Home Away From Rome

So, you guys are my friends, and it's time to come out with some truth. I have been putting it off because I think I might lose friends, and I might lose readers, and some people who are both. I considered starting a separate blog just for dealing with faith questions, because I don't want to be divisive, and I know that writing about faith can be very divisive, among believers and nonbelievers and groups of the two, and even "among" just one person, alone and confused. But this story is part of being a Happy Nash, so into the blog it goes.

Friends, after 30 years of real devotion and practice, I no longer practice Catholicism. And I want to talk about the reasons why. But before I talk about it, I want to start by blessing the place where I came from. I feel strongly that I should bless the Catholic church, even as I am walking backwards out of her doors. She has done so much for me, and she will be in my heart for my whole life.

She taught me about God. She taught me that the soul exists, and that the soul matters. She taught me the beauty of liturgy. She gave me words to express the hunger of the soul for God. She taught me how to pronounce Latin. She taught me the value of free-form prayer and the value of repetitive prayer. She taught me not to be afraid of ritual. She joined my husband and me in marriage, and she baptized both of my children. She gave light to some of my darkest days. I love her.

The story of how I came to take my first step on the road away from Rome really starts when my son was born. As a young mother in the Catholic church, I felt that I had done the thing that a woman is supposed to do -- At just the right age I married a good man, and gave birth two years later to a beautiful boy. Yet in the state of motherhood -- that exalted state -- I found myself shoved to the margins of church life. I had to feed my son in the vestibule of the church, watching the real mass go on inside, through the windows. I had to take him out when he was crying, or talking, or running. I had to remove myself from the mass when my child was being a child. I began to wonder what I was doing, when I spent most of the mass outside instead of inside. On the odd Sunday when he behaved and I could stay inside, I grew antsy and had to walk outside anyway.

And the subject of the homily stuck in me like an arrow in the tough hide of a buffalo. It irritated me. When my son was old enough to go to church, when he was six months old and the doctors said I could take him in public, so many of the homilies I heard were about how I wasn't good enough. Every week there was a new reason, but the message was always that we did not measure up.

And I couldn't really argue with that. I was measuring myself to the point of exhaustion, and I never even came up to 50% of what I thought I should be. But I couldn't help but think that if I had spent an hour preparing myself and the baby to leave the house, and driven 30 minutes to get here, parked up a hill and hiked down with him, that maybe I could hear something encouraging, something redemptive, rather than more of the same, "Guess what, you fail even more every day."

And the feeling continued throughout the next few years. It's hard to explain in terms for someone outside the church to understand, to really understand, but there is a sort of basic belief, a kind of underlying spiritual aesthetic to Catholicism that basically maintains that if you are unhappy or unsatisfied in any way, that basically the reason for it lies within you. Maybe you don't pray hard enough, maybe you don't do your rituals correctly or often enough, maybe you don't spend enough hours begging God to help you understand something that can't be understood. --And here I find my dismay and my anger creeping out, and I don't want this to be an angry post. -- But let me say that within Catholicism, there is not much of a feeling that "we're all in this together." In many ways, in the great big cathedral, it's every man for himself.

But to corral my narrative back to its original purpose, I absorbed this message of just not quite measuring up, and it fit perfectly with my feelings about myself as a mother. Okay, I was an okay mom, and sometimes I was a good one. I usually wasn't a bad one, although there was the time I yelled at Christopher when he was just a baby in his high chair. There are so many things to feel guilty about as a parent, and the idea that I wasn't good enough just fit perfectly in there, like a puzzle piece.

Now, to understand the next part of the story you have to understand the basic Catholic idea of sin. Essentially, sin is divided into two categories: venial (less severe) and mortal (severe). If you commit a venial sin (something like lying about who broke the cookie jar, or not telling the cashier that she gave you an extra dollar in change) and then die without confessing it, you will go to Purgatory until it is burned out of you (or perhaps purged in another way?) and then presumably you will go onto heaven. If you commit a mortal sin and then die without confessing it, you will go straight to hell. It doesn't really matter what overall good or bad you have done -- if you commit one of those, and you die before you do the ritual of confession, God pushes the "go to hell" button and you fall through the floor to your eternal torment.

To someone not raised in the Catholic church, this might sound so ridiculous that it is funny. But to someone who lived and breathed Catholicism from birth, this stuff is more real than my hand held in front of my face right now. This is Truth with a capital T. This is the stuff you just don't question. There's too much at stake. It's so much easier to just follow the rules so you don't have to worry.

Now, I could have borne this scheme and worked within it for the rest of my life if not for two specific factors. The first is that the division between "venial" and "mortal" is not always clear. The apologists would have you believe it is clear-cut but it's not. For example, murder is a mortal sin. But so is missing mass. But missing mass because you are sick is not. So, what about missing mass to care for a sick child, even though technically you probably could have found someone to stay with the kids while you went to a different mass in the evening, but you just didn't because you were exhausted from taking care of a sick kid all day? Questions like these leave us splitting hairs and veering off course -- we become obsessed with how to classify our sins and there is no energy left for actually living good lives.

The second point is that confessing sins in the sacrament of confession is, to put it in a mild fashion, completely humiliating. The line of thought that I have encountered is that this humiliation is good for us -- that it brings us closer to God, and it allows us to let go of our earthly pride and let God in, in a new and revelatory way, because our defenses are down. But God doesn't humiliate me -- he knows me through and through; he knows me much better than I know myself. He has my whole life written down. What humiliates me is confessing in gory detail every dalliance of my soul (and you have to confess every single one -- to not confess everything is in itself a mortal sin) to another human. And maybe this shouldn't matter, and maybe it is my human weakness that makes this so hard. I have read about people who like going to confession, but I don't. I hate it. I feel like I am going to throw up. I do feel relief when it is over, but it's the kind of dizzy relief you feel right after you almost get into a wreck but then don't. There is none of the gentleness of Christ in this strange cycle of sin, self-hatred, humiliation, and then ghastly relief, followed by fear of sinning, followed by isolation of self in order to avoid sinning, followed by breaking down and sinning, and on and on. The system, for me, did not help me get to the root of my sin, the real reason why I was sinning, and what I could do about it to work to actually be free of the sin. Instead, it kept me terrified, off balance, teetering on the edge of the pit, running away from one thing or another, "all the days of my life."

And so what happened for me is that I had committed one or another of these mortal sins that are shockingly easy to commit -- let's say it was missing Mass. So, Mass happens on Sunday, and confession happens on Saturday, so unless you do all of your sins on a Friday night, you have to carry them around with you for at least a few days before you confess them. And if you sin on a Sunday, you have to carry them with you for six days. Six days of knowing that if you die, you are going to hell, period. It is true that you can call up and ask for an appointment for confession at any time of the week. But try to do that with two small children, one of whom is smart enough that he doesn't need to hear the words of your confession. What are you going to do, leave him in the hall?

And I feel like I have to pause here and explain something. I am not exaggerating when I describe the "go to hell" rule. It's on the books. It's not a mangling of the real Canon Law; it's real. The most I have ever heard from an apologist is that God *might*, of his own volition, choose to forgive you anyway and not send you to hell, but the chances of it are not overwhelming, so really you can't bank on it. In other words, you can't really trust in God's mercy. Not all the way. Not really.

So there I was, and it was Monday or Tuesday morning. I was engaged in the usual -- getting breakfast for the children, getting my day started, and suddenly realized that at that moment -- as I was engaged in the loving life of my warm household, as my children were hugging me, as I went on through my daily life as a mother, wife, and worker, that according to the rules of my church, at that moment, the connection between my soul and God was severed completely, until I went to do the confession ritual. Imagine being told, "Right now, until six days from now, your mother hates you. Your father will disown you if you go home right now. You have to do your ritual first." It's a painful thought at best; at worst it's paralyzing and terrifying.

And here's where it gets interesting, friends. Within Catholicism (and outside of it as well, although it seems to find a certain strength within Catholicism) there is a mental illness called Scrupulosity. Scrupulosity is defined basically as being obsessed with the letter of the law. For example, a scrupulous person might go to confession two or three times in one day, because he or she has remembered a new sin that they forgot to confess the first time, etc. It is a type of OCD and it sounds very painful.

The treatment for Scrupulosity would be funny if it weren't so chillingly ironic. Sufferers are advised to remember that God's mercy is great, that he loves us, that we are his children and he cares for us deeply. To relax a bit in their observance of the law, trusting instead in the mercy of God. In other words, the exact opposite of the message that Canon Law tells us.

And here is where it gets even crazier. I feel like this is the point at which Catholicism folds in on itself so many times that it starts to create a black hole, pulling everything else into it as it swirls: Scrupulosity, itself, is a sin.

That's right -- if you actually believe what the church teaches, and you practice it to the letter, then you have a mental illness called Scrupulosity which is also a sin.

So let's review some of the requirements of being a good Catholic:

1. Follow all the rules
2. Don't leave out any of the rules; follow them all
3. Don't get obsessed about following all of the rules because that is a mental illness and a sin.

It is actually chillingly parallel to what I was learning about breastfeeding at around this same time:

1. Follow all the rules
2. If you don't make enough milk, try harder to follow the rules
3. Don't worry about following all of the rules exactly, because worrying makes your milk dry up.

Go ahead and lock yourself in the mental and spiritual equivalent of an M.C. Escher engraving like that and see how well you do, for years on end. Walk to Emmaus on a mobius strip like that and see where you end up.

So basically there I was, spinning in circles, wondering then, if my relationship with God was stone cold dead, as my church teaches, then what is it warming my heart when I see my child? What is it inspiring me to do my best that day, with my work and my parenting? What is it that makes me pause for a prayer? Is He even listening, if He has already written me off?

And then suddenly I just couldn't do it. I felt something snap inside of me like a rubber band pulled so tight it snaps apart and goes flying. The kids were in the living room and I knelt down in my pantry, out of their view, because I didn't want them to see me acting so emotional and bizarre. I didn't kneel in a holy-card pious kind of way, I knelt down the way you do when someone kicks you in the gut and you can't stand up anymore. It was basically a glorified version of fetal position. I can't do it anymore, I sobbed over and over, as quietly as I could into my fist. I just can't do it. And there in my kitchen, on the sticky floor by my boxes of pasta and cans of beans, my paper bags folded for recycling, I felt a presence of God, and not just of God but of Jesus, as a brother. At first it was just a companionable silence, like when a good friend, or spouse, or someone who has known you forever just sits with you at a hard time. There are no real words to be said, just a presence.

Weeks before this incident while praying outside I had received a strange kind of message, "Find God in the desert." I didn't know what it meant but then in that moment in the pantry I knew. It meant that God wasn't just present in the water; he was present in the absence of the water as well. Not just in bread but in the absence of bread. Not just when I was perfectly clean of all my sin but when I was weighed down with it as well. God walks the whole line of life with us, not just sometimes when we have been good enough, but all the time, and when we are not good enough is when he stands the closest. I came to see an "ordinary" part of Jesus's personality then -- the part that led him to provide food to a huge crowd, the part that led him to tell the people about how to pay their taxes, and how to live together in peace. The Daily Jesus; the Quotidian Christ. He is not just God of the Sinless Mountaintop -- he is God of the Desert as well, and all places in between.

I felt the story in my soul, the story of the woman taken in adultery, in the Gospel of John:

Now early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people came to Him; and He sat down and taught them. 3 Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, 4 they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?” 6 This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear.
7 So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” 8 And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. 10 When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?”
11 She said, “No one, Lord.”
And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”
12 Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”


And here he was, telling me to get up off the pantry floor and go and sin no more. And don't tell me what I can and can't do.


And so, in a nutshell, although these things can't really be contained in a nutshell, what it comes down to is that the more I study history and law within the Catholic Church, the more I see that the Catholic Church has a certain tendency to tell God what he can and cannot do, and likes to tell her people also what God will and will not do for them. Perhaps this is with good intention -- if we believe in a God who is a bit less forgiving than what he really is, then perhaps we will be on our best behavior and offend him less. And how could that be a bad thing? But the Catholic line about sin and forgiveness seems to me a bit like telling your children that you will shoot them if they don't eat their broccoli. Chances are, they will eat their broccoli, but at what cost to your relationship with them? They will get lots of iron, but will they ever really love or trust you? And since our lifeline to Jesus is that relationship of love and trust, why would we want our church to impose itself upon that relationship, telling us extra rules that we must follow in order to maintain it?

Isn't there a level of arrogance in the Church's willingness to dictate to others the personality of Jesus, when we can see his personality in the words and actions of his life? I would like to think -- and perhaps I am wrong -- that if I had known Jesus in his time on earth that he wouldn't have corralled me into a confessional just then and commanded me to tell him every sordid detail before he would forgive me. Instead I feel he would have knelt by me there in the pantry, him like a caring brother, me a sort of modern Martha. And, in fact, the words of Luke 10:41-42 say it almost perfectly:

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one."

Only one!

NonBig!

Looked in the mirror today (at the gym, no less) and realized that I don't look "big" anymore. I don't look small, but I don't look specifically big either. I've crossed over that invisible divide. Just barely, but I'm happy to be on this side. :)

I Miss Nature

So the trek to health continues and it is [this week] an enjoyable venture. We are having some random lovely springtime weather, which I am soaking up -- Weather in the 50s in the am, 70s in the pm. A little chilly here and there but in the "heat of the day" it's ideal for being outside.

If you have known me for four seconds or longer, I have definitely told you about a hiking trip I went on for three weeks when I was 20. Fantastic, excellent, beautiful, life-changing, etc. During this trip I spend a lot of time just walking and thinking. I didn't realize what an absurd luxury that was until I became a mother and every moment of my life involved interacting with people. As an old-fashioned introvert, I enjoy my time alone. So when I get out for a walk on my own, I often think of those three weeks, and the natural beauty I saw, and how clear everything became to me when I was out in nature.

Yesterday I went for a really long walk down the brand new extra-wide lovely pristine sidewalk that has been put in along US-90, from my neighborhood going east until the I-10 interchange. It is a lovely walk:



...that leads directly to the brand-new strangely-Southwestern library branch that was built recently near my house:



When I drove by as it was under construction last year, I thought it was a church. You have to admit, it has a churchy vibe to it.

So the nice weather, the outdoors, and the strange little faux-adobe library that was plopped down within minutes of my house remind me of those hiking days again, and I realize how much I miss hiking, not for itself, because to be honest I don't really *like* blisters or hauling heavy bags around for hours on end, but for everything else that goes along with hiking: quiet, nature, breeze, campfires, jokes, stories, spectacular views, self-sufficiency, sunlight, mental clarity, escape from the daily grind, and total lack of expectation that I will be bathed, made-up, or presentable.

I wonder if I will ever go hiking again. I can't imagine it happening before all of my children are away to college. And by then, will I have the joints to walk up mountains? It's a question that makes me sad to think about. Maybe I can cajole the family into a couple of national parks to soothe my soul. Until then, lots of walks to Santa Leon de la Biblioteca.

New Year's Desolutions

When I knock on the outside of this afternoon, it has a hollow sound -- for years my new year plans have included a modest or not-modest list of resolutions -- things I Must Do, and the ways in which I will achieve them, which I try in earnest to do and then fail, and then re-resolve and fail again. Failure is as much a part of the resolution cycle as success is, and I am beginning to think that the approach is the problem -- that going at a fault or failing with a resolution is the wrong way to do it.

For example, let's say that one of my resolutions is to keep up with the dishes. So I write that down with my new felt-tipped black pen, and I declare that I will do dishes twice a day until it becomes like second nature to me. I do this each day for three days, and then on the fourth day I have a migraine and my 7:30pm I can barely even stand up, much less scrub and scrape congealed crap off of plates yet again, so I just don't, and then in the morning I still feel awful so I just stack the breakfast dishes on top of the dirty dinner pots, if I even stack them at all. I tell myself that as soon as I shake the headache I will catch up, and then someone calls to see if I can help them with an errand, and I have to grab a pizza for dinner, and since I didn't really use any dishes that night, why should I clean them? And so on, until they are piled up so high.

A resolution like this tries to attack the end result through a barrage of little Plans and Interventions. But as we learned from the Army Corps of Engineers, when you try to fix something by just attacking the very end result, you can end up with a big mess.

Instead, as I am learning, the process has to be different.

First, I have to actually observe myself making the mistake. For example, with the dishes, instead of taking on new resolutions, I just have to observe myself and my dishwashing habits for a week. When do I do dishes? When do I not do dishes? I leave judgment in the other room and I just watch myself. And I discover something -- I do not get behind in the dishes because I am lazy and disorganized, as I had been telling myself. There are a lot of factors that go into creating the problem. First, I have too many dishes out and available for use. When all of the cups are clean, they do not fit into the cabinets. This annoys me terribly, so I do not ever really want them to all be clean, because that means they are falling out of the cabinet every time I open it. So, instead of berating myself for not cleaning the cups, I get rid of some of the cups. Bam. Problem solved. Or at least the beginning of the problem. Then, I see that I do my biggest clean-up of the kitchen in the late afternoon, at about 3:30 or 4:00pm, right before I cook dinner, which then wrecks the kitchen again. So, even though I am doing dishes every day, I never see the kitchen actually clean. It never reflects a sense of order or success back at me -- only failure and filth. So I switch my dish-doing to the evening, after the kids are in bed. I go to sleep with a clean kitchen and then wake up to one as well. When things get dirty, I think, "My clean kitchen has gotten a little dirty; I should clean it up a little," instead of thinking, "My kitchen is always nasty and will never be clean no matter what I do."

And lastly, I realize that dish doing is a solitary act, and a little lonely, and a little boring, but at the same time I yearn for a bit of solitary alone time in my day. So instead of hating it all at 3pm, children underfoot, hungry myself, mess everywhere, I just let it go until 7:30pm. Then I plug in my headphones and clean while I listen to a favorite podcast. I don't really mind anything else that is going on. And at the end of it, the kitchen is clean, and I've learned a little more about cooking or gardening or world events, and I haven't had to speak to anyone for an hour. (If this seems strange to you, I'm an introvert, and talking to people all day, the way I have to with two young and very-verbal children, is as stressful as a day full of business presentations. Even though the questions are charming -- "What kind of factory do marshmallows come from?" or Norah's favorite, the simple, "What's this?" -- sometimes I just want a break from speaking.)

So what I end up with isn't a perfect solution -- I will still get behind on pots and pans at the end of long days, and I will never really like bending down and standing up a hundred thousand times to load and unload the dishwasher and hand-wash the rest, but it's manageable when I reduce the number of dishes and fit dish-time into my day with the mild reward of listening to a podcast.

But this is not a post about dishes. It's about the way I expect myself to do things, and the fact that it is the opposite from the way that I actually work. Basically, I need a day that has scheduled time for doing certain things -- teaching, mothering, cleaning, resting, eating -- and some wiggle room as well, for picking up slack when I get behind, or for pointedly not picking up slack when I am just too darn tired and finished with it all. Because sometimes "giving up" for an evening is more restorative than anything else.

So I refuse to resolve to do anything this year. I do not resolve to lose any weight at all, I do not resolve to have a cleaner house, I do not resolve to be more orderly in my work or more creative in the activities I do with my children or more or less of anything as a wife. Instead, I am going to do something that I have never done before at the end of a long December:

I love you just the way you are. You're good enough right now. You taught yourself everything you know about how to keep a house clean. You taught yourself how to be a happy mother and wife. You taught yourself how to teach yourself things, and now you teach other people. That's not nothing -- that's something. You're not a failure. You're a ringing success. If you don't believe me, watch your husband playing with your kids when he gets home from work. That's the stuff that matters. That might be the only thing that matters.

Happy New Year!! :)

Thoughts on Simplicity

So this post is sort of a "cheating" post because it won't include much of my own thoughts.

The background is that with some beginning success in recovery from thyroid and adrenal fatigue problems, I am motivated to gently turn my life from its crazy frenetic pace to something more livable. If you had asked me six months ago if it would be possible for me to simplify my life at all, I probably would have laughed at you and then said something very rude, implying that my life is much busier and more important than the average person's.

Over the past few months of work on my health and happiness, I have been given the gift to see that at the root of so much of my crazy breakneck ways is simply conceit -- the belief that I am somehow set apart from normal humans, that I must always do more, achieve more, be more. It's completely ridiculous, and completely false. Realizing that snobbishness, not bad luck, is at the root of my poor health choices is very humbling, but also very true. Anyone who has known me for very long can tell you that I am this way -- that I take things on, more than I should, not for pure reasons but because I think I can do it better than anyone else. It's conceit, it's snobbishness, and it made me physically ill.

So I'm holding the idea of a slower life in my hands, turning it over and over like a smooth stone, feeling it warm up from its contact with my palms. I am growing to like it. Every once in a while that crazy voice comes back -- she sounds a bit like the Wicked Witch of the West -- and tells me that unless I do twice as much as I am now, I will sink into the mire of obscurity and sadness and drudgery; that my only hope is to do more and be more and always more than I am right now. She says that I am never enough.

If there is nothing else to inspire me to change (and certainly there is), then at least my children inspire me. I want to be present to them and to telegraph to them that they matter, not just in the big things but in the small things. I want them to have my attention more often than they hear, "In a minute, honey." Because there will always be moments when I am busy, but I have more opportunities to tune into them and into the slow life in general than I previously thought.

So I am scanning through a book about unhooking, slowing down, and simplifying, and I have come across two really fantastic quotes that I want to share. These are from Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne, M.Ed. and Lisa M. Ross.

The first:

"A more rhythmic daily life establishes beachheads, small islands of calm and predictability in the flow of time."

I love this image! "Beachheads" makes me think of a parched, exhausted shipwreck victim, finally washing up on shore, panting, grateful, totally spent with grief and joy. And the ground is firm underneath. That is what I want to be, and what I want my home to be. The island, always there just when you can't go any further out in the big bad world.

And the second:

"We're confronted with the often simple requests of these small beings (whom we love immeasurably), and yet their pleas seem to be coming from a galaxy far away, from the planet "slow." The two- or three-year-old asking for the same story to be read again and again becomes an eight-year-old who wants to tell you the plot of a movie in such remarkable detail that the retelling will surely take longer than the movie itself. You've figured out a complicated car-pool schedule that requires split-second timing, but saves you a roundtrip or two per week. The whole enterprise grinds to a halt each morning around two laces that will not be tied, or one head of hair that cannot be brushed, or one backpack that is always -- but always -- missing something."

Wow, that's exactly it. Those two laces.

Alchemy

So I have found a magical formula, a balance of what I take in and what I do that helps me:

1) Feel healthy
2) Be productive
3) Slowly but consistently lose weight

Of course these are not conclusive results because I have only been at it for three weeks, but here it is:

1) No wheat or dairy
2) Limited concentrated sugars (I have a weakness for dark chocolate, and for honey, but I indulge within reason)
3) Limited starch
4) No caffeine at all (not even decaf coffee)
5) Thyroid medicine (T3 + T4)
6) Adrenal support herbs (licorice, et al)
7) Cortisol Manager*
8) No strenuous exercise **

*At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, this supplement has changed my life. It helps me switch off at night, but it isn't a heavy, dopey feeling. I can get up in the middle of the night to help the kids if I need to, and then I can come back to bed and go right back to sleep. Basically I feel like this is undoing the harmful parts of what happened to my sleep when I had tiny babies. I don't wake up in a panic at 2am anymore, but if I set my alarm for 5am or 6am to get up a little early, I can. And if I want to sleep until 7am or 8am, I can do that too. I feel like it's my choice how I sleep, rather than a game of roulette. And with so much good sleep, I wake up rested. I haven't been through that exhausted-yet-wide-awake torture since I started taking it.

**I know, right?? I found out the other week that when your adrenaline/cortisol situation is all whackadoo like mine is, strenuous exercise actually makes things worse -- it triggers a cortisol response, which then locks down your fat and doesn't allow your body to burn it (because the body thinks I am running from saber-tooth tigers, so it has to hold onto that fat because who knows when I will get to eat again, with all that running). Who knew, right?? It does explain why my efforts at losing weight for a wedding last year were completely unsuccessful, and why I lost five pounds over Christmas last year when I gave up exercising for a few weeks. I never put it together, though, because who would ever think that exercising less would help me burn fat?

I am actually used to the eating plan at this point, and while occasionally I have to have a "gluten free" version of an old favorite, for the most part I don't even miss bread or cake, etc. I find that I am eating a *lot* of protein... like, a *LOT* of protein. I actually feel a little guilty about it because it's such a Western thing to do, but it works? I ate two tilapia filets today for a midmorning snack, which is about 40g of protein. Wow. But it was good. I am a huge fan of fish these days.

A great advantage to the new eating plan is that when you are not eating grains at all, it can actually be challenging to get all your calories for the day. So a few times a day I will just wantonly drizzle extra-virgin olive oil on whatever I am eating, and man, I love that. I would so much rather have olive oil than bread. In fact, that's a weird development (which perhaps I commented on earlier?) -- wheat and flour seem gross to me now, like eating glue or paste. Instead I spend a lot of time craving grilled fish and zucchini, and curry. Oh, curry. I want curry all the time. The exception to these healthy-cravings is when I am very stressed. Then, I still want sweet squishy cakes and mac 'n' cheese. But the cravings pass quickly enough, and I can still hunker down on a bar of dark chocolate should the need arise.

The weight loss so far has not been shocking in itself -- just a few pounds -- but the shocking part of it for me is that it has been steady, and it has continued at its normal pace in spite of Thanksgiving. Weird, right? I will happily accept weight loss of only a half pound a week, when it keeps marching on. At this rate I'll be at my goal in a year. Since I had Norah, I haven't been able to steadily lose weight on any plan at all, and I think taking the slow road is the way to go.

So that's where I am right now -- oh, that, and neck-deep in essays to grade, catching up from a week of no childcare. It's still within possibility, though. Again, slow and steady wins the race.

(On a side note, are happy blog posts boring?? Where is the angst that drives my writing??!? I will have to dig deeper, I suppose. :D )

The Good, The Bad, The Just Plain Gross

Taking a moment to myself in the midst of childhood illness, and all of the work (mostly laundry) that it entails.

THE GOOD:
Getting my adrenaline and cortisol under control has helped me face the past 4 days of cleaning up puke and other various unmentionable things without really getting too stressed. Of course I am flipping tired of it, but in general I have been able to stay pretty even-keel, including last night which was very exciting as I was finalizing my grades for three classes of students in between changing sheets and santizing everything, over and over (4 times in one day).

THE BAD:
I haven't been able to have any childcare this week, which means I do all my work (teaching 3 accelerated sections of college comp) when the kids are asleep. This throws my sleep schedule off and makes it difficult to get things done without sacrificing a lot of rest, which of course I need in order to keep my adrenaline/cortisol under control. So it feels like I am choosing between money and health, but I need money in order to be healthy, and I need health in order to be able to earn money. So there's a quandary for you. Praying that I can stay on the right side of that equation. Looking for the little things to be grateful for (this sickness: no respiratory issues) (called into my tutoring gig this week: more time to clean house, which I need) (and of course the ever-present: blessed with flexible employment).

It's a constant juggling act, and as soon as I get something handled, something else crumbles apart. I'm coming to understand that this is the constant state of motherhood -- something will always be a horrifying wreck, and something else will be an unexpected delight.

Just keeping the plates spinning and, in the immortal words of those old-timey poets,

Just hoping for no more vomit tonight...
Just hoping for no more tonight.