So Heavy

I have to apologize in advance that this will be a plodding and serious blog post. As always, read if you want and feel free to ignore.

I found out today that I have been undercutting my daily calorie needs, by quite a bit. The calculators I found tell me I should be eating 2,100 calories a day and I have been eating about 1,000 to 1,200. I had been getting more and more impatient, wondering how much more I could cut, when I am already feeling dizzy and sick a few times a day as it is. Then, I learned that this is not because I am out of shape, but because I might be sort of (literally?) starving a bit. Which seems strange because you would think that if I were starving I might have actually lost some weight. But that is neither here nor there. This is not a post about weight loss.

Discovering this, that I was eating not just a little bit under my goal but actually quite a lot under my goal, the whole time feeling like I was an overeater, was an unpleasant wake-up call.

Coupled with this, I got enough sleep last night for the first time in about six months. I have been sleeping in general 5-7 hours of sleep broken by 2 to 3 feedings per night, so all in all, not a whole lot of sleep, but apparently enough to keep ticking. But last night I slept enough and woke up to a new kind of consciousness this morning. Good, but not good at the same time. Realizing my calorie snafu, in my new state of consciousness (i.e., non-zombie) I realize a very heavy ugly fact: somewhere on this road of parenting and [failed/attempted] weight loss I have left behind part of myself. It's lying on the road somewhere miles back. To be honest I think that I might have laid it down on the day that C was born, that terrible day, something so integral to myself that without it, I can't remember what it was to begin with. A piece of self? A range of emotion? A capacity for something? Maybe that part of me that used to join clubs in high school, or the bit that was good at arts and crafts, or the singing self. Not robbed from me, not stolen by the patriarchy, but laid down by me because my hands were full for the moment, but then the train sped off with me on it and now the tracks cross at their vanishing point in the distance.

I suppose now the thing to do is stop starving myself; though it was accidental, the undoing of it must be on-purpose. And sleep more, sleep as much as I can, and be nicer to her/me. What did I leave, and where will I find it again?