Day 189

It’s been a few days. A week? More than that.

To be honest, I am not sure how many more entries there will be. This blog is an exercise in vanity at worst and an ill-thought of implementation of a diary format at best.

No.

I haven’t lost any weight this week.

I will have, in the space of a few days, gone back to the progress I’d of made if I’d only lost a pound a week since I started.

And, as we all know, it’ll take just one comforting meal to lose even that bit.

And I’m not sure I care.

My husband… he’s a good man. He’s been through a lot. His family wasn’t the most supportive towards shows of emotion, and apologies were rendered with a punch to the shoulder. He went to military service at eighteen, saw seventeen people blown apart before he reached twenty-one. Spent days without sleep, on a ship that may have been sinking underneath him, waiting to see if there would be a second attack. Suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a time when the military told him there was nothing to be done about it… Fears unexpected death, had to get meds that have robbed him of vital parts of himself  just to keep the panic attacks away…

He’s a good man. He tries.

But I don’t think he sees me anymore.

“I love her patience.”

That’s what he told the adoption agency he loved about me.

He loves that I stand by him.

I do not know that he loves me.

After doing the absolute minimum to help me with getting everything ready for the adoption process… After a month of lying to me, twice, about where he was during the day because he “needed some alone time” and didn’t think I’d understand... After leaving me at home, sick, after a six hour drive, because he needed to get away…. He tells me he wants to talk to me about his independence.

And it leads to things like “Wife, you’ve asked me before whether we might be better friends than married….” And, “Husband, what are you unsure of? Me and you? Or me, you and a baby?”

“…All of it.”

He doesn’t remember saying that.

I do.

Then again, I was very upset at the time.

Then again, he didn’t seem to realize that separation means an end of a marriage. A separation. Not just a break.

Long story short, I waited. Within twenty-four hours he was texting me to say he thought he might have made a mistake. Might have just lost his best friend and his wife.

But he still didn’t know how to verbalize what he wanted. What he’d meant.

I wait.

Forty-eight hours later, we agree to meet up at the house..

And he is over an hour late in showing up because he fell asleep.

The conversation was simple.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“I want to be married,” he says.

“Okay. What else?”

“I don’t know.”  

Fine.

So I came back to the house, but did  a rough split of it into two apartment areas. And he says wants “the chance to win you back”. But not together. He still wants some distance. To deal with things. He’s never paid his own finances, scrubbed his own bathroom, experienced things for himself. He went from High School, to the Navy, to married.

I understand. He’s never lived a life on his own. During rough times, I miss the good old days of being on my own, as well.

But … he isn’t on his own.

There’s an us now.

But the first night after that discussion, he tells me he’ll be home at six.

I’m thinking maybe we’ll watch TV together, catch up on Doctor Who. Get a pizza. Be a couple. It’s been a long time.

It feels like forever.

That’s worth pizza, right?

Fuck the diet.

We’ll get a  pizza.

So, I’m home at six.

And I wait.

And he comes home at eight.

They never talk about this in the movies, you know.

What do you do, when the one thing you need, is something you’ll never get?

I love him.

But he doesn’t know how to express love back.

If he loves me as anything other than a big sister figure even in the first place.

And I can’t fix that.

I can’t change that.

I made a promise. He’s my husband. And he is legitimately hurting. And he is legitimately trying.

But I need him. And he just… doesn’t know how to be there… and doesn’t … maybe doesn’t want to.

And, naturally, being a sane woman…. I know what this means for the adoption.

I will never have my own children.

Now, I won’t have any child at all.  Or at least… not before I’m forty. Before I’m so old that a birth-mother will be less likely to think I’m going to be good enough.

I’m getting ground down. Soon I’ll have nothing. No beliefs about myself as valuable. Everything … slowly but inexorably taken away.

…Rich Mullins would say that’s where you meet God.

And CS Lewis would say that the decisions I make now, now that there are circumstances that warrant decisions, decide who I am. The type of person I am in adversity molds me more than the type of person I am in contentment.

So.

Here I choose.:

I am the type of woman who does her best to support her husband, who is a great deal of pain.

I am the type of woman who does not over-burden her friends with constant complaining.

I am the type of person who chooses to follow a God whose presence, if not nature, has been logically proven to her by the observations of the universe around her.

I will be kind.

I will be just.

And I’ll keep walking.

And… I’ll eat a bologna sandwich for lunch and grilled cheese for dinner – staying on diet even though it hardly seems to matter anymore.

See, internet? Don’t worry. I kept this entry on topic.

Day 196

Shame has made me late on this entry.

Well, that and the fact that my work has sucked up every little bit of “urgency” in my life at the moment. 

Grrr.

Anyway! Shame. We were talking about shame.

You see, strange things happen when you have to attend the birthday party of a five-year old. Things like potato chips that must have been laced with crack and social obligations for after-party mingling with adults at local sushi restaurants.

It’s not fair. Sushi should be safe.

Then again, two sushi rolls plus an order of Lo Mein…

Okay, it makes sense.

There’s a reason I am not yet rejoicing as to what seems to be a steady-ish slope down of weight-loss. I’m very well aware that it apparently only takes ONE good meal for me to be up at 200 again. One day of eating one meal without thinking about calories and BOOM.

I do count myself lucky that, on the grand scale of things, weight gained in that way has proven to be temporary – so far. I’m down a pound from where I was last week. And while that is not as good as being down THREE pounds (which would have been the best of the best goal) it is still something.

Besides. I am hopeful that I’ll be down a grand total of two tomorrow.

Day 202

Missed it by this much...

Ah well. The world continues to spin, does it not?

Day 203

This week, dear friends, we’ve faced bacon laden pizza and Texas Roadhouse. We’ve eaten fried onion blossoms, donut bits, delicious rolls and even had an alcoholic raspberry flavored beverage.

And guess what?

We’re still standing!!

Now, I know what some of you are going to say.

“Jaime,” you say, “That sounds nice and all, but honestly, all we’ve done is stay at the same exact weight we were this time last week. That’s not a triumph. That’s stasis!”

And, you know what?

I know.

I understand how a lack of forward progress can feel like no progress at all. I understand how, with the clock ticking to our next deadline, the niggling fear that a loss of momentum will prove to be our undoing can worm away at our resolve and erode what little satisfaction we’ve hoarded.

And I’m not going to lie to you. We are facing an enemy y much bigger than ourselves – a biological need to eat, swollen and bloated with psychological ties to food equaling comfort and good food being a reward for good people. Plus, we are particularly vulnerable right now. We’re wading in a rough time and we’re denying ourselves the Ben & Jerry’s we’re supposed to be allowed as a coping mechanism.

And make no mistake - our enemy owns this territory. It’s claimed this battle ground with a society that calls women over size 11 “big girls” and names the men who don’t believe such women are hideous as “chubby-chasers”.  (I’m looking at you “Repo Man!”)

But, at the end of the day, we don’t exist in a world where existence is all that matters. We exist in a world where our actions shape our character and our beings for an eternity. We decide what sort of people we will be. We decide how to face the challenges of our lives, from the horrifically shattering to the stupidly mundane. And the effort it takes does not go out into the void. It does not mean nothing. It returns to us and shapes us into who we are.

And we decide whether we allow a holding action to become a route.

We decide when a failure is a failure, or when it’s deciding that sharing food with a friend, without complication or guilt, is greater than the priority of seeing the scale drop that day.

You cannot advance unless you've first stood your ground.

And we’ve stood.

Day 206

Today is a moderated win. 

Moderated because, sadly, I am a pound heavier than I was on Friday.

A win because I'm still on schedule and, frankly, after eating Indian food, a glazed donut and one of those ever-nummy (okay, the one I got wasn't that great, but the POTENTIAL is there!) jalapeno bagel thingys from Dunkies - I should be on my knees praising God it was just a single pound!

Plus, I had a bit of a sobering experience the other day. We are required to talk on camera as a part of our adoption profile. So, my husband and I were taking video and naturally rolled it back to see how it had gone. I looked over the footage of myself and...

...It really wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. 

Which I want to take as a positive. It'd be nice to have some "facts" to come back at those mean little voices in my head when they tell me how bad I look. But, I've looked at myself in the mirror a hundred times and thought I looked good, only to have a photo taken moments later tell me otherwise. 

Which leads me to the following point... how accurate are we, ever, when it comes to our self-image? To judging how we really look?  I mean, we know there are obvious cases where people aren't matching up what is in the mirror to what they feel they look like. When it's a massive gap, I know, it's a psychological thing. 

But, I've read about studies where people have been shown images of themselves, some photo-shopped to look better or worse. They were then asked to identify which one was the "real" one of them. They almost always picked the better looking photo-shopped images.

Which, sounds kind of eye-roll worthy but, can you imagine how sad it would be if we all picked the uglier ones? 

I suppose it doesn't really matter. All of us are locked in our own heads - we're never going to truly see the heart/soul of another person. Smiles will still lead us to believe that the broken person is really happy, bravado that the grieving are strong. 

That's such an obvious but... subversive concept though. When it comes to how you look, to just fight to have your body do what you want it to do and last as long as it can. Nothing more. Nothing less. If you want your body to fit into Slinky Dress #5, then make it happen. But make it happen because you think the dress is cool, not because your worth is based on how you look in it.

A nice concept. I honestly wonder whether it's every been successfully applied by someone who's run the spectrum of looking good to looking bad.  

Ah well. That's enough psuedo-pop psychology for one day! Everyone push their glasses up on the bridge of their noses and attempt to look "smaht".

Day 209

Now, I don't want to get too optimistic here. I have at least thirty little Excel spreadsheets in my trash marking various weight loss efforts and nearly every single one of them has me hitting the mark for at least the first two weeks.

As I am not currently a svelte 140 pounds (hey - I look good at that weight!), you can extrapolate that those trends never really went /past/ the first few weeks.

Early success doesn't guarantee overall success.

However, it's a heck of a lot more encouraging than early failure!

So, with that in mind, I'm proud to announce that this week's weight-loss goal has been met.

(Pause for applause!)

In fact, folks, it's been a bit exceeded. Our buddy the scale spat back a reading of 195.
A reminder - we only needed 196 to stay on our most aggressive track.

Now, now. No stage diving yet, if you please. A good deal of this can still be attributed to the bloody cough/sore throat combination that's been plaguing me all week. Eating hasn't been on the top of my list and, as mentioned, weight lost in this manner tends to come back very quickly.

We'll see.

Finally, I did want to pass along this bit of information.Perhaps the most important thing I've said yet in this blog.

Motrin is awesome.

No.

Really.

Every single inhalation hurt like hades. Warm drinks didn't help, gargling salt-water didn't help. Motrin, though... absolutely amazing.

Day 213

So, the good news is that I am theoretically on track! Not bad for 11 days after an official start, right?

All I need to do is lose a single pound in four days and, given my usual self, that would normally seem reasonable.

Of course, normal isn't exactly the word of the day around here. I fear my lovely success has more to do with the fact that I've been laid up with a fairly nasty cold for the past few days than any true righteous effort on my part. The thing about losing weight by just not eating? That weight tends to come back the moment you start eating again, even if you are being good.

As a side-note, I've been in the house with a gallon of Tiger’s Milk ice cream for a good three days now. No desire whatsoever to eat it. I’m not sure whether I want to blame that on the cold or just a general lack of enthusiasm for life.

I mean… come on. The day that Tiger’s Milk Ice Cream doesn't appeal is the day you are at least a little dead inside.

Day 222

Today has been a drama llama's dream. Highlights include playing go-between on a OCD's phobias and a overly helpful mother's desire to straighten and/or arrange and spending most of the night wondering if my husband was still among the living, given my lack of an ability to get in touch with him.

Yeah.

Enough said.

Needless to say, eating right hasn't been on my top priority. Then again, it was always futzed for today. It's my birthday after all and the family will be taking me out to eat tonight.

I have hedged my bets with the days... I don't think this missing time will have too much of an issue.

Which is why I include my pic! Yep - this is what I looked like yesterday. With any luck, I'll post a new pic each month and... well. We'll see, won't we?

I...am not sure what to think about that picture. It's... actually... not as bad as I thought it would be. Which is a little scary for a few reasons.

But, whether I'm underestimating myself or have just grown jaded, it doesn't matter. The scale is the scale. Healthy is healthy. And... still can't rock a trenchcoat.
Yet.

Day 223

For your reading pleasure, I present the following dramatic recreation of my morning:

Alright! I walked for at least a half hour yesterday, ate a decent breakfast and lunch. Let’s see how it went. 

Good morning Mr. Scale!

… Ah. A pound heavier.

…

 Well, damn. How did that happen?

Oh, yeah. There was that Oreo bag that Dad and I were munching from while we had yet another argument with Mom. On a side-note, that might make a good drinking game. Every time Mom turns a random discussion to how Dad never stood up for her (and how he never has and how it started back when she was seventeen), take a drink!

And then there was the bowl of Frosted Flakes after Mom stormed off upstairs after telling me I was too hard on her.

“I see a baby in your future,” she’d said, “I think it’s a boy. It has green eyes and blonde hair.”

…

I begged her to stop.

In all fairness, when she asked why, my response did include the phrases “You aren’t a prophet” and “you’re talking out of your ass.”

But, I tried to explain to her how much that hurt. Just like it hurt when she was intent on making a baby blanket for us while we were trying -  A baby blanket that has since been given away to a niece.

There won’t be a child that looks like Dan and me.

That’s the thing we’ve had to accept.

…Did I mention that the family is getting pizza tonight?

Day 224

I recently discovered the TV show Supernatural.

Now, I haven’t been living under a rock for the past ten years. I knew it existed. I just had no particular desire to check it out. At some point I’d caught a bit of the first season and decided that it was another monster-of-the-week that I could do without. My copious forays into the fan fic of various fandoms frequently brought up Supernatural stories written by authors that I knew were no slouches, but the vague interest never really coalesced.

Then it happened. That day is fogged by the distance of time, but as memory serves, my beloved husband remarked on the way into the kitchen, “Hey, I had Supernatural playing while I was re-tiling the backsplash. It was actually pretty good.”

Quick as a bunny, I hopped onto Wikipedia to get the down-low. My nose twitched over some of the world-building but even through the veil of text and grumbling over the fact that they were GETTING IT WRONG I knew which character was going to hold my attention should I start watching.

I mean… a Constantine-Look-A-Like Angel Sidekick? Please. Does anything else need to be said?

Roughly 4 weeks, 2 complete seasons, 40 fan fiction stories and easily 30 episodes picked around for interest later – I was flying high on the glory of a new fandom to immerse myself in.

Now, the last year has been a rough one for our household. Some dreams have been lost. We’ve been fighting tooth and nail to make others happen. As a result, I’ve been actively looking for things to provide a little extra …happiness... for me and my husband.

So with the sad memory of having to miss the well-anticipated Star Trek convention fresh in my mind, I started poking around for Supernatural conventions.

Ah, the ecstasy of finding that there was a whole run of them going on, and one not even three hours away from us!

Ah, the agony of realizing it was already sold out.

Ah, the renewed joy of finding a Facebook group where extra tickets were being sold off!

Being a rational, even-keeled woman, I put my name on the list for the next available tickets and waited to see what would happen. God would be the advocate of whether this expense (mitigated to a day-trip though it w as) would be a good idea in the middle of our finance challenges.

If it went through, lovely. If not? Not meant to be.

In the meantime, however, it couldn’t hurt anyone if I looked through Ebay for certain Cosplay components….

As luck would have it, tickets became available. I chortled as I messaged back the seller on Facebook and promised payment by the end of the day. Then I casually checked the calendar for other events I might have going. A year ago, one could have found a stretch 13 months long with nothing planned for my husband or I. But luck recently reconnected us with some friends, and through them we’ve met other friends, and now I knew there were at least two childrens’ birthdays on the horizon.

One of which, as cruel fate would have it, lay right on the day of the convention.

Adorable three year old who has dragged my husband off in a death grip and held him in the thralls of play for hours at a time….much to the amusement of myself and the girl’s parents…

Or a crowd of people, hyper, creative, and thrilled to be a part of something bigger.

Friends who have been supporting me through the bad news of learning I’d never have a child of my own, provided written references to the adoption agency to tell them I’d be a good mom…

Or getting an autograph from an actor who seems to be some much fun that you just ache to be a part of the creativity and excitement he’s putting off.

…Such great fun.

The contest wasn’t a hard one. And, I don’t think it’s any great credit to me that I decided to forgo the convention to spend time with friends who care about me.

However, it’s not the choice that brought me back to contemplative lip chewing days later. It’s what went through my head when I realized that there was a conflict and that my one opportunity to go to this convention was just not going to happen. 

The thought was: “Ah well. I’m such a fat idiot, it’s probably for the best anyway.”

It was for the best because I am certain that I, even if I got all the tickets and opportunities I wanted, would be on the verge of tears walking into that convention hall.

Because every brilliant Cosplayer would make me ache because I was never going to get to shine like that, have fun like that.

Even I know there is nothing admirable about a sausage in a trench coat.

Every second of a posed photo op with Misha, Jared or Jensen, would have my  heart curled into a tight ball inside my chest, hyperaware and shaking.

Because even if they were the nicest, sweetest, guys in the universe, someone who looked like me, who was shy like me, could only come across as a fat, non-verbal Becky Rosen to them  in  the maximum of 60 seconds of time I’m sure we’d interact.

Poor guys. This fatty is paying money. Act like you want to have something to do with her so we can snap the picture.

How messed up is that??!! 

My self-worth… isn’t derived from the opinion of strangers, even cool ones. It really isn’t.

But it certainly isn’t in that good a shape to take that sort of hit – even if it’s only imagined.

Now, being a reasonable woman, I am very much aware that this isn’t the healthiest mindset. To worry about how you are perceived by others is natural. To be in tears over it, probably needs to get fixed up.

And bloody well better be fixed up before you are raising a child.

Though, it’s not like I don’t know I have strengths. I do. It’s not like there aren’t things I like very much about myself. There are.

But, unfortunately, when it comes to my own jaded view, sometimes I have a hard time seeing those traits through the massive layer of fat that seems to be blocking my view.

I am not who I want to be. In a hundred little ways, some physical, many many more emotional and intellectual.

But… the physical one hits hardest because it’s what the outside world sees and judges me on. I’ve read enough comments sections to know that. And, if I can just feel comfortable in my own skin, perhaps all the other things I want to be will be easier to grab a hold of.

So, I decided to embark on what I’m now dubbing the Meeting Misha Collins journey extravaganza. For the next 224 days I will document the oh-so-horribly exciting journey of one Jaime towards the theoretical attendance of the last “Creation Entertainment’s Salute to Supernatural Convention “ in Nevada.

Can she lose 48lb before March 12^th so that she can strut her stuff in Cosplay, shamelessly squee over the boys (especially Misha Collins), and otherwise say “YES, I have a groove, baby. My sexy phone voice totally matches my hospital slipper wearing feet!”

 Notice I’m saying “could” and not “will”. Yes, darlings, I’m afraid that this is an entirely hypothetical event as I live way too far from Nevada and adoption is way too expensive to allow for this to be in the budget.

But, even if I can’t attend, at least I’ll know that I could have.

And I wouldn’t have been miserable while doing so.

So, there you have it.

Game on!