandpa are my mommy and daddy,” Mr. Chicken told her, as he sluiced shampoo from her hair using a small container of water. “And meema is Mommy’s mommy.”

Suddenly, without warning, The Poo realized a new truth about our extended family.

“Mommy!” she exclaimed, the gears in her head grinding away. “You don’t have a daddy!”

I winced, her words hitting me as hard as any blow. My father’s been on my mind of late.

This is, you see, my season of loss.

*****

Even as we welcome a new soul to our household, my mind wanders – dreadfully – to this date on the calendar. Four years ago today, at 3:30 in the afternoon, my father drew his last breath.

Each year I think the hours will come and go like any other, just a pair of numbers and nothing more. I believe I will keep house and tend children, spending my time as I would on an ordinary day.

But this day, this terrible day, will never be ordinary again.

The immediacy of my grief has faded; that much is true. No longer do I wake in the heart of the night, veins pounding with dreams the color of blood. No longer do I wake each Aug. 26 precisely at 4 a.m., the time my telephone rang with the news that an ambulance was ferrying my father to the emergency room.

But when August begins to wane, a bruise rises to the surface, tender and easily irritated. The warm weather and the slant of the sun prompt recollections I’d rather forget – walking my parents’ dog in the late afternoon the week before my dad died, while they were away at The Mayo Clinic; the hope I felt when the doctors reported that the cancer was dead; the terrible tremor in my dad’s voice the last time I spoke to him on the phone.

I called to tell my mother I wanted to come out to Minnesota. I was on vacation, and something inside urged me to get on a plane and be with them.