Yeah yeah yeah

I am not feeling good about myself lately.  I feel fat and tired and old; the 20 pounds I have gained in the nearly two years since Elle's birth are not good for me either physically or mentally.  (Also, I'm short.  Short people can't gain 20 pounds with grace.  We get very round, very fast.)

I have noticed that I carry myself differently.  That I interact with people differently.  I am not happy in my own skin right now, and that leads to a lot of negative things.  It's a horrible Catch 22.

There's no question that I need to do something about it (I can't afford an entirely new wardrobe, for one thing), but today, as I tried to force myself to stand up straight instead of slumping, I had one of those moments where my brain was full of dislike for my body.  FULL of it.  It was just a really horrible self-bashing moment.  At the end of a long string of thoughts hating on myself, I thought "And Elle deserves a mother who's not a horrible cow!"

(This gives you an idea of what I say to myself in my own head sometimes.  It is not pretty.  It is not healthy.)

But as soon as that mean, nasty, self-hating thought went through my head, it was followed by another:  Elle could care less what I look like.

That thought stuck with me all day.

She could care less.  She doesn't care if I have fat rolls, or my skin needs a chemical peel, or my roots are showing.  She doesn't care that I have one pair of jeans left I can get into, and they aren't especially comfortable.  She doesn't care that I probably need to size up on my bras.  She could care less how I feel about my body.

To Elle, I am beautiful.  I am her mom.  I am the arms that hold her.  I am the hands that wash her face.  I'm the chin she tucks her head underneath as we read books before bedtime.  All that matters to her is that I'm there, every day, doing what I need to do.

I need to lose the 20 pounds, yes.  Elle deserves a healthy mom.  But I also, perhaps, need to stop letting the negative run the show, and give myself a little bit of a break.

I need to remember that the truly important voice is not the nasty one in my head.  It's the little one shouting "Squirrels!  Where are you?" as she runs ahead of me.

Healthy living

There are many wonderful things about being a parent, but "ability to get to the gym" is not one of them. At least not for a single parent.

I am a short person, and I've never been mistaken for a model. About 11-12 years ago, I lost 30 pounds, and kept it off. While this weight loss never got me to what the charts tell me I should weigh, I was at a place where I was healthy, where clothes fit well, and where I was pretty happy with my body. I'd gain a few pounds here or there, sure, but I was always able to pull it back. I think the most I ever gained was nine pounds, so I never really got out of hand. I was able to do this largely because I worked out. I like food-- I'm never going to be someone who picks at her food, or forgets to eat-- so you have to make up for it with activity.

I didn't gain a ton of weight during my pregnancy-- again, because I exercised. I was going to the gym until a week or two before Elle was born, I think. My workouts changed, sure, but I was still exercising. There were many benefits to the exercising besides the weight control-- I really didn't like the feeling that I had lost control over my body, so working out calmed that anxiety as well.

In the 18 months since Elle joined the world, though, there has been no gym. I dropped my Y membership; didn't make sense financially. I get to yoga once in a blue moon-- I can't afford a sitter every time I want to go to a class, and while there's a weekly lunchtime yoga near my office, I can't get there every week. I am using the exercise bike in my basement when I can, but it's not the same as a good, intense half-hour on the elliptical.

I have gained back 25 pounds. That is completely unacceptable. Also, I can't afford a whole new wardrobe, thanks.

So I'm back on the healthy eating train. Last time I did it through that national chain (named with two words, both of which start with W and the second word is "watchers") and found it pretty straightforward. So I rejoined. "Rejoined," for me, now means I went, "signed up," bought the reference materials I'm going to need, and won't go back. Weekly meetings are nice, but see above re: yoga-- not going to hire a sitter, can't go during work. I also can't afford the weekly fees right now.

This is actually OK for me. When I'm motivated, I'm motivated. Weekly meetings don't do anything to help me in either direction. The weekly weighing in is, actually, helpful, but I'll manage.

I've been on it just over a week now, and so far so good. It's a straightforward plan: eat whole foods, eat lots of fruit and veggies and lean proteins, and make sure you eat enough healthy fats to keep things right. (It's counterintuitive, but if you don't eat any fat at all, it's not good for you AND it slows down your weight loss.) There have been a number of changes since I was on the plan all those years ago, so it's definitely an adjustment. For instance, what do you MEAN I can have all the fruit I want? Do you know how many bananas I can (theoretically) eat in one day?

Really, you can have anything you want; you just have to fit it into your day. Do I want that bag of chips, or can I have a banana AND peanut butter AND some crackers? I'm going to choose volume over specific foods, usually, which is why this works for me. And at least one day I've actually had trouble meeting that minimum food target. Nice problem to have. (I had a few graham crackers and they were heavenly.)

I do have to be careful not to eat Elle's leftovers (a bad habit that was probably responsible for at least a few of the 25 pounds) and it's not like the old days where I could just keep tempting foods out of the house entirely; there's another little person around who likes a graham cracker after dinner once in a while. But again, if I'm motivated, it doesn't seem to be a big issue. And I'm motivated. Elle deserves a mom who feels good about herself and is healthy. I deserve to be healthy and feel good about myself. And I know I can do it-- I did it before.

I'm also applying for additional life insurance (Note: I do have a good amount of life insurance already, through work, but I want a term policy that's independent of my job, and big enough that my total coverage is sufficient to take care of Elle if, God forbid, it's necessary) and it's cheaper the less you weigh.

So happy new year! May it be healthy and happy and wonderful for you and yours. I'm going to go have some popcorn now, because I can.

Free Time

I e-mailed someone (who had posted to a local list saying she wanted babysitting jobs) about possibly babysitting; no response. How is it so hard to respond to my e-mail and say "Sorry, not interested"? Young people these days. Get off my lawn!

---

Getting exercise into my schedule is (as I've mentioned before) not as easy as it used to be. Sure, I could still go to the Y, but I leave Elle for 11-12 hours a day, five days a week, and I'm really not in the mood to add several hours a week on top of that. So I've gotten more creative. I use my much-loathed exercise bike, I've started the 200 situps challenge, and there's a yoga class once a week near my office. (I don't get to the class every week, not by a long shot, but an occasional yoga class is better than no yoga at all.)

The problem is-- and there's always a problem, isn't there?-- that the only time I reliably have to myself is after Elle goes to bed. Most of the time she's a good, sound sleeper, so when she falls asleep by 8 p.m.-ish, I have the evening.

Which sounds luxurious, doesn't it? No other kids to wrangle, no spouse to talk to. Just me.

Except it's me and all the dinner dishes, and then getting food ready for the next day. It's me and the bills. It's me and checking my e-mail. It's me and work I brought home. It's me and exercise.

Given that I should really be IN bed and on the way to sleep by 10 p.m. at the very latest, which therefore includes pre-bedtime ablutions, that's really not much time.

And it doesn't exactly work in any down time.

I was feeling really whiny about this the other day-- I need "me time," and always have. Being a parent, though, means that "me time" is last on a long list of things that matter. My time away from work, right now, is important as it relates to parenting Elle-- not as it relates to me having time to laze about on the sofa eating Cheetos and watching Law and Order reruns.

But sometimes, couch time is really appealing, and much-missed. Gym time, too. (I really loved the gym.)

I've been turning this over in my head the past few days, and what it's really come down to is that yeah, right now I have little or no time to myself. But given how quickly Elle's first year of life has gone (and it has gone so quickly that I can hardly believe it), the next 17 or whatever years will probably go by just as fast, if not more quickly. (And once she's older, even when she's still living at home, my time will of course be more flexible.)

In other words, the fact that right now I can't be as lazy as I'd like to be is just not a big deal. It's the blink of an eye, and she'll be out of the house before I know it, and I'll desperately miss the days where I was necessary. I'm pretty confident bad TV will still be around in 20 years, after all.

I think the same thing, really, about the various difficult developmental phases we've gone through-- yeah, it's awful for a day or a week or even, in some cases, a month. But then it ends and they're on to the next thing.

(NOT looking forward to the seemingly endless resentful teenager phase, but I'll cross that bridge when I have to.)

So yeah. By the time I finish up my nightly tasks and exercise it's well after 9. If I only get twenty minutes or so to myself, whatever. It's more than nothing, right? And my little girl is upstairs sleeping, and I can see her little dark head on the video monitor any time I want to. She is safe and sound, and her food for the next day is waiting for her, and her mom is in the basement hoping that an annoying exercise bike will keep her healthy enough to be around for many years to come.

My whiny need for down time is a first world problem, indeed. And I wouldn't trade Elle for all the bad cable TV in the world.

Now, if you'll excuse me, the exercise bike is calling.

I would give you the moon

We’ve been taking swimming lessons at the local Y. (“Swimming lessons” consists, at this age, of splashing around singing. Elle loves it, and so do I.) I’ve enrolled us in both summer sessions, and just went to enroll in the fall session.

The price for fall went up by about thirty bucks. Thirty bucks. That's half again as much as it was. The session’s a couple of weeks longer, yes, but not that much longer.

I am not poor by any means, but I hate the way I feel when something like this comes along: there’s a moment of “oh, crap” and I have to think quickly about whether or not I can swing it. This is important to me, so I make it work.

But I wish I didn’t have to think about it. I wish thirty bucks wasn’t a big deal. I wish I could give Elle everything and anything, because she deserves it.

Quality parenting does not equal "giving the kid everything they want." I know that. But I also know that kids are smart, and if their parent(s) is constantly worrying about money, they figure that out early. I wish Elle wasn't going to have to figure that one out.

Downward what?

When I went back to work after my leave, I was skinnier than I'd been in years. I was still kind of strung out in terms of lack of consistent, predictable sleep, and was still breastfe.eding; I could eat pretty much anything, any time, and it didn't matter. Nervous energy and providing food for Elle-- however minimal my production was-- apparently took care of my weight issues.

Right about 12 weeks, when I went back to work, was when Elle's sleep schedule normalized (mostly) and when I stopped breastfe.eding (not by my choice; the girls just gave up the ghost, and I wasn't in a position to work hard at upping my supply). And my weight issue holiday was over.

Let's just say that I am no longer skinnier than I've been in years.

I'm not at my heaviest weight ever, but... I'm far closer to that than I'd like, and a good 15 pounds heavier than my usual resting point has been. A desk job + stress eating + no longer able to get to the gym have all combined to put me at a weight where I'm simply not comfortable any more. Not to mention I'm going to need to buy new clothes if I don't lose weight now, and that's just not in my budget.

I realized I've become really out of touch with my body. Pre-Elle, and even during pregnancy, I was far from a gym rat. But I was at the gym at least a couple of times a week, regularly, and I liked it. During pregnancy, I was a regular at my weekly prenatal yoga. I walked regularly with my little Vertigo Dog for many years, summer and winter. So while I'd never make the cover of Shape, I was certainly healthy and active.

Now, even when the weather's good, I have so little time when I get home from work that I don't necessarily want to spend it strapping Elle into a stroller. I do sometimes, but in the 1.5 - 2 hours I have when we get home at night before Elle's bedtime, she needs dinner and a bath, and we both need a little time to decompress. (And play. Always play.) And then when she goes to bed, I have another 1.5 - 2 hours in which to do all the things around the house I need to do, including cooking and cleaning up the kitchen. Plus, Mama needs a little time to screw around on the internet, go through her mail, and maybe (SHOCK!) read a book or watch a movie.

There's precious little time in there to exercise.

I did mention that I have an exercise bike now, and I am trying to use it. I just don't like the bike very much, so it's not motivating. (If it was an elliptical, now...) I can watch a movie while I cycle, so that's something.

The other night I decided to pull out an old yoga tape. Yes, tape. Not even a DVD! After ten minutes, I was completely exhausted, and went upstairs feeling like a complete failure.

My goal now is to up the yoga time by ten minutes each practice until I can do the entire tape (which I believe is about 40 minutes). Once I can do the entire tape, my goal (of course) is to simply improve in my practice each time. Hopefully, if I alternate the bike and yoga, I'll help both my heart and my flexibility... not to mention my state of mind.

Ten minutes. Seriously. Pathetic.

Travel, not leisure

I was out of town on business last week. It was my first time away from Elle overnight, and I went two full days without seeing her; I left for the airport before she got up on day one, and I got home after she went to bed on day two. I had great support from friends on the front and back end, and she stayed overnight with her regular sitter.

For her, really, it probably didn't feel all that different. When I came into her room the morning after I got home, she was as happy to see me as she usually is in the morning-- no more, no less.

She is a happy, adaptable little thing, who is clearly secure in the fact that she's loved and well-cared-for. That's exactly what I want her to be, so I ignore the intermittent pangs that I would like her to be slightly more dramatically attached to me. That's just feeding my ego; that's not what's best for Elle.

At the end of the day, I'm her mom. And it's far more important that I raise a happy, social, well-adjusted child than it is to raise one that feeds some occasional need for validation.

**

While I was out of town, I was able to use the little hotel gym. It was decently set up, and featured my favorite exercise machine of all time: the elliptical.

I can't possibly explain how much I love the elliptical. I love it so much that I should be skinny and muscled. Sadly, I can no longer get to the Y (yes, they have childcare, but I leave Elle for 11+ hours each day; I'm not going to get her home and turn around and leave her with yet another sitter several times a week), and there's nowhere in my house that has high enough ceilings to accommodate an elliptical.

I did recently get a used exercise bike, and have been doing at least a few miles on that 4-5 times a week. This is significantly better than nothing at all, but not nearly as much fun as the dearly beloved elliptical. (And I'm watching season three of Slings and Arrows while I'm on the bike, a Canadian series that has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves. Highly recommended if you like theatre, Shakespeare, or Shakespeare and theatre.) So getting to exercise at the hotel was, believe it or not, a huge treat-- I even gave up additional sleep to go exercise that second morning, before I showered and checked out of the hotel.

It felt wonderful.

There are two questions I get, fairly often, as a single parent. One is if this is what I expected, or if it's easier or harder. The other (often from other single women) is asking what I miss about my single non-parent days.

I answer, honestly, that there's very little I miss. The two things do I miss are:

1. Being able to go to the gym
and
2. Being able to stay in my pajamas all day and sit on the couch and watch movies and be lazylazylazy.

That's not really much to miss, is it?

The nice part about it is that both those activities can return one day. Someday, Elle and I will do pajama days together (I hope we have the same taste in bad movies!). And someday, I'll get back to the gym on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of other stuff to do.

I swear I'm not being whiny. OK, yes I am.

You know, if (when, probably) I stop trying to get pregnant, the first thing I'm going to do is have an enormous diet Coke. ENORMOUS.

Fizzy water + juice is much healthier, but oh, oh, OH so boring.