(Preserving the Open Diary history.)
okay. od opened an auto-dave draft of my last entry, so i had to make sure i didn’t write over that before i started this entry.
i am all sorts of messed up in the head right now.
first, my son is doing fine. he was a squad leader for the first couple of weeks, and then he wasn’t the squad leader anymore, but we’ve gotten some letters from him, and he seems to be doing well. the first letter he sent, made me cry. i am so proud of him…he says that many of the other guys write every night and he just doesn’t feel the need because i raised him to be strong, and that is certainly true. so, we shouldn’t take his lack of constant communication for lack of care, but for self-sufficiency. that made me very, very proud because that’s exactly how i take it. he is more verbal with his girlfriend because she needs to hear his words more than we do. his staying with us before he left was good for everyone. he says he feels closer to us than he has in years and i also feel that way. it’s alternately easy and hard to have grown-up children. i am happy that he is doing well and is self-sufficient. i know i have done my job…he credits me with perhaps more than i deserve, but i did raise him and i feel accomplished that he is a good person, for the most part.
another thing that happened about a week after my son left is that i started a new diet/eating program. i had been saying to myself for a long time that i wanted to do something structured…and i was getting flyers all the time for the center on metabolic studies here on campus, but they always talked about using our state ppo insurance health benefit for this, and i have the hmo health insurance, not the ppo one. so i said to myself, "the day i see my insurance offered on that program, i am going for it"…and it happened later the same week my son left. i called, they had an "orientation" session, and then i contacted my doctor to see what he thought. he asked me if this was something i really wanted to do, and i told him it was. he is also a friend, so he helped make sure i had all the papers signed, approvals done and such in time to be able to start the program the next week. my insurance is paying for everything except for the actual food…they give you everything you are supposed to eat.
so, this week will be my fourth week on this program. i’ve done well as far as the numbers on the scale go. not like, jaw-dropping good, but well enough…manageable even.
the thing that’s messing me up is all the mind-fucking that goes along with body image, weight loss, health. there’s so much negative connotation for me with this. on one hand, i don’t want to end up like my mom, and that’s the major reason i am doing this. another part of me likes who i am and says "fuck your preconceived notions of beauty". this all came about because my fire group got a "community member-at-large" and asked that person to talk to people in the larger community and see what those people thought; their perceptions of the fire group. what came back was a whole lot of ugliness. she said some people said we were only a group of fat, old, ugly members anymore, and some of them even said they had brought people to our event last year who ended up making fun of the people on the stage. part of me thinks these people are small-minded, but it still annoys me. and i’ve thought if some of us should step back because we are hurting the group. the issue is that the pretty people don’t participate anymore, for a variety of reasons. if it wasn’t for us old, ugly folks, some of the time, we wouldn’t have enough people to keep the show rolling, keep the gigs going, etc.
but this whole thing also plays into this whole complicated thing concerning my relationship with food. it’s all very twisted and dysfunctional, and it’s definitely making me think a lot about my motivations, the things that make me eat, and how i react to things. now, i am out of time…i will have to finish this later.
peace.
