Does This Make My Butt Look Big?

Does This Make My Butt Look Big?

by | Art, Food, Life | 5 comments

Chocolate is calling to me. Not the good kind, the 88% full of anti-oxidents it’s-so-damn-healthy-you-can-eat-it-for-breakfast-and-you’re-happy-with-just-a-smidge-of-a-bit kind. Oh nooooooo, I’m hearing the seductive call of it’s evil twin, a well known brand of milk chocolate that tastes like…well, it tastes like my childhood. All sweet and sugary. Laden with fat and chock full of stuff that makes my inner nutritionist cringe. But that doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter at all because even if it glowed in the dark from radiation (and it might) what the hell…I WANT IT! And I WANT. IT. NOW!!!

I could eat a one pound bar All. By. Myself. In fact, I would go all ferrel and snap and snarl and growl threateningly at anyone who even looked at it, much less tried to take it away.

And after that, I would round out the day with potato chips.  Salty yummy greasy crunchy chips. YAY!!! Let’s hear it for–

For what? Am I hungry? Umm…no. I just had lunch. A nice chicken tostada with extra guac and greens. To be perfectly honest (which I rarely am when it comes to food) there’s NO vacant real estate in belly land right now.

Then why do I feel the need to eat? Especially something loaded with sugar and fat and salt? Stuff that’s no good for me. That makes me hyper and tired all at the same time. That makes me look like I come from a long line of Sumo wrestlers.

WHY?

I’ll tell you why in a couple of minutes. But first go read a post I wrote back in February. Because even though I’m sounding desperate right now, I’m not. But I was back then.

Before I met AnaLisa Rutstein, MA CHHC. Before I took part in her Jump Start Program. Which was NOT a diet but six 45 minute one-on-one phone calls exploring and clarifying my issues around food. With handout and e-mail support.

That’s a whole lot of AHA! moments, believe me. A whole lot of getting back in touch with myself. Slowing down. Breathing. Meditating. Understanding the emotional triggers that send me scurrying to that bag of chips.

My emotional triggers? The biggest one…stress. But not stress like the car broke down or I had words with DearDaughter. The top hit on my personal Stress O’Meter…creativity. Or the insecurities I have surrounding my creative endeavors.

WTF??? Whack upside the head. My whole life is one big creative endeavor. Painting. Writing. Starting a biz…. No wonder my ass is so big.

Does this mean if I want to wear those skinny jeans again I’m going to chuck it all, get a 9-5 somewhere, a boring 9-5, and call it a day?

No. It means when I’m sitting at the computer searching for the exquisite turn of phrase, the perfect thing to say and I find myself getting all jittery and jumpy as a tweaker and I NEED to stuff my face with the bad bad bad bad BAD stuff so I don’t have to THINK…it means I now have the tools to deal with that. Tools like BEING AWARE of what I’m doing. And why I’m doing it. So I can redirect myself by breathing, by acknowledging the emotion, by any number of little MINDFUL diversions.

The chocolate up there? The stuff I really, really wanted? I had some. But not a lot. It was a choice I made consciously. I didn’t have nearly as much as I would’ve six weeks ago. And honestly? If you’d come by and wanted some, that’d be okay. I wouldn’t  have gone all ferrel on you.

I might’ve even shared.

Change of subject: Whoo-hoo! Over here! Be sure to check out my new FaceBook page. There’s art. New art every day. Imagine that!!! And if you click the ‘like’ button at the top of the FB page I will like you forever and be your BFF. Because I likes me those ‘likes’. So go ahead, do that RIGHT NOW because you wouldn’t want to forget or anything, right?

 

 

 

With a Wimper

With a Wimper

by | Family, Kids, Life | 8 comments

Not with a bang.

It’s official. The docs are signed, the keys returned. The war-that-was-never-ever-declared-a-war-by-Congress is OVER.

I was on my way to work, driving down a steep country road when I heard the news. And that’s all it was, just news. Blah blah blah a story. Followed by other stories that I didn’t pay attention to because I was too busy thinking about the war that wasn’t a war.

The non-war that my son returned to three times over the course of four years. But he was one of the lucky ones. He survived. And any injuries he received were not important enough to tell his mother about.

Unlike the 4,487 American service members who didn’t survive. And the 32,226 who were injured severely enough for their moms to be told. And the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis either killed, injured or displaced. But they don’t count because, well, we don’t want to think about them.

It’s over. Maybe. Sort of.

We’ll see….

The question is, will anybody outside of the military even know? Because we, as a people, have been sheltered from the facts. The tone was set by our former leader (he-who-must-not-be-named) when he told us to show our patriotism and go shopping. Don’t worry our pretty little heads about what was going on over there. And then he told the bad guys to ‘bring it on.’

AARUGH!!!

Okay. Step back now. Breathe deep. Much better….

When I was formulating the idea for this blog I told myself it would be non-political. It’s about art and life and everything in between, right? Painting, not politics. But for a long time this war WAS my life, affecting everything I did. It’s why I stopped painting. Why I moved my elderly mother into my studio, ensuring I wouldn’t have a place to paint if I wanted to. Because if I couldn’t save my son, maybe I could save my mom. It’s why I quit my galleries and just let my career turn to dust. You can read about some of that here, written during deployment #2.

It’s why I was a crazy woman–absolutely bat shit crazy— for four plus years. Because being consumed by fear and rage and anticipatory grief will do that to a person. So will going to funerals of young men who are called heros for being unlucky enough to be on the wrong end of a bullet or a bomb. And writing condolence letters to the unlucky moms. Hundreds of  letters, until one day I woke up–not that I ever slept–and said, “I CAN NOT. DO THIS. ANYMORE.”

And so I pulled back and allowed some semblance of normalcy to creep into my life. I never for one minute stopped caring. But I had to start living my life again. My son was home. He was safe. For me, it was time to move on.

And now, this war-that-was-never-a-war is over.

But only for some. Because for those who lived it or died in it or came home missing something, or for those whose loved one is never coming home…this war-that-was-never-a-war won’t be over for a long, long time.