Thursday, September 24, 2009

Labor pains...

Parenthood has been an interesting thing. Sometimes I marvel at the fact that I gave birth to this thing that constantly tortures me. But I also love her something fierce. I'm thinking it's somewhat like Stockholm Syndrome where you fall in love with your captor. Except that your captor is your kid.

Your child is the worst of you and the best of you all rolled into one. Not to mention the constant work involved. As my husband says, it's like trying to push water up hill.

My induction into parenthood was on November 10, 2003. The day my daughter was born. The labor itself wasn't too difficult because I had an epidural. It is a glorious invention! After 25 hours of labor at home and some serious sciatica pain, I was ready for some relief.

I have a friend who heard that you needed to ask for your epidural early so you can get in line sooner. She was worried that they would forget about her and it would be too late for the pain medication by the time they got around to her. She told every person who came into her hospital room that she wanted an epidural. I don't know what she expected that janitor to do about it, but her request was duly noted.

I have no shame in saying that I had an epidural. Why turn such a momentous occasion into a painful and traumatizing experience? It's not like you get a plaque on your wall stating that you gave birth without pain medications or anything.

Nobody needs a hero.

Because of the epidural I couldn't feel anything from the waist down. I do realize that that was the point and I was perfectly fine with the numbness. Which came in handy because I did have a pretty serious tear.

Down there.

My legs were in the stirrups for at least an hour while the doctor sewed me up. He - yes HE - had to lean in pretty close to make sure my sutures were right. It was then that I passed gas.

Right in his face.

And he jumped up startled, flapping his hands like a sissy. That's right. I said sissy! Man up dude!

It's not like I projectile peed on him or anything! Haven't these doctors seen it all? Or at least could have pretended that they had?

So that was my introduction into motherhood.

Joyful, messy and woefully humiliating.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

The Biggest Loser and Me.

A new season of The Biggest Loser started last night. It's one of the few programs that my husband and I watch together. And cry together. Man that show always manages to squeeze at least one tear out of me before it's over. This season they are the biggest contestants yet.

And I feel so bad for them.

Their first challenge was to run/walk a mile. They were so out of shape that two people had to be taken to the hospital when it was over. One of whom was so serious that she was still there a week later. I've never been 400 pounds or even 300, but I've been over 200 and it sucked.

It was uncomfortable, tiring and humiliating. It isn't too hard to see how people can get even bigger. There is a lot of shame when you are over 200 pounds and the way to deal with that is to eat to dull the pain, then you feel shame over that and then you eat some more. Rinse and repeat until you have gained another 100 pounds. It's sad and I've been there.

My journey to weight loss actually started with The Biggest Loser a year ago. We were watching a weigh-in and my husband asked, "Do you weigh less than her?" And I couldn't answer.

Because I knew I weighed more.

I just sat there and cried. I cried out the pain and humiliation of my big, strong and athletic husband knowing that I was so fat. I always told him that I weighed less than him. But he didn't know that it was only by 5 pounds.

I'm sure people saw us on the street and wondered what he was doing with me. My husband is 9 years older than me but I was the old woman. We didn't match anymore and I was ashamed.

I had actually tried to lose weight for two years, but to no avail. I had my thyroid checked, saw a nutritionist, and went to three different doctors asking them why I couldn't lose weight. Nobody had any answers for me. After the third doctor's appointment where the doctor said, "Are you watching your portions? Some people think they are eating healthy when they aren't." It dawned on me after I left the appointment and was in the parking lot that the doctor didn't believe me.

No one believed me.

As the realization dawned I started to weep. Not silent tears, but big ugly sobs. I realized that every "expert" I had seen had said basically the same thing as that last doctor. They probably just looked at me like another fat person who sat around all day stuffing their face and then told everyone else that they were on a diet. Right then, as I sat in my car, I had flashes of other doctor's appointments. Not for me, but for my daughter.

She's is not fat. She takes after my husband. She is tall and muscular with no fat on her. But for her 4 year check-up her doctor said that, "Her weight is fine now." Stop, gives me the head to toe eye sweep. "But you need to start watching what she eats now." Huh? This was the kid who five minutes earlier said that her favorite food was salad! Didn't matter. My being fat was a walking billboard for everyone else. I might as well have painted the words, "Lazy. Eats like a pig." on the front of me. That's what everyone thought anyway.

At a surgical consult for my daughter's hernia I got the same thing. The doctor looked at her hernia and said that it wasn't a big hernia, but there could be complications when she got older.

And bigger.

(Yet another head to toe eye sweep.) Yes, Doctor, I get what you mean...

After that day in the parking lot of my doctor's office I had to have a "come to Jesus" with myself. Did I want to admit defeat? Nothing was working anyway. Was I really not trying as hard as I thought I was? Was it time to just say, "I'm fat and I will always be fat."?

I ate my way up to 215 pounds, but I couldn't figure out how to eat my way out of it.

Luckily, my husband had an idea. Our gym had a program called Lifestyles 20/20. I had looked into it a couple of years before when I first started to try to lose weight. It cost thousands of dollars and - at the time - I thought it was a ridiculous amount to spend to lose weight.

But that was at the beginning of my journey. That was before I had started Weight Watchers and gained two pounds the first week. (My husband lost 25 pounds by changing nothing other than eating the healthy dinners I prepared.) I tried Nutrisystem, lost 9 pounds and then promptly stopped losing. Then gained it back. I counted calories on my own and religiously wrote everything I ate into a journal. Nothing happened for two years.

I kept going because I figured that I had to at least be healthier because I ate healthy and I exercised regularly. I may be fat, but I was healthy! Anyway, back to my husband's idea.

He said that maybe I should check out 20/20 again and see what it entailed. He said that he was willing to pay for it if it would help me. The man that had seen me fail at countless diets over the years believed in me even when all of those doctors didn't!

We don't spend money easily. This was desperation. My final hail mary pass before giving up. We talked about it before I started the diet and we decided that this was my last try and if it didn't work then it "is what it is". I would just need to live with the weight.

Luckily it wouldn't come to that. The first week I lost over 5 pounds. I really expected to gain, I always did before. I was exstatic! Come to find out that I wasn't eating ENOUGH calories!

Go figure...

I also wasn't eating enough heart healthy fat. (I spent my whole life avoiding fat in any form; this was a revelation.) And the last piece of the puzzle was that I was intolerant to grains. Not carbs, those I really needed to keep my energy up. In one week I had two servings of grains and gained a pound. Nothing else in my diet had changed. Basically, I needed to eat whole foods.

Not 100 calorie snack packs. Real food with real ingredients. I was and still am amazed.

As of today I've lost 61 pounds and am at my goal weight. Who knew? I certainly didn't that night when I watched The Biggest Loser with my husband and he asked me a simple question.

That night I never would have guessed a year later I would be my own Biggest Loser.

Monday, September 14, 2009

A-holes and the people who enable them.

I belong to a pretty nice gym. This is my family's only extravagance. It's BIG, it's clean, and it's fancy. Our monthly dues are like a mortgage payment but we are willing to pay it so we don't have to go to the national chain gym that we used to belong to.

I actually wouldn't have minded that national chain so much if their locker rooms were nicer. I'm not saying that their decor was ugly. I'm saying that I don't really like to see poop smeared all over the toilet seat.

I kid you not, at least once a week I would find a toilet with poop all over it. Smeared. Like some one's toddler reached into their diaper and finger painted on the toilet. And by the looks of that poo, that toddler had to be over 150 pounds and liked to eat A LOT of fiber.

Smeared poo is something I have never seen at our new gym. The only problem with our new gym is that people seem to get a sense of entitlement when they pay that much for a membership. For some reason the rules don't apply to them.

They waltz past the sign in the Women's Locker Room that says "Cell phones not allowed." while gabbing on their phone. Loudly. They happily do their runners stretch underneath the sign that says, "No stretching in the lounge area." If this were the '70's I bet they would stand in the cardio theatre smoking while they leaned against the "No smoking sign". Helllooooo?

Why are they so special that they don't need to follow the rules? And if they don't follow the rules, should I stop following them too?

No. I don't think I could. I'm too much of a rule follower. If everyone did this it would be complete anarchy out there!

They will ignore the signs that require them to sit on a towel while naked in the sauna. Naked stranger butts will be everywhere! Stop signs will become like a standoff at high noon, but with cars instead of guns. No one will allow the other person to go. They will all screech into the intersection, stop an inch from each other's bumper and proceed to honk and gesture out their windows. And they won't get anywhere.

It's almost like the polite people have to acquiesce to the assholes of the world just to keep things moving. And this I think is why it pays to be an asshole. There are still more polite people then a-holes.

A-holes are the adult equivalent of schoolyard bullies who push people around because they know they can. The people who ruin my zen locker room experience and steal my quiet time were probably the same people who shook kids down for their lunch money in grade school. It worked then and it works now.

So what should I do? Say something?

Um. No.

As my husband always says about us Americans, "If you call someone out for being an asshole. You will become the asshole." And everyone who once agreed that the person was an asshole will now look at you with scorn because you actually said something.

I don't have a good answer to this. There are less of them than there are of us nice people, but they are still getting their way. Squeeky wheel gets the grease and all that. I guess I can sit around and whine about it or I can try to let it go.

Man is that hard. I do my best to hobble up on top of my high horse and tell myself that at least I'm not like them. At least I try to be polite to my fellow citizens. And I have never - at least in my conscious memory - ever smeared poop all over a toilet seat. On purpose anyway...

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Memories...

Today I received an e-mail from a friend who's youngest child started preschool today. Seeing his smiling face with his new backpack reminded me of my daughter's first day of preschool and I set out in search of a picture I knew I had that documented the occasion.

Because my husband is German we sent our daughter to a German preschool. They accepted kids from 2 years old and up. After two years of screaming, not sleeping, hyperactivity, and horribly short naps I was ready to cut the apron strings. At the time I thought she was ready too.

I mean, she had grown from a 21 inch 8 pound (11 ounce) screaming blob to a toddler. (I can't even remember her weight or height at that age. It was off the charts, though, I remember that.) To me she seemed practically grown up. Did it occur to me that she wasn't even two yet? (She started at the school 6 days before her second birthday.) Did it occur to me that she had never actually been away from me before? That she didn't speak German and her English wasn't so good either? Nope.

I was soooo ready for a break that I made whatever deal I needed to with my conscience in order to drop her "high energy" self off at the school. I see that picture of her first day now and I cringe. She was so small. My God the kid barely had any hair! She couldn't even say school! (In German or English!) But I dropped her off and made a break for it. I only got as far as the nearest Safeway, but I didn't care. For the first time in her short life I was able to go to the store by myself.

There was no screeching. There was no grabbing of things off of the shelves. I didn't need to run from aisle to aisle like Supermarket Sweep and throw things into the cart haphazardly. I didn't care what I bought, I just needed food and FAST before she lost her noodle! A trip to the grocery store usually ended with me all sweaty and her screaming and crying at the indignity of being strapped into a grocery cart for all of 20 minutes. I left that store that first day of German school with a smile on my face.

I wasn't sweating and I had actually bought things on my list! I packed the groceries into the car and was heading home when I noticed that my cell phone had three messages on it. All from the school. Claudia apparently wasn't adjusting as well as I was.

So that first day she lasted 40 minutes. It would have been less if I would have answered the first call. It is hard to remember a time when my daughter was that attached to me.

This morning she got a ride with a friend to school and was chanting, "I'm a big girl! I get to go to school without you!" while jumping up and down. I realize that my purpose as her mother is to turn her into an independent adult who leaves the nest in search of a life of her own. I try my damnedest to make sure that she can do that someday.

But does it have to be today? I shouldn't have wished away her "toddler" years so quickly. Thank God I have that picture of her first day of German school to remind me how cute she is and how important she is in my life. And I know that some day, in the not so distant future, I'll be staring at her first day of kindergarten photo wondering where the time went. I'm looking forward to getting from here to the first day of Jr. High and High School and college. I just need to pay a little bit more attention to the journey and not just the goal.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Big girl in the City...

My daughter started Kindergarten last week. This was a momentous occasion that was harder on her parents than on her. I actually was maintaining my calm until I met up with my husband in the hallway after dropping our daughter off. I rounded the corner and found all 6 foot 3 inches of my Manly-Man crying. His eyes were red, tears were flowing and he was sniffling. It very well could have been the sexiest thing I've ever seen.

After that day I've at least managed to not cry while dropping her off. Not even on day two when she begged me to drop her off a couple of blocks away from the school because she was a, "big girl now!" I won't even go into my chanting, "You are only five! You are only five!" while I walked/dragged her to her classroom. Then came the big Milk Money Dabacle of 2009...

It started out innocently enough. My daughter wanted to buy milk in the cafeteria. It costs 50 cents so I thought it was a good compromise because I wouldn't let her buy lunch. I didn't have any change so I gave her a $5 bill and instructed her to bring back the change. This is where things got sticky. She came home that day and said that the "girl" wouldn't give her her change. I asked her over and over and in multiple ways and this was the story she was sticking to. Being that this wasn't my first rodeo as a mother I had a feeling this wasn't exactly the straight poop. So to speak.

My husband, on the other hand, heard her story and was ready to rip the "girl's" throat open for taking advantage of his little girl. He ranted about some snotty teenager stealing his child's money. My husband is from Germany and I don't know what kind of lunch ladies he had growing up but my vision wasn't of a girl at all. I pictured some overweight lady with a giant mole (with or without hair growing out of it) and some sort of unattractive hair net. I just couldn't picture this woman stealing my daughter's milk money. It was all just a little too cliche. After calming down my husband and promising him that I would get to the bottom of it all I e-mailed my daughter's teacher. Luckily, just as I suspected, the change was put onto her lunch card account and she can buy milk as much as she likes. Or until her $4.50 runs out.

If my husband was this upset about her milk money, what is he going to do when our daughter is bullied by some mean girl? Will he track her down and hang her upside down on the monkey bars? Then leave her there as an example to all other bullies what could happen if they messed with our little one? Maybe I should stop allowing my daughter to buy milk and start saving my change for bail money.