Sunday

Some days, I sit down to write, and I think, this is the wrong stuff to put here. This blog is supposed to be about something. About weight loss or something like that. But I think... I don't know, I guess that for me, weight loss is about 10% what you actually do and 90% what you learn not to do. And at the end of the day, that's all behavioral modification, and your ability to do that is all about consistent effort... which in turn is all about the rest of your life.

It's a sunny afternoon, Michael's asleep, my son is at his father's, and I'm cleaning the kitchen. Or I'm supposed to be, anyway. I got derailed by thinking too much, as usual. And missing my mother. It's been 8 months, and I suppose that the grief has lost its immediacy. But it's like a wound that scabs over but still hurts all the time. I begin to think that there's no end to this. I can't talk about it, and I can't stop feeling it. It seems to be one of those things that is a marker, after this thing, you will never be the same. It's like having children... it's impossible to understand really what it's like to have kids until you do, and then there's no going back; your understanding of life is different forever. (Yes, I know, Circle of Life; I'm one second from humming Lion King songs.)

And I think, as I do so much these days, about where I am and what's next. About getting to some different place, where I'm not just replaying the same choices over and over again, where something actually changes. I was reading this on Escape from Obesity this morning... and, yeah, I can relate to missing the "happy" binging, to when food, a day of food, was a real source of pleasure. It's not anymore... but there's a part of me that wishes that it still was. Or, more accurately, that there was something that gave me the simple kind of pleasure that I used to be able to get by sitting down with high-carb foods and a good book and just letting the world go away. And, yes, I'm ashamed, in a way, to say that. I have different pleasures now, but it doesn't mean that I miss the old simple ones. Everything these days seems complicated and full of thought and just not easy.

Everything is ok. But some days, I just feel so profoundly tired, tired to the core, and I want to go back to a time when life seemer simpler and the choices less limited.