6/28/2015 The World is but a Stage

Aleathia says:

"Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.” --H.H. Dalai Lama

This weekend I celebrated my 42nd birthday.  I have essentially, if I maintain good health, have lived half my possible life already.  It has been filled with so many events both sorrowful and joyful.  In the last 4 years I have been lucky enough to have Michael in my life helping me grow as a human, as a woman, and as a mother.

We have birthdays one day apart so we usually go away together to a cabin and celebrate life while also mourning the loss of his mother who took her own life on his birthday.  It has been my mission since I met him to help him find some sense of peace and happiness on his birthday again.  My life would be so much less without him.  This year was the first year his sorrow did not outweigh the grace of his birthday.

On these special weekends we have time to really talk uninterrupted, laugh, cry, make fools of ourselves without worry, and rejoice in the beauty of the lives we have created around us.  I find these trips vital to our friendship and our relationship.  He has said to me on many occasions that relationships are work and if they fall apart then not enough effort was put into it.  Each of us brings challenges to the table and both of us have had to find some zen in our hearts to bear the other on occasion, but never has it seemed like too much work.  Our relationship is always worth the effort.

My birthday consisted of torrential downpour from the time we woke up until the time we went to bed.  We were essentially cabin bound and the plans for hiking the woods thwarted, but we made the best of it.  Later in the evening he began to tell me that he felt our relationship was special because until he met me he felt as if he had never been truly loved by anyone.  I stood there in the kitchen with my heart breaking at this thought.  He is so talented and charming and funny.  He is a man of morals and a great thinker.  It was probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.  It was the best birthday present I have ever gotten.

To know you have made someone feel loved, loved so much they have to love you back in the same way is the most wonderful thing imaginable.  I am a lucky woman.  We are lucky in love.  I thank my stars for that every day.

6/21/2015 Happy Father's Day

Aleathia says:

As a child I knew I needed my parents.  They gave me food and shelter and safety.  It is hard to bring into concept when you are young how much more they are to you.  In my life, my time with my Pop has been sporadic and the spaces marked with long, sad pauses from both circumstance and stubbornness.

I remember bits and pieces from my young childhood.  He taught me to hold a gun, skin a deer, walk in the woods, appreciate nature, and understand history.  There are glimpses of moments from those times we were together and those glimpses were always filled with something very important.  Hidden lessons and morals and great swathes of character that my small mind could not process, but absolutely recognized.

After a long pause in our time together, we were reunited when I was 10 years old.  So much had changed, so much time had passed it was like having to meet a stranger you had been waiting your whole life to meet.  We were hesitant.  I was shy and scared, but it didn't take much to break that.  We spent 2 years being inseparable.  We watched Yankee games together and wrestling matches.  We took long walks where there was the most comfortable silences only broken by names of trees and information about Native Americans or other useful history.  There was fishing and camping by the river. There were summer's at work with him learning architecture, direction, map reading, hard labor, carpentry, painting, and patience.  There was lunch by the ocean and so much jazz my 10 year old brain didn't understand because at that time "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" was so much more interesting.


When I moved here to upstate New York it was the hardest decision I ever had to make.  I would leave him again and break his heart.  I will never get to know what my life could have been like, what I would have learned, but where I am now is such a wonderful place that it must have been the right journey.

As an adult, our relationship has been strained.  Part of this was my fault and part of it was his fault and part of it was my mother's.  She fed me stories that were not true and I believed them because she was my mother.  I never got to hear his side of them until my mother passed and how sad it makes that all that time was wasted.  But we have right now and that counts for something.

In the last year my relationship with my Pop has been growing.  We have been active in the space between us.  We have made an effort to set aside all the awkward pretenses of people who love each other, but don't know how to show it.  I have learned to let so much go.

All of those moments in my life where he has been present has shaped who I am as a woman.  All those little things that didn't seem very significant when they happened were just seeds planted in a young mind waiting for the right conditions to grow.  I will be 42 this year and I am still learning from my Pop.  So much of him makes up my character, so many of his qualities he bestowed upon me are the qualities that my friends and family like about me.  His influence is stronger than I believe he imagines and our time together in this history of our life has touched me.  It has made me a strong, confident woman.

Thank you Pop for your steadfast patience.  For your love.  It is more precious to me that you can imagine.  I can't wait to see you this summer.  I love you.

6/4/2015 Proud Mama Moments and Taking Charge of My Life

Aleathia says:

This has been a very busy time of year for me.  It seems that my little girl has grown up some and the events of her life have been taking up my time.  She recently got her braces removed.  I haven't seen her smile in two years and when I saw it I thought I was going to drop out.  The orthodontist did a great job, but more importantly, she did a great job.  Her teeth were not stained at the end and she made it a full two years without ever breaking a wire or needing a repair.  I was definitely impressed.

Chloe also participated in robotics this year.  It was the first time she ever came to me and asked, no told me, she was going to join a group.  It has been many years of encouraging and pushing for her to be a part of SOMETHING.  Her group started out with 4 students and 2 of them backed out leaving her and her partner to complete all the competition tasks themselves...this included building the robot, programming it, teaching it how to move, creating dance moves to music, and then countless time testing and readjusting until it was right.  Their hard work paid off and they placed 3rd overall out of all the participating teams which included high school students.

This same week she was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society for her academics, character, and service in the community.  It was very hard for me to keep from crying as they called her name.  Yes, I am a proud parent, but there are so many times that I have doubted myself and my approach to parenting.  I am by no means a Tiger mom.  I encourage and I make sure she endures whatever she signs up for, but I don't make her join things she does not enjoy just to satisfy my own needs for her to be "normal" or to "fit in".  She even dressed up for the event in a skirt, wore makeup, and allowed me to touch her hair long enough to put it in a bun.  These are milestones in their own right.

During all of this, I have been working feverishly on my Relay for Life projects.  I have suffered another loss in my family.  This time my 42 year old cousin passed away and I got word from my father that my Aunt Lilly's cancer has spread to her bones and she is not looking well.  My life has been a closely knit series of deaths over the last 5 years.  I wish it were getting easier, but I think the older you get the more your own mortality becomes apparent, especially when the ones dying are your age or younger.

Last month, in the midst of all of these things, I made a decision to change.  Since my mother's death I have slowly let myself go.  I was depressed, moody, and definitely comforting myself with food.  I woke up on day and looked in the mirror and started crying.  What had I let myself become?  I just kept eating and eating until I didn't care about my anger or my pain.  I am smart enough to know that this is no way to deal with my emotions.  I was self-medicating.  It may not seem dangerous but in this day in age when the looming threat of diabetes hovers over everyone, it is dangerous.

I knew I needed to make a change, but the thought of dieting creates so many problems for me.  Having been a survivor of an eating disorder the line between healthy dieting and obsessiveness is very, very thin.  The problem with most diets (as with religions) you feel like you are starving and if you have something you like it is considered "cheating" which really makes you feel even worse about yourself.  Even the lauded Weight Watchers gives me this feeling.  I cannot express how emotionally stressful this is to feel like you are the scum of the earth for having a brownie.

I set out to find something I could work with and in the age of apps I finally found one that works for me. Lose It! makes me  responsible to myself.  The program is simple. I set a goal for myself.  In this case I wanted to lose 1 pound a week to lose a total of 30 pounds.  That is not stressful, right? So, I eat food and I record the nutrients.  I am honest with myself.  I look at the actual portions and then eat a portion.  This is not stressful.  Over the last month I have reduced the size of my stomach again so when I am hungry, an actual serving size FILLS ME UP.

I have added exercise.  I walk or use the Wii to Just Dance or Wii Fit.  I try to purposefully move at least 30 minutes a day.  But what happens is I like food so when I want to eat something "naughty" I make choices in the day to eat less in other places or exercise more to gain calories back.  I have been on a 2150 calorie diet for a month and not once have I starved or felt bad about myself or thought "this is a problem".  If anything, I exercise more to feel better and enjoy the foods I love.  I eat pizza, pie, cheeseburgers, chips, and drink beer.  I do them in moderation which as we all know is the key to just about everything.

Today is my one month check in:

I have lost 12 pounds

I have lost 3.5 inches off my waist

I have lost 2.5 inches off my thighs

I have lost 1.5 inches off my hips (damn hips)

I have done this without starving or feeling completely obsessive.  My family does feel like my recording calories is ridiculous and they are tired of it, but for the first time in my life I feel like I'm in real and honest control of my life and the food in it.  It has always been a struggle for me, a shame, a dirty secret, a reason to keep people away from me.  Layers of fat provide protection both physically and emotionally, but what it also does is kill me with threats of diabetes, heart disease, and back problems.

Thanks for bearing with me in my lack of posts.  Life sometimes overturns art.  This, I cannot help.

Aleathia