Same old same old

Same passive aggressive mother, same reversion to emotional eating...everything is as per usual. I've given up on buying a house next year. I won't survive that long. I will either eat myself to 300 pounds or I will punch my mother in the face and be kicked out.

We're going to sell off the appliances we have in storage that have been accumulated for a new house and use the money to sell the car. My dad's cousin owns a store with a one bedroom apartment over it; right now that sounds great to me. I'll deal with a sofa bed to be free of this place.

I'm starting a nervous breakdown pool

It's for my mother, but hey, why not me, too? My brother left for Iraq either today or yesterday, and she's not happy. (According to my sister, he didn't actually leave for Iraq, he's got a layover somewhere for two weeks. But I guess it's all the same to my mom, and for that I can't blame her.) I'm trying to be sympathetic--hell, I can even be empathetic, I have two sons and I have been trying very hard not to imagine what it would be like to see one or both of them and know that it may very well be the last time I'll see them alive--but she's not making it easy. How can I be sympathetic to someone who tells me that me and my family are filthy and disgusting? Take it with a grain of salt. That has become my mantra.

I have gained at least five pounds since living with her, probably more. But that stops now. I will not let her make me revert to emotional eating--well, again, anyway.

Before my brother left, we had some pictures taken. I got them off my mom's camera and onto my computer and I am not at all happy with what I see. I look six months pregnant in all of them. The only decent one is one where I am posing with my siblings and I'm behind my sister. Here's one of the worse pictures. I'm the one in red.

I've never been particularly photogenic, but this just...ugh. (By the way, that's my sister holding my youngest, her husband behind her, and the back of my oldest's head.) I don't want to look like this any more. I think that from now on when I need a kick in the pants to get back on track I need to have someone take a candid picture of me.

I almost went to Taco Bell today. My mom was driving me crazy, my 25-year-old husband is having stomach pains because of her (onset of an ulcer?) and I was just done. I couldn't even fathom the idea of being there another day, let alone another six months. I was actually counting the money in my purse to see what I could get, and I just said, "Stop. This is not what you want." So far it's worked. And I'm right, it isn't what I want.

You know when they say that you have to lose weight for yourself first? I honestly think that if my main reason for losing weight was for myself--and especially if it was noncosmetic--I wouldn't do it. "Health" is kind of a nebulous idea at my age. I feel fine. I can walk up a flight of stairs just fine, I can ride a bike, I can do pretty much whatever I want to do. I will be drenched in sweat, but I can do it. To me it's not enough to say "I want to get healthy," even though I have a strong family history of diabetes. There is no diabetes meter that I can see my risk go down with my weight. (I'm sure there's a calculator of some sort online, but you know what I mean.) So I need something stronger than that. To be honest, most of the time my strongest reason for losing weight is revenge. Well, maybe revenge isn't the best word. I want to show people that I can overcome obstacles. That I am not a fat lazy slob. That I can be pretty. I want to show them that they were wrong about me. Right now I want to show my mother that she cannot break me. She cannot drag me down with her, and she will not make me turn to fast food for comfort because she's taken her bad day out on me.

OK. Enough of that. I can hear the swelling of the violins as I shake my fist in the air. I think I've griped enough for today. I'm going to go look at real estate online and dream.

Hurry hurry hurry

Just a quick post before the library closes...that's where I get to go to use the internet now. Yay fun, especially considering that during the week DH doesn't get home from work until they're ready to close, so if I come down I get to sit outside and feel like I'm a thief. Anyway.

Dieting is...eh. Not good, not bad, just pretty much not anything. I'm trying to pay more attention to my eating and do the stuff I've learned from the Beck Diet Solution--I have my card with reasons that I want to lose weight that I read twice a day and before meals, I eat sitting down, and I have my diet picked out. Just slow going right now. But I'm still here, I swear! At this point it's looking like we may be able to get out by February. That would be nice.

Have to go...hope everyone out there is doing well, I don't have time to visit other journals today. I hope to be back soon.

Goodbye, blog

Well, not really. Catchy, though, right? The reason I say goodbye is that my mother's house has only--wait for it--dial-up internet. The horror. She is looking into getting satellite internet so that she can talk to my brother on Yahoo Messenger or something similar when he gets to Iraq. Since she lives in the country, she can't get cable under normal circumstances. DH works for the cable company, though, so he's trying to get them to pull some strings and install cable access out there. They're going to have to do it sooner or later--housing developments are springing up all around her house, and presumably they are going to want cable. The estimate is $7000, and I guess the cable company is now deciding if it's worth it to install. I will miss my cable internet, yes, but I do feel slightly vindicated. One of our neighbors has been stealing our WiFi and to him I say ha! Enjoy your last night of free internet, josh-PC, because tomorrow it goes bye-bye. Ha ha ha! And ha!

Eating is bleh. No real change. I made cheesecake cookies today and ate too many when they were first out, but that was because the first batch didn't come out very well and I was trying to get rid of them. Isn't that the stupidest reason to gorge on cookies? I did notice this morning that my pants weren't as tight when I put them on. That's a plus.

I really do need to get moving on the whole weight loss thing. The Beck Diet Solution is really helping me, but I haven't read anything on it in a week or so and I'm kind of stagnating.

Well, I have a lot to say about this move--our worst move ever, although I would never go so far as to say it was *the* worst move ever--but it will have to wait. I'm at the house to clean, and it is going very slo-o-o-o-wly. Our washer kicked a hole in the wall behind it, and I'm trying to fix it. It was able to kick a hole in the wall because it wasn't actual wallboard, and I really don't think a shoddy fix that inevitably broke when exposed to normal use should be my responsibility to fix, but I want my deposit back. So I'm fixing it. It's 10 PM and I wouldn't be surprised if I were here for another two or three hours. One nice thing about being at my mom's house, she gets home at 5 PM. I could always take her car and finish it tomorrow. In fact, I probably will, because I don't see how this is going to get done tonight.

The next six months are going to be terrible.

Well, my mom and I had a fight. Not physical or anything, just yelling.

A quick recap of the situation there: about a year and a half ago we went through some major financial difficulties that resulted in lots of bills that we were very close to not being able to pay. We had to move out of our first house, a house that I loved and still do. It was a very difficult time, and I am very paranoid about money now. Especially since we don't have any, and you should be paranoid about money if you're poor. So when the car died and we had no savings to pay for it (it couldn't have broken a month earlier when we did have savings, of course not) I made the decision that we needed to move in with my mom to avoid getting into a situation like we had before, where we very seriously were discussing bankruptcy. I don't want to do that again. We're moving this weekend and hope to have the money for the car by mid-August. Then we can focus on saving, paying bills, and maybe even buying another house. I asked her if that would be OK, and she agreed.

My sister lived with my mom and moved out not too long before our situation came up , and all I have heard the entire time we have been planning our move is "I hope it's not like when your sister was here. I can't take that again." "I hope you appreciate this more than your sister did." "I hope you keep this room cleaner than your sister did." It's not all about my sister, though. Some other memorable quotes? "If I decide that you're spending money on things that aren't necessary, I'm going to start charging you rent." And about us being there when she's trying to sell her house: "If the real estate agent comes to show the house, you guys need to leave. Take a walk or something." (To understand why this is so bad, my mom lives about ten miles out in the country. Off a major highway. There is no place to 'take a walk' unless I want to get hit by a car, and if the kids are sleeping, I'm not going to wake them up. Sorry, that's just how it is. If people can't make an appointment and expect to show up at a moment's notice, they have to get used to the idea that there may be people home.)

She's also told me that I have to buy groceries and clean, which, on paper doesn't sound so bad. The first one doesn't really bother me, my mom doesn't eat breakfast and buys her lunch so all I'd have to worry about is dinner. Most of the food I make can be served family style, one extra isn't a big deal. However, I have cleaned for my mom before and she expects the house to constantly be in show condition. As in, if the kids are playing with toys, run after them and pick up one toy as soon as they're done with it instead of waiting until they're done playing. Take people's plates from them as soon as they've taken the last bite of food off of it even if this means getting up from your own meal. Even if it means you have to eat cold food, you put the pots and pans from dinner in the dishwasher as soon as the food is out of them (if they're able to be put in the dishwasher, there is some sort of arbitrary system to what can and cannot go in the dishwasher that seems to be related to when she bought the items and how much she paid). Stuff like that.

I don't want to sound ungrateful that my mom is letting us move in for a few months. I am grateful. I am just tired of being taken for granted. I have yet to hear a thank you for loaning my mom/brother the money that could have let me avoid this whole situation. DH doesn't get thanked for helping my mom with the chores; in fact, she complains about him all the time and has been trying to get me to leave him even when I was pregnant with my oldest. I can remember an incident where she was driving me home from the hospital where I had been with preterm labor. I was going home to go on bedrest and she harped on me the entire way home about leaving him. Stress is good for the baby, right?

My mother is difficult to live with. At least two of my sisters agree with me on this. She is great when you're not living with her: easy to get along with, nice, etc. But when you're under the same roof she's a nightmare.

Where was I going with all this? Oh, yes. We were at her house Sunday. DH and I had been moving stuff up, and E was sitting at the table coloring with his cousin M. M knocked a napkin on the floor, no big deal. I saw it as I was loading and unloading the dishwasher. I didn't think it was important enough to interrupt that to go pick up a clean napkin. Oops.

My mom came in, saw the napkin on the floor, and started sniping about how this was just like when my sister was here, it was starting already, on and on and on. Over a napkin that a two-year-old knocked onto the floor. And not even my two-year-old. I snapped. I am so sick and tired of hearing how us moving in is a huge inconvenience. She constantly talks about wishing she could sell the house now, there's a lady who's going to come see it in November, wouldn't it be nice if she could sell it then, etc. I know, or hope, she doesn't mean it the way it comes across--I'll sell this thing without a care as to what you guys are going to do for shelter--but it still stings. So I had had it up to my eyeballs yesterday. When she started complaining, I started yelling about how I wasn't my sister and I was sick and tired of hearing about all this, it wasn't even something that my kid had done, etc. I was just done with it. We left.

On the way home, I kept telling DH "this is a huge mistake. This is a huge mistake, we should not be doing this." His argument was it's not a mistake if it's your only option. I think that you can be doing the only thing you see available to you and still be making a mistake. Sometimes that's just how things work out.

Sorry about the huge vent, hopefully no one thinks I'm an ungrateful brat. I just don't appreciate the attitude that we're doing this because we'd rather leech off my parents. To the contrary, I am very upset that I'm 24, married with 2 kids, and having to move in with my mom. I only hope that we can get this taken care of and get out of there ASAP.

To make this a post that's on topic with my blog, this didn't make me overeat. In fact, I believe I lost another pound. So there.

I am a weight loss turtle

Slow and steady wins the race and all. Since I last posted I've lost two pounds doing a whole lot of nothing. Well, eating slightly less. (If I didn't overeat at all it probably would have been down five or more pounds.) I've been reading this book called "The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person." It's actually working. For instance, and this is going to sound really stupid, it came as somewhat of a revelation to me that you don't always need to eat if you're hungry. If it's an hour to dinnertime or an hour since you last ate, you're probably not going to die. There's a lot about talking yourself through stuff like cravings. They will go away eventually, you don't need to give in to them. It's actually been helpful.

I mentioned in a previous post that I don't really eat emotionally anymore. I guess it's true that I don't eat out of anxiety or anger or whatever--not really--but I do eat out of boredom. Especially after the kids go to bed. After 8 PM, I don't really know what to do with myself. I think this is why I always need to have a project. It kind of makes me sad to think that my sense of self is so wrapped up in being a mother that I am at loose ends when there is not some immediate parenting to do. That's my biggest hurdle right now. After that? Laziness. Because I am nothing if not a couch potato.

It's a Numbers Game

I have been thinking over the past few days, weeks, whatever, about my grandfather. He died in January of 2002, at 78 years old. He died of a diabetes-related illness that could have been prevented if he had stayed on some sort of diet and exercised, even a little bit. My father and uncle also have diabetes--they have two brothers and two sisters who have so far escaped it. (I wonder how long it will stay that way.)

Anyway, my father is 48 and my uncle is 58. This makes me wonder--does that mean that my uncle has 20 years to live? And my dad only has 30? Does this mean that I am probably looking at 50-some years? It sounds like a lot--20, 30, 50 years. But when you consider that we could have at least another 10 years on top of that, and probably better quality of life in between, shouldn't that be something to strive for? Health and wellbeing and happiness and all that? My grandfather was chairbound for probably the last ten years of his life. I can only vaguely remember a time when he could walk easily, drive a car, etc. What sort of life is that?

I get these forwarded emails from my mom that say things like "Eat well, exercise, die anyway." If only it were that simple. It would be nice to have that black and white choice: I can eat well and exercise, or I can not, and the consequences would be the same. Ultimately I suppose they are, but the years before the final "consequence" will surely be as different as night and day.

Another thing that I have been thinking--I really want to lose weight. Really really. But somehow I let the stupidest things get in my way--Taco Bell, for one. Chocolate, for another. How is it that I could value a taco or a candy bar over the thing that I have wanted for over a decade?