Detour

imagine

I pull into the oral surgeon's parking lot behind the paramedics.

Shit.  This is not reassuring.

The staff greets me warmly.  They know me well, I've been coming here for the last two and a half years. I'm pretty sure I am singlehandedly responsible for fat bonuses and vacations to Greece. Today is the final surgery in a major oral reconstruction that will run me, when all is said and done, over $40K.  

...He places the gas mask over my nose.  It is not sitting firmly enough; I strain my neck. I push my head up further on the chair in an attempt to make the mask sit flush against my skin.  I don't want any air; only gas.  I breathe deeply though my nose...

I am a loser in the genetic tooth lottery.  I was born with a jaw that did not occlude well, soft teeth, a tendency to form tarter. Then there was bad dental care, avoidance of care, traumatic early experiences, a lack of (needed) orthodontia in my teens, years without insurance.  I entered my forties with lost and broken teeth. Though not visible in my smile, my dental condition was a source of a deep and abiding sense of shame. Every tooth I lost had also had a root canal. I needed more serious intervention.  l needed bone grafting, braces, root planing, extractions, implants, crowns. 

..."You might feel a sting here" My eyes are clenched against catching any glimpse at all of the needle I know he is wielding. In my imagination it is impossibly long and large. I flash back to some time in my past: I was high, the car was moving too fast and recklessly; I'd crawled into my head.  I'd thought of the beautifully written novel on my bedside at home. Surely I wasn't ready to leave a world with such beauty?  I couldn't speak to make him slow down; I could only escape further into my head, turning over a perfectly wrought sentence I'd read the night before. It had made me feel anchored to the world. I looked for an anchor now. The quiet conversation I'd had with my son the night before, him in the passenger seat beside me talking in a low voice, sitting perfectly still, devoid of his usual fidgeting...

I must have done evil with my teeth in a past life. Possibly I was a piranha or maybe a lion?

The final straw in my dental degradation was breaking a tooth during a marathon.  I had a good job and good insurance; no more excuses.  I went to a dentist who suggested that the quickest fix was a "partial."  This would be a piece of plastic with teeth on it that would go into a glass on my bedside at night.

Um, no.  Not yet.  I had just come to terms with the necessity of reading glasses in my life.  I was not ready for removable teeth.  

...I felt the needle puncture my cheek and willed myself to stay still, hands clenched under the drape.  It was not a sting or a pinch but a more robust and full bodied pain.  I couldn't think of the word for that.  We only have words to minimize pain. I thought of how inappropriate the word "discomfort" was. I took yoga breaths.  The epinephrine hit my system and I felt clenched, taught. I felt in danger of seizing or floating right off the chair.  I sent my mind back to the night before...

...the car was gliding through the inky blackness towards the eerie lights of the refinery.  The refinery always seemed oddly lifeless as if industry had eliminated the need for humans entirely. We were on the less traveled bridge; a long span that curves over the quiet side of the bay. At this time on a week night it is as silent as the Sierra after a snow storm.  We were coming home after a hard and rewarding weight lifting session; confronting our fears at the barbell.  Can I get this over my head? What if I fail? Lifting it anyway. The relaxation that follows a hard effort was already creeping into our bones; the satisfaction that follows facing down your fears was creeping into our heads, soothing anxiety.  I was relaxed and happy, enjoying his company, enjoying this time we spend together every week.  I was proud of his efforts in the gym; I do not want him to have to journey to hell to learn to take care of himself, like I did...

My dental staff and I (dentist, orthodontist, periodontist and oral surgeon) mapped out a treatment plan. It was to span almost three years and many thousand dollars; it required me to spend hours in the chair.  I would start with getting my gums and teeth healthy; then braces; then implants. Six of them.  

...I close my eyes and cannot help picturing myself laid out in the morgue.  My person hood has receded, as it must in death. I am only a mouth, held open wide by some device.  It feels huge and I am afraid my jaw will unhinge. I feel the surgeon hovering over me, a knee propped on the top of the chair, bent over his task like a demon.  Putting his back into it.  But when I open my eyes he is merely standing next to the chair, working at arms length...

...My boy is talking about "The Little Prince."  I have not read the book since I was a child.  I remember how much I liked the elephant in the snake and how, even then, I knew I there was a point and I was missing it.  He says "The allegory is, well, to me, that the people he meets on the planets he visits represent man's sins or flaws."  I stay silent, hoping he'll go on.  "There is the man who thinks he is king of everything." He pauses. "Hubris."  I say.  "Exactly, and the guy who lights the lamp over and over; workaholism.  And there is the alcoholic..." He need not explain, we have a deep mutual understanding of this human flaw...

Today, the doctor is placing the final three implants.  In four months, they will get crowns and I will be done.  I will again have a fully functional mouth.  The braces and regular care has done wonders for my smile.  I am no longer self conscious.  I am also no longer afraid of the dental chair.

...the surgeon is screwing in the titanium screws.  I feel my jawbone expand as he tightens down. I think, for the thousandth time since this all started, about how dentistry is such a rudimentary science; the tools it uses mimic those in my toolbox at home.  He is screwing in the second one on the bottom, I feel more than I should, he is anchoring the screw below where the anesthesia went. I get a preview of how it will feel when the drugs wear off...

...The boy continues, "The Prince leads this simple life on his own planet, taking care of a rose.  He is happier doing that than are any of those other people he meets, on other planets. I think it's about the difference between childhood and adulthood.  How you lose something, imagination, when you become an adult..."

The assistant asks me how I'm feeling. 

"A bit woozy."  She looks at me.

 "Queasy?"  

"No.  Woozy."

"Do you want some apple juice?"  What?  Is it spiked with methaphetamine?

"No, thanks." I have been in the chair for over 2 hours.  I am desperate to leave this place.

"Ok, well I'll give you a minute and then you can..." She launches into a explanation for the third time on how I can start with over the counter meds for pain, how I must take the antibiotics every 8 hours, etc. etc. etc.  I want her to shut up so I can go home and take my vicodin immediately. 

I want to curl up with my dogs and my son and pretend that time is not passing.

flashdance

I started exercising in the Dark Ages.  No, that's not a reference to the fact that I am a crone, it's a reference to the fact that that I cut my fitness teeth in the eighties. 

The eighties were not the age of fitness enlightenment.  Oh, we thought they were! We had discovered fitness as a nation.  The "jogging boom" of the seventies had given way to aerobics studios and walk-a-thons.  We were breathless in our enthusiasm: Low-impact aerobics!  Low fat diets!  Rice cakes!  Walkmans! 

America had discovered being in shape.  It wasn't just for athletes any more.  There was a whole generation of women whose marriages had unexpectedly imploded mid-life. They went to work for the first time.  They discovered Jazzercise and sweat for the first time.  It was the embodiment of the American dream; you could reshape yourself into someone better.  Start over.  Not age.  Jane Fonda made workout videos.  Jamie Lee Curtis showed us that we could be perfect.  Oprah got skinny. 

Here was the dogma:  Eat a low fat, high carbohydrate diet.  Exercise at a moderate intensity and you will burn more fat.  Stay around 60% of your max heart rate for at least 40 minutes a day and you'll look like Jane and Jamie.

Yeah. Bullshit.

Let me back up.

Where was I in the eighties?  Well, aerobics saved my life.  After my tentative start, I dove in with mind, body and soul. I took two classes per day.  WIthin 6 months, I was teaching classes myself. I was an evangelist.  I checked out nutrition texts at the library and read them cover to cover.  I preached to my classes about good food; complex carbs, the importance of calcium, the benefits of nonfat dairy products, the evils of saturated fats.  I was happy for the first time in my adult life.  I looked good, I felt good.  Most importantly I was helping others to do the same.

One day, I was in a fitness equipment store shopping for something that could make me even fitter. Ankle weights or some stupid shit.  I was checking out the muscle magazines.  I loved seeing photos of female bodybuilders.  Maybe it was because I felt that I had a better chance of looking like that than I did of looking like a fashion model.  I've always been kind of solidly built, big arms and big legs, short limbed.  I didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of ever becoming "willowy".  But these strong lean women were something else.  I loved their strength and I really loved that this was an alternative view of feminine beauty and perfection.

"Where do you train?"  Oh fuck.  Was that the guy at the counter?  The one I may have noticed before in this store who may have been part of the reason I stopped by?  And "train"?  How cool was that?

"Um. I don't.  I just like to look at these."  I managed to stammer while bending down to retrieve the magazine I'd dropped when I jumped.

"Well you look like you do."  He looked amused.  

A viewing of Pumping Iron II sealed the deal for me. Bodybuilding was a sport I wanted to try.

So I joined his gym, a hole in the wall called "Solid Sweat" and spent the next few years changing my body drastically. That's the point of bodybuilding.  It's the only sport i know where the competition has nothing to do with the training.  Training to build muscle is hard.  It requires lifting heavy, scary weights, regularly.  It involves coming face to face with your limitations.  You either lift it or you don't.  There's nowhere to hide. 

BTW, this is why you won't, especially if your female, "bulk up" if you start lifting.  It's fucking hard to build muscle. It's so hard that I seriously considered using steroids.  To build muscle you have to lift so hard you can barely fucking walk.  It will not happen by accident.  You will not wake up big.  Fuck.

And training for competition is so much harder.  Because on top of the workouts, you have to be fanatical about diet, rest, and every other aspect of your life.  It took over my life, but with a lifetime of "fatty" comments floating around in my brain, I had something to prove.  I was going to get on stage in a tiny bikini.  And I did.

I learned so much about what works and what doesn't work in terms of getting fit and lean. Bodybuilders have been getting lean for years.  Bodybuilders did not jump on the high carb band wagon in the eighties.  I finally got lean following a bodybuilding diet that was high in protein, low in carbs, low fat and made up of mostly unprocessed food.

The recommendations for a healthy diet seem to change every few years.  The low fat craze of the eighties is likely a factor in the fattening of America; the introduction of "low fat" processed food was co-incident with a steep rise in sugar and high fructose corn syrup consumption.  In the 80s the NIH funded an advertising campaign to encourage people to reduce their consumption of eggs that was based on flawed science.  We are increasingly aware that the government agencies charged with setting our nutritional standards are beholden to big agriculture and sometimes bad science. 

There are voices of dissent to mainstream nutrition.

The same can be said for what sort of exercise to do to get in shape.  There are many different theories on what works.

I will talk more in my next post about what I have learned over the years about what works and what doesn't for getting "in shape".  I will talk about my own results on a diet that is way too high in fat for the nutritionists, but has helped me improve my performance across the board.  I want you to take all I say as one data point in your quest to find what works for you.

I want to make one point in this post:  If you want to get fit, do your homework.  Figure out what you want to do or be.  Then research it.  Find a plan and STICK TO IT for a prescribed period of time.  Keep track.  Track results.  Find what works and what doesn't.

You have access to the best laboratory in the world: your body.  Research on it.

Let me give you an example of what I mean:

Let's take the marathon.  "Old school" marathon training has runners running 50-100 mile weeks. Newer "less is more" theories have runners doing shorter workouts at higher intensities.  The old school method is the one that works for me if I want to run a marathon (which, btw, is stupid for me.  Not a good sport for me.  I have learned this the hard way.) I know what works because I've followed both types of programs.  I followed the program religiously (even when I felt one wasn't working) so that I would have good information.  I've raced using both and one is clearly better than the other for me.

So, if I ever run another marathon, well, please shoot me if I talk about it.  If I survive and insist on running anyway, I know what method works for me.

If you use a coach, trainer or nutritionist, trust them, do what they say.  If it doesn't work for you, move on.  There are many, many ways to get there; wherever there is.  Become an expert on you and you will find your path.

how to get fat skinny

Many of my favorite bloggers are in the midst of new fitness and/or weight loss regimens (new year, new decade). Many, like Jonniker, are using Jillian Michaels 30 day shred.  (Hi, Jonna! Don't worry, the nausea will pass and, also, you will be able to pick up your baby again at some point...) Some are running.  Many are combining their workouts with nutritional changes; check out the challenge at MamaPop.

Since I've been at this fitness thing for over 25 years (fuck), I thought I'd share some of what I have learned about what works and what doesn't.  Not that you asked, but blogging is better than bossing my friends around. Which is what I usually do.

First, there is a distinction between getting fit and losing weight. I'll stick to  losing weight in this post since that's what most people think they want to do (I'll talk about fitness later):

1.   Losing weight is ALL about diet. 

2.  I'm not kidding.

3.  You can lose weight without exercising at all.

4.  Really.

5.  You can exercise like a mofo and not lose an ounce (or any size).

6.   I am not shitting you.

7.   You can do all the crunches you want; abs are made in the kitchen.

Heresy one:  Exercise is not the most important thing in losing weight.

You are stuck with the calories in vs. calories out equation.  Sorry.  If you lower your fat intake to 5% of your diet but are still taking in more than you burn you will gain weight.  If you drastically reduce carbs but are still eating too many calories (my personal favorite way to do this is with the excessive consumption of almond butter) you will gain weight.  Yes you will.  You can train for a marathon, run 50 mile weeks and not lose weight, if you eat what you burn.  I've done it.

Heresy two: A reduction in calories is what matters for weight loss.

People will argue with the above statement and claim that low carb diets are more effective.  Science doesn't back this up. To the extent that low carb diets are effective at all  it is because they are low cal diets. The same can be said of weight watchers, south beach, zone.  Every one of these diets reduces caloric intake. (Again, we are talking strictly weight loss, there are benefits to a carb controlled diet in managing some chronic diseases like diabetes and I am not even going to pay attention to extreme shit like going into ketosis, I'm sure there are sites that cater to supermodels that talk about that kind of insanity)

But! Some people find they are more comfortable slashing calories if they do it by lowering carbs.  In other words, having a higher percentage of your calories come from protein and fat may control your appetite better that just cutting calories.  This is true for me, if I am cutting calories, I have to cut carbs or I will chew off my arm.

Heresy three:  The quality of your calories doesn't matter for weight loss. 

No shit.  You can eat only Snickers and lose weight (however, see above about chewing off arm). You may increase your chances of developing a disease, but we don't care about that!  We just want to look hot! The best source of information I have found about this is Lyle MacDonald's site. Lyle has been working with athletes and bodybuilders for years and has been collecting scientific literature on fat loss, much of which is indexed on his site.  Bodybuilders get leaner for competition than any other athletes and we can learn a lot from them (the only time I ever got below 10% body fat was following a bodybuilding diet and training program).  You can learn a lot from them and from Lyle. 

Personally, I find that eating whole, unprocessed foods makes me feel less deprived mentally because I can eat more volume and bulk than if I eat processed food.

Heresy four (the corollary to number three; I'm telling you this shit is hard):  Just changing the quality of your food is likely not enough to put you in a calorie deficit.

Unless you had a pretty crappy diet to begin with or are a 15 year old boy with a ridiculous metabolism, you will probably have to keep track of what you eat, and this means weighing your food.  This is definitely true for small framed women over 40 who have a desk job.  Why?

Well, take me for example.  I'm 5'4," old as fuck, have a desk job,  and usually weigh between 135-140 lbs.  (Shut up.  I have a lot of muscle)  If I want to lose 2 pounds a week and I'm not exercising, I need to limit my intake to 850 kcals day.  (fuck, fuck, fuck) It would be very, very easy to blow this number and inadvertently add 200-500 kcal per day. Don't believe me?  Watch Leigh Peele's video.  In my case, that's adding over 20% to the my daily intake. How much does that suck?  The only way to really know you are sticking to a low calorie diet is to weigh your food. Obviously, if you can eat 2500 kcal per day and lose weight, there is more room for error. However, you will need to reduce your intake by 3500 kcal per week for each pound you want to lose.  Which is why it is difficult for smaller, older females to lose weight rapidly.  More reasons it sucks to be me.

Heresy five: You need to cheat.  

"What?  You just got done telling me I need to weigh everything..."  You do.  If you are serious about losing weight you need to keep track of what you eat.  But!  This shit will make you crazy. No.  Really crazy.  When I was pre-contest dieting for bodybuilding, I had a dream one night that I sat down with a spoon and a box of nonfat dry milk powder and pigged out  That was a good dream!  I was beyond deprived.  Do not go there.  Trust me.  You need a mental break.   There are also some good arguments for why you need regular breaks physiologically (again, look at Lyle's site, his more extreme diets have structured re-feeds. Look up info about the hormone Leptin).  I don't think you can separate the mental from the physiological here, allowing yourself a cheat meal or a cheat day will make it much easier to stick to a plan.  Again, if you are me and can only eat a pittance to begin the fuck with, you have to be careful of your cheat.  That sundae as big as your head can wipe out a week of dieting.  Fuck.

I remember being in a Venice Beach Supermarket the morning after the Mr. Olympia contest. There were several professional bodybuilders walking around with carts filled with Twinkies, fruit pies, donuts and other crap.  Extreme deprivation will seriously mess you up.  The urge to binge can become uncontrollable.  Do not fuck with extreme deprivation.

Ok. Here's the thing.  Nothing that I said above is about good health.  Nothing that I have said above has anything to do with performance.  Nothing I said above has anything to do with fat loss vs. loss of lean body mass. To cut calories without regard for the quality of your food, your macro-nutrient ratio, or attention to your activity level is straight dumb. You might as well also smoke and take amphetamines if all that really matters is losing weight. Save your flames; I AM NOT RECOMMENDING THIS APPROACH.  But you must know the basic facts to design an effective program and this is part of the equation.

someone saved my life

I grew up fat.  

Actually, not really.  But I grew up not skinny in an era when Twiggy was an icon.   I had a lavender vinyl Twiggy lunch box.  Thin was in.

I remember evaluating the shape of my arms in Kindergarten and understanding that they were too thick and shapeless to be acceptable.  I had pale skin, freckles, thunder thighs and a big butt. Kids were mean.  I remember every single nasty comment I ever heard from the thin brown girls. I felt unacceptable.

I was born in 1961, so my formative years passed in a world that hadn't yet enacted Title IX. There were no girls' soccer leagues.  Our mothers didn't exercise.  There wasn't women's college or pro basketball. We had gymnasts, figure skaters and Billy Jean King.  But even those sports were not for every girl.  The only girls I knew who participated in those sports had Olympic dreams.   

Our health classes focused on menstruation and VD (venereal disease).  That's what we called STD's before HIV took sexually transmitted diseases beyond the venereal. We didn't talk about nutrition, lifestyle related diseases, the relationship between stress and exercise.  Our parents still smoked and had cocktails every night.  In my house we had  "hors d'oeuvres"  before dinner. Potato chips and clam dip.  

In my family, intelligence and creativity was revered.  The subject of athletic prowess just didn't come up. Every four years we watched the Olympics and we understood that those people, that level of discipline and aggression, lived a world apart from normal people.

I woke up one morning when I was twenty three choking on the certainty that I was going to die. Too soon.  I don't know where it came from but lying there with the four walls of my bedroom closing in on me, I couldn't see a future.  Any future.   My self loathing had grown so much there wasn't room for anything else inside of me.  The drugs and alcohol were no longer working.  I had no education, no skills, and no future.  My life was beyond chaotic and I felt insane.

And I was fat.  We can argue about how fat I was, but it was the thing that I hated the most about myself. I'm ashamed to admit this.  I was not depressed abut the state of my mental and physical health, which was abysmal, but rather about how I looked.

I'd made attempts to "get in shape" before.  By now it was the early eighties and even normal people jogged and did par course calisthenics, the seventies brought us that.  I tried to jog for the first time  when I was about 18.  I drove down to the junior high school (3 blocks away) and tried to run around the hockey field.  I went around once (probably 1/10 of a mile) and I thought I was going to DIE.   I had to lie down in the muddy grass and concentrate on not losing my lunch. Of course I had asthma and I smoked, but I really couldn't imagine how anyone actually could do that sport.  I developed a respect bordering on awe for joggers.  I went home and had a beer.

I didn't try it again until I was 21 or so.  That time, I actually bought some expensive running shoes, blue New Balances.  I thought I looked pretty cool in them.  I put on some sweats and left the house early in the morning. I made it about half a block, then I walked a bit.  When I was coming back down my street, some young guys drove by and one of them yelled out the window "You ain't gonna get all that off just walking."  I slunk home and stashed the shoes in the back of my closet.  

When I found myself at the bottom of a pit that morning two years later I had NO idea what to do to change my life. There was so much wrong. I had didn't know how to live a good life or where to start.  I was so bereft of self love that I had no idea how to treat other people.  I didn't know how to reach out or who to reach out to. I felt completely alone in the world.  I didn't know how to achieve goals or even understand the need to set them.  I was 23 and I had been abusing drugs and alcohol for ten years.

But I knew what I hated the most on that day was how I looked.  I was invisible.  I felt people's eyes slide over me when I went out. I wasn't someone they wanted to know.  My entire life felt like junior high.  I was unacceptable.

There was this kernel of pride and arrogance inside me.  I knew I was smart. I'd read a bunch of classic novels, all of Shakespeare's plays.  I was good with words.  I had good taste.  But people looked at me and saw something else. Lazy. Slovenly.  I was really pissed about it.  But I was also miserable, so tired of having men want to date my friends and never me.  So tired of the unrequited love that seemed to be my lot in life.  I understood even then that those things were more about my perception of myself than they were about the shape of my body or my uneducated status.  I just didn't know how to fix it.

I looked myself in the mirror and decided I had to do SOMETHING.  I had to stop hating myself. I either had to accept myself as I was or I had to change.  I didn't know what I could change. The mountain of problems in my life seemed insurmountable.  I thought about working on accepting my size, but I didn't feel strong enough to eradicate the years and years of messages that taught me it wasn't ok to be fat.  And physically, I felt like shit.

I decided that maybe, just maybe, if I got a little bit healthier physically, it would be like picking up a corner of my crazy life.  Maybe I could just do that one thing.

There was this aerobics studio up the street from me. The shades were always closed so you couldn't see inside from the street.  I only ever saw women going in there.  It seemed like a place to start.  I dug out those still new running shoes and pulled on my big over-sized 50% polyester bright green sweat pants, took a deep breath, and walked up the street.

It was a midday class, I think there were only about 10 women in the class. The woman who taught the class was a lithe beauty named Andrea.  I will never forget her. She was kind and welcoming.  I searched her eyes for judgment when I shook her hand and I couldn't find any. She started the music and gave cues. The class went right and I went left. I didn't know what a grapevine or the charleston step was.  I was all over the place.

But, Oh! Was it fun.  The music was groovin and I felt like I was out dancing.  The hour went by in a flash.  I felt amazing.  I walked home with my head held high.  I was full of hope for a different life.  

And it was the beginning of a different life.  I was 23 and it was the first time I had taken care of myself in any way.  I was still a child, an unformed person in so many ways.  I hadn't had the ordinary experiences of a passage into adulthood, I hadn't gone off to college or traveled the world.  I hadn't had a lot of guidance in "how to live."  That day, I knew something big had happened.  I didn't realize until years later that I had taken my first real step towards growing up.

the ground beneath her feet

I’m sitting in a large conference room at the Four Seasons breathing in the smell of expensive coffee.  There are a lot of suits in the room.  White faces.  Mostly male.

I feel a thin sheath of alienation slide over my body.  As usual.  I wonder for a moment what the room would look like if I were wearing true color glasses. Magic spectacles that would make people’s appearance match their true character and secret life.  Who would be the wife beater, a looming, oversized ogre? Who would be the binge eater, a 500 pound woman sitting in the corner, furtively stuffing twinkies and hohos into her mouth?  Who would be the alcoholic sitting on the ground against the wall clutching his paper bag, slack jawed and toothless?  What twisted fetishes and shameful secrets would be revealed?

Every woman in the room is wearing expensive clothes and is well put together.  So am I.  I imagine myself through the true color lenses.  I imagine that my polished, professional, persona would be fractured: my features off, like a Picasso portrait.  Or I would be held together with duct tape and baling wire, missing a piece of my ear, an eye, some teeth.  Every misstep, wrong turn, bad decision, shameful secret, detour, would show up as crack, a fissure, a break.  You would be able to see it on the outside instead of just in my eyes. My past.

I am afraid of heights.  I am afraid of standing on ledges, bridges, roofs.  I am afraid that gravity will stop working just long enough for me to float several feet up in the air and out over the abyss. Then I will plunge to my death because it is working after all.  It only stopped because I looked away, stopped concentrating

Professional success feels the same to me.  I am afraid that I will look away and it will stop working, stop holding me fast to the ground. 

I know so many women who talk of their inner bag lady.  How they feel like imposters.  Do the male boardrooms and glass ceilings do that to us?  Is it because it was only yesterday that we burned our bras?

Maybe men feel this way, too? 

Or is it something else.  Is it that a dope fiend looks back at me from the mirror? An alcoholic?  A fuck-up?  I can't shake them, they are part of me forever.

Trauma victims are always waiting for the next traumatic event, sitting with their backs against the wall, watching the door.  Hyper-vigilance.

I am acutely aware of my lack of backup in the world.  A single parent with no siblings. Parents who would prefer I never needed them at all.  I am one slip away from ruin.   No room for accidents.  No room for mental illness. 

I can’t look away.

angels

There are single moments I can point to in my past that changed the entire course of my life.

I was 25 and at a party. I was uncomfortable in my outfit; my "dress" World Gym sweatshirt, the pink one that was still new looking.  I was acutely aware of my gym rat status in a roomful of larger lives. Somehow my single biggest accomplishment, becoming an athlete after a lifetime of sloth and crappy eating habits, seemed threadbare in a roomful of genius grad students.

I admired my friend Terry very much. He was a medical student and he took good care of himself. He was thinking about doing a triathlon. He ran along the crest of he Berkeley hills in the mornings and spent an hour on the bike in the afternoons.  That was our common ground. He was studying for his boards. I peppered him with questions about science and medicine.  I took in what he had to say like a sponge.  He was everything I thought I could never be.

I thought those decisions had already been made.

I glibly mentioned that “if I had it to do all over again” I would study molecular biology. As a high school dropout barely subsisting, I was pretty confident that ship had sailed.

Growing up in Berkeley, in the shadow of a world class University, I remember lounging at the UC pool in the summers of my late teens and early twenties. Overhearing the casual conversations of the college students around me made me unbearably sad. I could taste the envy. Did they know how lucky they were?

That first “C” in the seventh grade was the start of a slide down a slippery slope to  my own version of Loserhood. I dropped out of high school as a Junior with a gpa of 1.9…after repeating the ninth grade. 

I did not think of myself as college material.

There was never a college fund for me.  There were recriminations and punishment. No one reached for me. My high school counselors had me firmly slotted in the “juvenile delinquent” category.  No one talked to me about college.

I was an angry kid.

My phone rang early the next morning.  It was Terry. He reminded me of what I said. He told me he had been thinking about it all night. He said, “you know, it’s never too late.”

And just because he said that thing at that moment, I decided to go out and find out if he was right.

custodial bliss

Twenty ought nine was not an easy time in our house.  I had to seriously consider  the option of walking away from my spiraling mortgage, I worried about losing my job, my available credit shrunk, and life looked very scary for a while.

My son's father moved away...only a few miles in real distance but a continent's width in emotional distance from his kid.  Hard to watch.

Big Love had (very expensive) surgery and the heartbreaking, baleful look he greeted me with when I picked him up is burned into my brain forever.  The recovery was hard and it took a toll on us.  He became an adolescent.  His fears, which are numerous and include things like cell phones and brooms, manifested themselves in some....ahem...behaviors.  (You should see him go after the broom: pure menace.)

And my son became a teenager in earnest.  There was cutting class, grade slippage, drug and alcohol use, lying,  and stealing.  Two school suspensions in one semester.  There was the fact that I became the sole parent in the equation. I have a stressful, demanding job and there were weeks where EVERY DAY I got a call from the high school or the doggy daycare about a problem with one of them. 

So basically I felt like every other working mother out there: as if I wasn't giving anything in my life the attention it needed, and as if I was doing a bad job everywhere.

But I can't really think of it as a horrible year because there was also so much to celebrate about my kid and my own growth as a parent. When 2009 started if you asked me how my son was doing I probably would have rolled my eyes and regaled you with stories of "how checked out" he was in school or how he was lying all the time and I was ready to send him off to live with his dad.

See, I've always been a bit of a tough love and clear limits kind of parent.  If you don't do what's expected, there are consequences and the consequences will be applied consistently.  I was raised with a lot of rigidity myself, in an era where parents didn't think much about where their kids were developmentally or that there might be something behind their kid's bad behavior besides laziness, stubbornness, and that general hatefulness that creeps into the teen personality.

Here's the thing: I went completely off the rails in the ninth grade.  I rebelled with a vengeance to the rigidity in my house. I was extremely angry and depressed.  The more angry my parents got: the more irrelevant they became.  I didn't think about the future, I didn't think about other people, I didn't think about anything except avoiding the pain.  I dropped out of high school halfway through my junior year.  For the next several years, I lived at a subsistence level, with very little education and very few skills.

Here's my idea of a living nightmare: watching your teenager make the same mistakes that you did at his age, knowing the pain those mistakes can lead to, and finding yourself reacting in EXACTLY the same ineffective ways your parents did. 

The thing is, the clear limits (grounding, taking things away) didn't work. They did not result in changed behavior.  What was happening instead was that the punishments increased his alienation and isolation, made him more likely to act out.  He kept ratcheting up his behavior ANYWAY. 

It's a lonely feeling, being a single parent, knowing your parenting style isn't working, and having no freaking idea how to turn it around.  I mean, really the books are all over the map.  There isn't that much info on the Internet (are there mommy bloggers who blog about parenting teens? I couldn't find them.)  I talked to other parents.  They were all as bewildered as me.  

I thought the toddler years were going to be the hard ones.

Finding myself in this position, stripped of the tools in my parenting arsenal, with a kid getting deeper into trouble everyday, I had to re-evaluate.  So, first I asked myself; what do I know?  I know that my son is gifted intellectually.  I know he is engaged with the world and interested in learning.  I know that he is deeply, genuinely a good person who feels empathy for others and who would rather step on his tongue than hurt someone's feelings.  I know he is generous, funny and outgoing.  He is a talented writer and photographer.  He has friends who truly love him and he truly loves them back.

I also know that he cannot manage a docket of homework.  That system you use with your kids that you want to tell me about?  We tried it. It doesn't work for us.  His grades are poor, not because he hasn't mastered the subjects (he has), but because he can't manage homework. I know that the pressure mounted as his grades slipped. I know that he felt the weight of my disappointment.  I know that when he cut school it was because he was miserable.  I know that his anxiety and depression increased.  He isn't into high school sports.  He isn't on the yearbook committee. He's not one of those kids who will have a high school "career" that seamlessly glides into a college "career" at an ivy league school.  He's a skater, he identifies with the outsiders; the slackers.

And so this is who he is: a bright, interesting, nice kid who is not doing well in school.  I believe all of his other self-destructive behavior flows from that.  In my position I cannot avoid being absolutely honest in answering the question: what do I really want for my kid?  He is at a very good public high school that sends kids to ivy league schools and to the UCs.  It takes an assembly line, pen to paper approach. Decent grades at this high school will get him into a good college after which he can get a decent job and...

...and life will be easy.  He will avoid the heartache I felt in my early twenties watching the college kids pass me by, being poor, feeling I had no future.   

But I have been talking to people, teachers who know him, experts, counselors. Guess what?  The assembly line approach doesn't work for everyone.  There are scads of bright kids, especially boys, who are failing in those systems.  His grades started slipping the year mandated class sizes went away.  When classes went from 20 students to 40, he started falling behind. He simply can't hear what the homework is, what's going to be on the test, what the teacher is trying to teach, in a class with 40 kids. His teachers acknowledge that the system doesn't work for everyone, and often doesn't work for 15 year old boys.

There are kids who need something different.  They are bright and curious, but they need more of a connection with their teacher, they need someone to reach for them if they disengage.  My son could do better in public school, maybe with more support, maybe with more discipline, maybe with Ritalin, but it will be so much harder for him than it is for some of his classmates.

He is not lazy.  He is not indifferent.  He learns differently than others.  I am ashamed that it took so long for me to see this.

He has been taking one class at a small school that offers a one-to-one student teacher ratio. He is getting a high A in a class he is taking from the hardest teacher in the school. He doesn't cut that class.  He does his homework. It's private and costly, it's like outsourcing homeschooling.  I am going to do whatever it takes to send him there full time.

And here's the thing: trying to protect him from being the 15 year old me because he might become the twenty year old me is parenting from a place of fear. Accepting that he is entitled to the same journey of self-discovery that I took and supporting him in who he is right now, instead of punishing him, that's parenting from a place of love.  Because at the end of the day, helping him be happy and feel good about who his is now, at 15, is so much more important to me than where he will go to college.  It will work out. He will be ok, because he is ok in all the ways that really matter.

shenanigins

When I was a kid, my parents had to rush me to the ER several times.  I was asthmatic and the drugs sucked back then, there was really no "prevention."  Here's how I hear the routine went:  1) I stopped breathing and turned blue, 2) my mother fainted, 3) they gave me a shot of adrenaline and I promptly hurled in my father's lap.  I felt guilty about this for years, until I made the connection between my hypoxia and my dad's chain smoking.  Not so guilty anymore.

While I now know I was set-up for asthma by the exposure to second hand smoke (which hadn't occured to anyone in the sixties.  Really.  Watch Mad Men), the white coats discovered that I was very allergic to animal dander.  It would start with sneezing and itchy eyes, and end up in a full blown asthma attack when I was exposed to anything furry.  So, my mother had to give up her cat when I was two (after a couple of these trips to the ER had already happened).  Which she is still pissed about.

Even less guilt.

Add to that the fact that I had eczema, which the doctors said was aggravated by chocolate, citrus, exposure to wool of any kind or anything with feathers in it like pillows or warm sleeping bags.

And I was allergic to Christmas trees.

So yeah, bit of a deprived childhood, right? (I do recognize that is a ridiculous statement for any middle class white kid growing up in the hyper prosperity of the US in the sixties and seventies)  Of course, all I wanted was all those things I wasn't allowed to have.  I remember the night before my 7th birthday a cat climbed in my window and curled up on my bed for the night.   Of course I didn't shoo her away or tell my parents.

I spent the morning of my 7th birthday in the ER.

Over the years, I missed out on enough things because of asthma that I eventually started pretty much avoiding animals.  I had a brief stint where I adopted cats, but my doctor convinced me that was beyond stupid when I got pregnant with A.  Both my kitties went to live on an acquaintance's farm where one immediately disappeared and the other lived a long and prosperous rodent filled life.

However, when I bought my house in 2005, I decided that my small family of two needed pets.  We started by adopting two feral cats (in Berkeley they are trapped and fixed instead of euthanized, then re-released, which keeps the overall population under control).  They live outside and have been doing great for 5 years.

But I really, really wanted a dog.  My grandparents always had dogs and I lived with them for a while in Mexico with two German Shepherds that I loved as only a homesick 13 year old girl can.  I still remember the adolescent Heike providing hours of entertainment on those long afternoons when everyone else in the entire town was having their siesta.

So in the fall of 2005 we adopted two adult female mutts from the animal shelter.  They were both on death row and the German Shorthair Pointer mutt, Ute to us (pronounced "Uta"), was literally going to be put down the next day.  I'll tell the story another time of how we went to get a dog and came home with two, but really, I knew we'd be gone most of the day and two seemed better than one.  They are pack animals after all.

It worked out great to adopt adult dogs as our "first" dogs.  A was 11 and it was just the right time for him to have the responsibility for walking them and feeding them, etc.  They are good dogs, though they have some shelter issues (not so much dog park material).  We basically lucked out with Phoebe and Ute.

So, I really, really don't know what demon was in possession of my good sense when I caught myself longing for a puppy in early 2009.  We had two dogs.  Oh.  And two cats.

And yet.

I had a month long sabbatical in April and a part of me always wanted to raise a dog from puppyhood.  I had two sets of friends that were getting puppies.  And then I saw a picture of this guy:
 
 Check out the size of those paws.

   

Seriously.  The cutest boy I had ever seen.  

So we adopted Omar.  Now, here is what you need to know about American Bulldogs.  In jurisdictions where pitbulls are outlawed, these guys often are too.   They are not terriers, they are mastiffs, but they are a"bully breed." They were bred for guarding and working.  These are the dogs that were bred with pugs to make the shorter English Bulldogs, so they are a very old breed. These dogs do weight pull competitions and can pull 30x their bodyweight.  They can be very aggressive and many AB owners don't take them to dog parks; the problem is that it is very hard to get these dogs to stop (playing or fighting) if their excitement gets to a certain level.

I was ready for a big tough guy.  I live ghetto adjacent and I wanted a dog that sent a message.

What we got was Omar.

When we got him home, it took 2 weeks before he would cross the street.  He was afraid of the street. And the cars. And the garbage can.

I learned that American Bulldogs do things in their own time.  Not yours, or mine, or any say REASONABLE time scale.  

I am a very fast and efficient person.  The universe has sent me this big lump of slow moving love to teach me a life lesson.

Have any of you EVER met a puppy that you have to pull on the leash?  I shit you not.

He is now 100# of solid muscle.  Dogs hump him. Phoebe, our 12 year old female, humps him. (which reminds me, the girls' first meeting with Omar was hilarious,  Phoebe sniffed between his legs and whipped her head around to Ute as if to say "Looky what we got here!"  She humped him CONSTANTLY those first few weeks.  Cougar.)

He squats to pee.

He trips over his own feet.

Also?  Not so much with the intelligence.  Or the spidey senses.  When I yell from my bedroom to the back yard, the other two look up, excitedly wagging their tails.  Omar crouches and looks wildly around, you can see the wheels turning "Holy Shit!  Voice of God!"  

It's ok, he was hired for his looks, not his brains.

He also, unfortunately, had hip dysplasia on both sides and so had surgery at 6 months.  I won't bore you with the details.  It was hard on us all and he missed a big chunk of his puppyhood.  

Which he is reclaiming now, in his adolescence.  Ok, so I hadn't totally thought through what it would be like to have a 100 POUND puppy.  When he plays, furniture moves.  Ute is completely freaked out by his playing (she hasn't really accepted that he lives here) and she starts barking, which makes him do that thing puppies do where they jump straight up in the air in front of you?  Which COMPLETELY freaks Ute out since he weighs twice as much as she does.

And the Christmas tree (which I get every year now that I am an adult and the drugs are better): not a good idea.  First I got the toddler play yard and circled the tree with that.  We came home to finely shredded glass and glitter all over the couch and also the shattered remains of the "baby's first christmas ornament." So the next day we also placed the dining room chairs around in front of the toddler gate.

Which made it easier for him to reach the higher ornaments.

So the next day we upended the coffee table in front of the chairs in front of the gate.  That worked.

But he chewed up one of the chairs and my christmas tree was not the joyous symbol of the season I had envisioned.  Our living room looked like Fred Sanford's front yard.

But still, oh this dog.  He is my heart.  He is hilarious to watch.  He is the sweetest, most gentle dog I've ever had.  He wakes me by placing his chin on the side of my bed while wagging the entire rest of his body.  If I am home he is always within ten feet of me.  When he has to go out he gives one bark and then sits and waits for me to come.  His wiggle when I get home form work is the best part of my day.  He nuzzles my ear when I hug him.  He likes to hug.

And anyway, I just can't be mad at this

 

Here's one where he is backing away from the camera.  That he is afraid of.

 

 And here's one of him with the long suffering Ute

 
 

 

 Big Love.

the thrill of victory

The debate I wrote about in my last post ruffled all kinds of feathers and caused some serious soul searching.  I want to write more about that later, but in the meantime I thought I would lighten the mood by posting my race report from the San Francisco Nike Women's Marathon I ran with my son in 2007 (he was 13 at the time).

Race Report

A and I woke up before sunrise and, after running around like headless chickens yelling at each other a relaxing cup of coffee, we headed over to the City. We found my friend Christine and headed up to the start. Union Square was packed with runners including many, many annoying inspiring “Team in Training” runners who really, really annoyingly, touchingly held hands to form human chains to stay together while moving through the crowd. We smiled and threw an elbow our good mornings and grew faint with anxiety soaked up the energy of the crowd.

We cried during the national anthem, whoever sang it was very good and all eyes were lifted to the flags atop the hotels surrounding the square. It was an emotional moment in which we could almost forget we were all participating in something really stupid really feel the community spirit.

We found our pace leader, a 54 year old woman named Deb who has obviously been a customer of BALCO taken really good care of herself. After running with her for about 3 miles I dropped back to avoid sudden death from cardiac arrest see how A was doing. I didn’t really NEED to finish in 4:20 and anyway, I could catch her later if she sprained an ankle or something I felt like losing my breakfast in front of 23,000 runners taking the pace back up a little. We started our climb up through the Presidio and I smiled as the runners around me turned up their ipods to drown out the exceedingly loud and disturbing sound of my labored breathing began to really focus.

We cruised up Clement Street to the really loud and obnoxious encouraging sounds of all the supporters. We heard “Go Team” so many times the phrase will always make me want to hurl smile.

At mile 8, I started to cramp excruciatingly felt a little depleted so I had a shot blok. A shot blok is a little like a soft gummy bear that contains electrolytes. Imagine my surprise when I bit into it and broke a tooth! I stealthily stashed the disembodied tooth in my fuel belt and thought about how God hates me the tooth fairy. I was having a good day.

By mile 11 my legs were cramped knots of pain warming up. As I approached the turnaround for the half marathoners I thought I could just turn around and lie to everyone about running the full marathon happily of those who were about to finish their first long race and remembered that all race results would be published. I pressed on because I have a ridiculous ego and could not admit to the world that I couldn’t finish the full marathon.

The 4:30 pace leader passed me as I was dry heaving in the bushes taking in the beauty of the park. I tried to trip her smiled and waved. So neat how Nike had them carry those cute little signs so you could watch your increasingly diminishing goals float out of your reach!

I have to admit, the next several miles were something of a blur of tears and self recrimination excitement. I remember the smiling face of the 4:40 pace leader and trying to remember that move where you can kill someone by hitting their nose into their skull at just the right angle how lucky I was to be out there. Running around the Godforsaken desolate place that is Lake Merced and hearing the sounds of those freaks shooting, actually shooting, at clay plates in the middle of the city while we were dying out there nature was an experience I’ll not soon repeat, I’m sure.

The last three miles I was struck by how like labor and delivery the peak experience of childbirth this was. Just like then, there were many people happily telling me I was almost there which I was NOT because when it sucks that much one more minute is an ETERNITY cheering me on. I picked up my stride to approximately the stride of a demented pigeon with a broken leg. My death march marathon was coming to a pathetic and really ugly triumphant end. I looked at the hot fireman in the tux who handed me my finisher’s necklace and burst into tears before leaning over to dry heave some more smiled graciously before hobbling strolling away to a quiet corner where I could concentrate and, hopefully, remember my name.

A and Christine had equally horrifying successful experiences. We are glad it is OVER we did this. The race raised 18.5 MILLION dollars for leukemia and lymphoma research, which is amazing.

Now I am enjoying hobbling around like a 90 year old woman my recovery. I am resting a lot and learning to plan my trips to the kitchen and bathroom carefully because it takes some time to get there and enjoying my meds downtime.

Really, each and every one of you should consider doing an event like this.

it's complicated

There's been a debate raging at Swistle's and at Kristin's fitness blog 
Aquafit that touches on what I think of as fat politics.  Here's a a comment I wrote on Kristin's blog (more about this journey of mine later):

"I've looked at fat from both sides now..."

I was a pretty fat kid into my early twenties.  Getting fit saved my life.  It taught me things about how to live that my parents should have.  I learned discipline, how to achieve goals and to respect myself.  

But.

But, the ugly underbelly of my journey was the body image piece.  When I first got fit, the reward was in the improved body image.  I was no longer invisible to the world.  I got attention.  I got on stage in a bikini at 9% bodyfat for a bodybuilding competition.  It was powerful to be thin.  I thought about it all the time.

I discovered that I always saw flaws, even at 9% body fat.  I discovered that my moods were negatively affected by the strict dieting I had to do.  I discovered that I wasn't meant to be that lean.  It took such an effort.  I was very close to developing an eating disorder.  I was boring as hell.

That was 22 years ago, Since then?  I've run marathons, done triathlons, raced bikes (road and mountain) and competed in weightlifting competitions.  I eat and train for performance.  I look pretty good for a 48 year old mom when I have my clothes on.

I don't look like Linda or Kristen.  And the voice that tells me I should is still inside my head and it bugs the f&*@k out of me.  So when I hear Kristen and Linda talk about the effect of exercise on their bodies it does make me uncomfortable. I feel like it's dangerously close to becoming part of the "you should exercise to be hot" chorus that I wish would just go away...please don't flame me for saying that I know it's not what either of them intend, but there it is.

But when they talk about what it feels like to achieve goals, I get it.  I am always training for something.  I push myself very hard to be better, stronger, faster.  See, I've discovered that training hard makes me happy and balanced, and keeps my depression at bay.  I wish we talked about these elements of fitness more.  

I catch myself feeling superior all the time, for being the only one at the track at dawn doing intervals, for ordering meat and veggies at dinner and eschewing the bread, for running a 5k in under 24 minutes...And it is NOT ok.  I am not better than other people because I can always find the time and because I do it even though it's hard.  Fitness is a  closely held value of mine, I need it as part of my life and it makes me happy.  
I'm lucky.  I found that.  But I really believe that other people can feel happy and balanced without it.  And I've met people who really, truly, loathe exercise.  Far be it from me to tell them they should do it. Even if they want to lose weight. ( Recent studies show that NEAT, non exercise activity thermogenesis, the time you spend house cleaning, gardening, running after your kids can be much more important to weight loss than "exercise").

But Im sure there are a lot of people out there  suffering like I was, people who don't know yet that exercise can bring you joy just in the act of doing it.  It can help with depression, anxiety, insomnia.  Those are the people I wish we fitness mavens would spend time trying to reach.  I don't really care about the message that everyone can change their body for the better, what I do care about is the message that everyone can surprise themselves by finding the limits of what they are capable of.   Really.  I promise.