Did someone mention fuschia?

From Alice Munro

A house is all right for a man to work in. He brings his work into the house, a place is cleared for it; the house rearragnes itself as bet it can around him. Everybody recognizes that his work exists. He is not expected to answer the telephone, to find things that are lost, to see why the children are crying, or feed the cat. he can shut his door. Imagine (I said) a mother shutting her door, and the children knowing she is behind it; why, the very thought of it is outrageous to them. A woman who sits staring into space, into a country that is not her husband's or her children's is likewise known to be an offence against nature. So a house is not the same for a woman. She is not someone who walks in into the house, to make use of it, and will walk out again. She is the house, there is no separation possible.

Insurance

I know a woman who has loads of pep, is truly hysterical--gifted in funny--who lost three of her four children: one to fire, one to murder, and the third to cancer. Inbetween the loss of the first child and the second was the death of her beloved husband--just a month after, as a matter of fact. And I realize that there is no "insurance" on life. Like someone close to me lost a child... what are the odds, I think, that I will too? This haunts me more than most parents, I think, because my best friend's child died a year ago this past 18th, in an ATV accident with another 11-year-old. Now she spends a lot of time with the other parents, drinking. And I don't think these people are good for her but I have no way to prove it. It is a sorrow without yield, an immovable object. Nothing I say makes any difference. As I watch her marriage finally crumble into dust, I grow weary of wondering about her future. The mess of the now is enough to discourage any speculation.

I say this because I realized today that the drink is the key to their time together. This other poisoned ruined couple both in marriages with a cheating spouse isn't a fix, and neither am I.

I say this because I have nowhere else to place these thoughts but outside of myself, and look at them. It feels better to somewhere, somehow, some way, have someone else read them. I feel like a 19th century poet dashing off his lines, watching the ink dry and handing to a friend in the candlelight.

This has nothing to do with weight loss, does it? It does, in a way. This Sisyphean burden, the unbelievable grief of a parent, is not easy to assess. I have spent the better part of thirteen months sweeping up after my friend, and I don't think she can be helped.

I have seen pictures from the past, and said to my daughter, "Gosh, was I fat!" only to look at her and say, 'You're going to tell me I'm still that fat, aren't you?" And she just giggles. Well, it was funny, and if you can't embrace your children seeing through your delusions, then you are missing a treat.

I say all of this this because I realized--since my last post--that the whole of myself needs fixing, not just my weight. Diagnosed with hypersleeping, I realize now that I was eating to stay awake, and I was eating to cope, and I was eating to eat. And now, after visiting the doctor and a sleep expert, I had an epiphany.

I am not okay.

It came when I had finished talking to the psychiatrist my medical doctor sent me to because he is a sleep expert. I filled out the questionnaire, ten pages long. I had been dealing with depression so crippling that I could not function some days. I lost interest in everything. The balding man with the quiet voice assessed all this and said, "You are not okay."

I lost track of everything he said after that until we addressed my sleep medication and the necessity to change it.

Oh. I said. What a liberation to know that I had been carrying on all this time thinking that I was okay, at least on some level. That things were alright. But how can they be when my body is so out of whack? When I don't like what I see for years yet cannot seem to change it?

So for now, I know, I am not okay. And the pressure is off. I decided that for now, it is good enough to just get a bit over a half-hour of exercise in daily, and leave it at that. Once I realized why I was eating, the obsessive need to eat all day trailed off.

Here's hoping--and I can say with some confidence--that I will find my way. But for right now, it's enough just not to be okay.