Category: It IS all about me

How cool am I?

How cool am I? Why, thanks for asking. I am, in fact, way wicked cool. And terribly impressed with my sassy self at just this moment.

What’s got me so excited? Tickets to see Rush in concert, baby! The last great concert I need to see. I’ve been a Rush fan since I was ten years old and Moving Pictures came out – it was one of the first LP albums I ever owned. Geddy Lee is one of my personal heroes and Neil Peart is a demi-god. Rush!!

And not only am I cool enough to be going, but I’ve already got my tickets when they don’t even go on sale to the general public until Friday.

*pauses for ohs and ahs of befuddled wonderment and whispers of amazed curiousity*

I was futzing about on the ticketmaster.ca site, trying to figure out the prices, and I found something about advance fan-club sales. So I went on the Rush site, and followed the links on tour portion of the Web site. It gave me the secret code and I was in like Flynn! (And ya gotta know that only people who are so secure in their ultimate coolness are comfortable to use a phrase as hokey as “in like Flynn”, let me tell you.)

Rush! Me! In September! Squee!!

On waste and waist management

I’ve been trudging along on my healthy-living / weight-loss campaign. I was doing okay in fits and starts – didn’t lose anything for the month of January, lost steadily a pound a week through February and into March and then it happened. The pepperoni arrived and blew my diet all to hell.

I was doing so well on watching what I was eating, until the week I ate FOUR ENTIRE PEPPERONI STICKS. And not just those little ones, either, but the ones as long as your forearm. What the hell causes a normal person to eat FOUR pepperoni sticks in a week (cough cough four days cough), you ask? My brother has this totally amazing butcher near his house, and he makes spicy pepperoni to die for. My folks visited one weekend and brought no less than six pepperoni sticks home for me.

I’m telling you, that stuff is meat mixed with crack. I’d cut myself a small piece and put it back in the fridge, intentionally hiding it behind other stuff so I couldn’t see it. I’d finish the bite I’d cut and start smacking my lips, salivating for more. Okay, I’d think, just another little piece, just a tiny bite. I’ll eat less at dinner. And after cutting off some more, I’d put the pepperoni away and the knife in the dishwasher and I’d still be back in the fridge five minutes later looking for more. And once it was half gone, well, there’s no sense in leaving it around for me to agonize over all night, right? Might as well polish it off. And at about the 3/4 mark, with my mouth tingling from the spiciness, I’d start to think that maybe I should stop now, but I wouldn’t be able to stop and so I’d just eat the whole damn thing. And then I’d have a righteous bellyache, because that’s really a disgusting amount of meat and fat(*) to consume as a snack. And yet, the next day I’d be right back at it, cutting myself just the tiniest sliver of the next one, just for a taste.

In the end, after four straight days of my pepperoni-stick-a-day habit, I threw the last two sticks in the garbage. I just couldn’t garner the willpower to resist them. I’m not kidding when I speculate that they are made with crack. Yummy, spicy, fatty crack. I gained two pounds that week.

Throwing food away is something new for me, and I’m very torn about it. I’ve been doing it since January, and I honestly think it’s one of the liberating concepts that have helped me actually lose weight this time. More than just leaving food on my plate, I’ve started to throw junk food away. I’ll eat a few chips and throw the rest of the bag away. Even more liberating, I’ll take a bite out of a cookie and throw the rest away. This works for me largely because I often only want a taste of something. Other than the crack-filled pepperoni, I’ve realized that I’m usually satisfied with most treats after a single bite or two.

The waste bothers me, of course. I’ve mentioned before that I have Scottish and Dutch roots, which combine to make me ruthlessly frugal when it suits my needs, and the idea of actually throwing away perfectly good food that I’ve spent perfectly good money to acquire disturbs me on a fundamental level. My grandmother on my father’s side would be rolling over in her grave right about now. Like so many people of her generation, she didn’t waste a scrap of food (or anything else for that matter) and the idea of taking a bite out of a cookie and simply tossing the rest of it in the garbage would have been horrifying to her.

But I remember reading a while back an article about controlling your eating that asked the question: are you a garbage can? When you are satisfied with something, you have two options: you can throw it away, or you can continue to eat it. When you continue to eat it, you become the garbage can, because the food has outlived it’s utility to you. I’ve really started to internalize this concept lately, and I try to find the point at which I’m satisfied and sacrifice the rest to the garbage can. It’s strangely empowering.

(Saving it for later is always an option, I suppose, but to me it defeats the purpose. Especially if something is a treat, like chips or a cookie, I will obsess about it if I know it is in the cupboard waiting for me. Throwing it away eliminates the temptation.)

And yes, I suppose simply not buying it in the first place is probably the most sensible option, but my willpower is a fearsome beast and if I can trick it into being placated with this simple sleight-of-hand, I’m willing to pay the price. Bottom line is, although the the pace has been glacial, the weight has been coming off. It took me three weeks to work off the two pounds of pepperoni weight, but I’m back on track.

(*) According to my favourite nutritional database, a single 10 inch (25 cm) pepperoni stick contains: 187% of your recommended daily sodium intake, 202% of your recommended daily saturated fat intake, more than half your daily calorie intake and a whopping 156% of your recommended daily fat intake. Yikes!

The interview meme

I think the success of any interview gives much more weight to the questions than the answers. That’s why I jumped on the chance to play along with the interview meme that’s sweeping through the Momosphere right now when Bub and Pie asked if anyone wanted to be an interviewee. She’s always thoughtful and clever and I was curious to see what questions she’d come up with for me. I wasn’t disappointed – they’re great questions. Now let’s see if I can do them justice with my answers! (And don’t forget to go back and read B&P’s answers to the questions posed to her by Mouse.)

1. You’re very open on your blog – it’s one of the things that draws readers in, makes us feel we know you. Experiencing your pregnancy alongside you and then the tragedy of your miscarriage was an intense experience for me as a reader. Do you ever regret the permanent record you’ve left here of your pregnancy in posts that now have a different meaning in light of your miscarriage?

There’s one post in particular I wrote maybe a week before the miscarriage when I was around 15 weeks or so, talking about how I thought maybe I could feel the baby moving. In retrospect, that was pretty unlikely, as given what we found out, the baby had likely died by that point. I called it “The Quickening” and I still get a lot of google traffic on that word (sigh, probably more now that I’ve highlighted it again. Darn spider-bots.) and it always made me cringe. I almost took it down, just because I was feeling a little bit bitter about it showing up in the referral logs, but I never did. That’s as close as I come to regret over any of it.

All of that stuff I wrote while I was pregnant was true as it was happening, and was a completely honest representation of what I was going through at the time, so no, I don’t regret any of it. It’s still hard for me to go back and read some of it, but I can’t say that I wish I didn’t write it, or that I wish I had thought differently at the time. I’ve always believed in sharing my joy while it lasts, which is why I could never wait to announce a pregnancy. Sad times may come, so live your moments of joy with enthusiastic abandon while you can.

2. Like me, you were married unhappily once, and are married much more happily now. Do you feel that your first experience in marriage helped shape your second?

Funny, my answer to this question after thinking about it was not my knee-jerk, first-blush response. I don’t write a lot about my ex because he’s not around to defend himself, and frankly, I’m done giving him any power over me, even all these years later. Suffice to say, he didn’t always treat me as well as he should have. He cheated on me, for one. Told his best friend that the best way to ‘train’ his new wife was to keep putting her down until she stopped fighting back, for another (and he practiced what he preached). And he was, in the most clinical sense of the definition, a pathological liar. He would lie even when the truth was a perfectly acceptable answer. He would lie for the sake of lying, even when there was no doubt whatsoever he’d get caught in his lie. And he lied to me about a lot of stuff – everything from “I took the movies back to the video store today” when he didn’t, to “I didn’t take your bank card out of your wallet and use it to take money out of your account” when he did, to “I didn’t sleep with her” when he did.

So yes, living with that for my most formative years (started ‘steady’ dating when I was 16, got married when I was 20, got divorced at 24) definitely affected the relationships that followed. When Beloved and I had been living together for a couple of years but not yet married, I went to see a psychologist for a while, and we worked through a lot of the crap I was still carrying around with me. She helped me understand that it was not okay for him to force sex through guilt and withholding of affection, which he did too often, and that I was not at ‘fault’ for his lies, his adultery, his difficulty in holding a job, and so many other things. Truly, the dozen or so sessions I had with that psychologist were one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.

All this to say that I was carrying a lot of emotional baggage by the time Beloved and I moved in together – but not in the ways I might have expected. I’ve never had trust issues with Beloved, for example. I trust him blindly, with my whole heart, and always have. It’s a kind of triumph of naivety and love over experience. But I do have residual control issues. For example, because I could never trust my ex to pay the bills, I must be in charge of the family finances now – I can’t cede control of that over to Beloved.

I was ready to answer this question with the many ways that the practice marriage has affected my marriage with Beloved, but I’m pleased to see that in the analysis, maybe I overestimated them. I’m sure there are a thousand other ways, large and small, that have left a residual imprint, but it’s surprisingly difficult to analyze what comes as a result of the ‘practice’ marriage and what was inherently me in the first place.

3. Who do you consider to be the sexiest Canadian politician?

I have three answers for this question, with varying degrees of qualifiers. To answer the question straight up, the sexiest current politician is Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison, which I conveniently happened to decide not that long ago when I saw him on the Rick Mercer Report.

Now, if we can expand the parameters a bit, as he hasn’t yet run for his seat in Papineau, but when he officially becomes a politician, I’m going to have to switch my allegiance to Justin Trudeau as the sexiest politician. I’ve had a crush on him since long before the moving eulogy he delivered for his father.

And if we can extend the definition of politics to include speechwriters and communicators for national leaders, my vote goes to former Liberal campaign blogger Scott Feschuk. I have a wicked literary crush on him.

4. Severus Snape: friend or foe?

Ugh. I don’t know!! I’ve been re-reading the books to refresh my memory of the details of the stories in anticipation of the July arrival of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As I read, I’ve been trying to glean any little bit of meaning or insight to this very question in all the scenes where Snape appears.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!! If you have not yet read to the end of Half Blood Prince, STOP READING and skip to the next question!

I’ve been pondering for two years now whether Snape was simply fulfilling his destiny, or some sort of obligation to Dumbledore, or whether he was truly evil all along, or whether he was possessed by Voldemort. I don’t know! I’m too Pollyanna to think that Snape is a truly evil character who willfully killed Dumbledore, and Rowling is after all writing what are in essence children’s books.

My bet is that he was under some sort of spell or obligation. I’m itching to read the next book, though. Conveniently, it arrives the first day of my two-week summer vacation. Coincidence or excellent planning on my part? I’ll be torn the whole way through, racing to the end to find out once and for all what happens, but slowing myself down because there won’t be another helping of Harry Potter after this one is consumed. Peanut gallery, what say you?

5. How do you think birth order affects the personalities of your children?

Another good question! I can definitely see that my boys seem to fit into their birth-order personality stereotypes, for lack of a better word.

Tristan, the first born, is a people-pleaser, and a little high strung. He’s keen and tends to be serious more often than not, and plays happily by himself. Simon, on the other hand, is mellower. He’s much more social and outgoing, and much more flexible.

This has been great fun to answer. If you’d like me to interview you, let me know in the comments. I don’t promise to be as prompt, let alone as insightful, as Bub and Pie was in sending her questions off to me, but I’ll do my best.

My 15 minutes in Chatelaine

Thanks to my colleague Rebecca, who was the first to realize that the Chatelaine article I mentioned is already posted online! No more skulking around the magazine racks at every grocery store and news stand in town, waiting for the paper copy to arrive. Er, not that I was doing that, of course.

Anyway, it’s with great pleasure and excitement (and a certain lack of subtlety) that I happily point you toward the article in the online May edition of Chatelaine magazine, In vitro we trust – coming soon to a paper edition near you! In my humble opinion, even past the bits that feature me, it’s a well balanced and informative article about the state of reproductive technologies in Canada. It’s quite long, though – nine screens’ worth – so grab a cup of your beverage of choice before you settle in if you want to read the whole thing.

There’s nothing about our story that you haven’t already read here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here (shameless, aren’t I?) but it still tickles me to see it all laid out like that in somebody else’s words. I was pleased to see that the article manages to shout out both boys and blog by name (sadly, without a direct link. Oh well.)

Even though we knew it was coming and discussed it in advance, I still cringed just a bit when I saw the bit outing Beloved’s low sperm count. We’ve come a long way from the days immediately after our diagnosis, when we could barely discuss it between ourselves. By now, of course, he has become rather acclimatized to me discussing our most intimate moments with the widest possible audience – in blog, on national TV (not once, but twice!) and now in a national magazine as well. He took it in stride, and in fact insists I correct the record by clarifying that it’s not so much that his sperm are not copious, but that (in his words, not mine) they are “stupid”. The fertility doctors used the slightly more clinical term, “of impaired morphology”, but you get the point.

All this to say, in my usual belaboured and roundabout way, that I’m terribly proud to be featured in the article. In case you hadn’t gleaned that from my oh-so-understated neon billboard of a post about it.

Dancing with Beloved

Beloved and I were watching Dancing with the Stars the other night. I didn’t actually mean to watch it, I just haven’t yet gotten out of the habit of tuning in to CTV on Mondays at 8:00 to watch Corner Gas. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, quality television, but there are worse ways to spend an hour than seeing that (relatively) famous people are almost as clumsy and awkward as I am. Almost.

Watching it reminded me that I don’t think I’ve ever told you the story of the time Beloved and I took ballroom dancing lessons. I need to back up a little bit and explain to you that Beloved is a wonderful dancer. He’s got a great sense of rhythm, and he’s graceful. He loves to dance. Me, not so much. I like dancing in theory, don’t mind going out and gyrating with the crowd to an uptempo beat, but I’m a bit stiff when it comes to actually dancing with someone, as opposed to simply dancing near them. Dancing near someone, it doesn’t really matter if you flail madly and thrust randomly. Dancing with someone is a skill I’ve never acquired.

Anyway, I got it into my head that we (ahem, I) needed to take ballroom dancing lessons for our wedding. Now, if one were inclined to make an observation, one might note at this point that our wedding reception was a barbeque, a picnic in a park, and there was not a lot of dancing planned. None, in fact, save for the traditional ‘first dance’. But that didn’t really factor in to our my epiphany that we needed to take ballroom dancing lessons. And Beloved really is an agreeable sort of fellow. He was game for it, and so we signed up for lessons at our local community centre.

Now, I have to interrupt this story one more time for one more point of clarification. To truly appreciate this story, you have to understand the rather unique dynamics of the relationship between Beloved and me. He is, as I said, an agreeable sort of fellow, which is quite a perfect match for my inherent bossiness. I like to be in charge, he tolerates my enthusiastic if not occassionally misguided leadership. Most of the time.

So, ballroom dancing. We were on our third, maybe fourth lesson. We had covered the jive, and the tango, and a bit of salsa. We were working on the waltz, which is perhaps one of the most basic of all the ballroom dances. After 45 annoying and fruitless minutes of stepping on each others’ toes, banging foreheads into chins, and general klutziness, Beloved finally threw down his arms in frustration.

“Do you want me to go into the bathroom and yank it off so you can wear it for a while, or is it MY turn to lead now?” he asked. There was no doubt in my mind what ‘it’ was.

Poor Beloved. It’s not always easy being married to me. And I still couldn’t waltz to save my soul.

Pressure

This working and mothering thing? Not so easy.

Okay, so most of the time, we achieve a reasonable balance. I admit, my job is easy on the family in that I work early hours, am home most days by 4:30, and almost never work overtime.

This week? Flaming exception. Between last Tuesday and yesterday, I put in more than 18 hours of overtime, including a marathon 12 hour stretch on Sunday.

There was a considerable amount of mommy-guilt on my part, being away from the family that much, but with a remarkably small amount of grumbling, Beloved picked up the slack. Dinners were made, nobody ran out of underwear, and while the cupboards are now stocked with Lucky Charms and Bear Paws and Oreos instead of, say, things we can actually eat for dinner and the house looks like warring tribes pitched a four-day battle in it, we made it through the worst of it. I’ve been loving the work I am doing, and really enjoying the challenge of crisis communications.

Yesterday, I had to drop everything on the backs of my colleagues because Tristan spiked a fever so bad we were doing the two-hour rotation of Motrin and Tylenol and I had to stay home with him.

His fever isn’t entirely better today, so Beloved and I played a round of “why my work is more important than your work.” In the end, I gave up and called the caregiver and asked her if Tristan could come, with the fever. She said of course, I hung up the phone and promptly burst into tears. This is the caregiver we are letting go. I’m afraid I’m making a mistake. I should be home with Tristan when he’s sick. I have a crapload of work to do today, and there’s no sign of it letting up for the next week at least, maybe two.

Did I mention my in-laws are on their way for a two-day visit and will arrive in time for dinner?

Edited to add: the caregiver called shortly after lunch, saying Tristan was crying and asking for me. Within 10 minutes, I was on my way, thanks in no small part to the help of my boss, who finds more ways to endear herself to me each day. By the time we got home an hour later, he was – of course – feeling better. The boys are currently watching Toy Story 2 and eating popcorn, calling each other Captain Underpants and Doctor Diaper.

A Thinking Blogger – that’s me!

I’ve been had an honour bestowed upon me which is also a tag, a meme that is an award. Because you know this motherhood thing? It’s all about the multitasking. The clever, witty and insightful Mad Hatter has kindly tagged me with the Thinking Blogger’s Award.


Nice, eh? She nominated me on the basis of my little rant on child care, but she said that it was your comments, from all points on the political spectrum, which increased the “think factor.” I’ve long known this little blog of mine wouldn’t be half the fun it is if it weren’t for you guys, so we can share this little award.

And speaking of sharing, it’s all about the sharing. Now I’m supposed to come up with five other Thinking Bloggers worthy of nomination. Except at least three of my favourites have already been tagged. Am I allowed to repeat? No? Okay, but I’m a little behind on my blog reading and this is spreading like the flu through preschool, so I hope I’m quick enough.

First off, I’d like to tag Phantom Scribbler. I heart Phantom. She has a way of using her own life as a lens to examine some weighty issues, and while she’s opinionated as hell, she’s never didactic. I like that in a smart blogger. But I’m nominating her for this particular honour because of a recent post written in response to a recent article in New York Magazine called the “Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids.” I thought the idea of over-praising your kids was totally bogus until I read her post and the subsequent comments from the Pixies. One of many, many posts that I’ve found myself contemplating long after my browser window was closed.

Next, I’d like to tag Kerry at Popwatch Canada for her post on religion a week or so back. She also posts great Grey’s Anatomy recaps, and has an obsession with Justin Timberlake that continues to perplex me, but threaded through the shiny bits about pop culture, Kerry blogs some pretty interesting ideas and opinions. And I’m not just saying that because she writes my performance reviews, or because my boys are both in love with her and she may yet end up to be my daughter-in-law some day.

My next nomination goes not to a particular post, but to the blog The Smartmouth Mombie in general. For starters, I love any blog with a permanent preamble that says something like “This is what a feminist writes like.” Like the other blogs I’ve tagged so far, Chris strikes a lovely balance between weighty thought pieces and ‘minutiae of mothering’ pieces.

Sadly, my next nominee has gone on temporary hiatus. Angry Pregnant Lawyer is freshly back at work after maternity and painfully sleep deprived. I already miss her quick wit and cutting sarcasm, and I have learned a lot about American culture and politics from her. And yes, that’s a compliment!

And finally, my last tag goes to JF Scientist at A Natural Scientist. I’ve only just started reading this blog, but Jenny writes, according to her tag line, about “science, education, feminism and religion.” I love love love her “ask a scientist” series, and the incredibly wide scope of her posts. I never know what I’ll find when I drop by, but I am assured I’ll learn something – often something I didn’t know I needed to know, but sure enough, turns out I did.

Wow, this was way harder than I thought. I tried to wander away from my usual favourites with this process. Thanks again to Mad Hatter for nominating me, and if reading my nominees makes you crave even more thinking bloggers, there’s five more back at Mad Hatter’s place, and five more at Bub and Pie’s place, too. I’m not going to get any work done at this rate!

Donder op!

My brother and his family were in town last weekend for Simon’s birthday. We were having dinner at my parents’ place, the adults lingering over dinner while the children played noisily nearby, and it was a moment of perfect contentment.

My brother was telling us about one day a few weeks ago, he was sitting in his car when a man with a very thick Dutch accent approached him and asked my brother if he knew what the word on his car licence plate meant (he has our family surname, Donders, on his personalized plate.) Caught off guard by the gentleman’s agitation, my brother replied that to his knowledge it means “thunder” in Dutch. The man said that in fact, it was a very offensive word to someone from South Africa, and walked off in a huff.

In my family mythology, we know that donder means thunder (my dad was a professional percussionist when I was growing up. Isn’t Lou Thunder a great stage name for a drummer?), and of course I have subjected you more than once to the Donder / Donner reindeer debate.

But “donder” as offensive? I had to do more research. My first stop was an e-mail to the witty and clever Tertia, who writes the blog So Close and happens to be the only person I “know” who lives in South Africa. . (Tertia and I are both haunted the message boards at IVF Connections, back in the day.) She passed me to her husband Marko, who wrote:

Donder in dutch means thunder as you have said, this is the literal meaning of the word. But it is also used loosely as a slang word for beating someone up. It is not really a very harsh swear word and should not be offensive to others unless they are very sensitive.

Curious, I kept searching the Internet, and found a few more interesting tidbits. From my general reading, to ‘donder’ someone means to rough them up, and the expresion ‘donder op’ is a general expletive that can range in meaning from ‘get out of here’ to ‘fuck off’.

From The Afrikaans Challenge – translating to English:

‘Donder’ is another very useful word, used as an all-purpose swearword, which again has no good English translation. Used as a verb, it can express any degree of roughing up. As a noun, it is a pejorative, as they politely say in dictionaries, to mean whatever you want it to mean.

Cool! All this time, I thought I was benignly named after a force of nature, or even one of Santa’s reindeer, but in fact, each time I say my name it’s a pejorative. If only I had known that in high school, I may have been less marginalized. (Stop snickering. I’m sure the popular kids would have been fascinated to be cornered at a school dance or party or other social event while I lectured to them about the origins and alternate meanings of my family name. They wouldn’t have thought me even more strange than they already did, I’m sure of it.)

And finally, when I came across this entry, I knew it was time to stop searching. I had found the One True Meaning of my name.

From Allwords.com:

donder (slang)
Etymology: Afrikaans, from Dutch
‘donderen’: to swear or bully
verb
dondered, dondering 1. To beat up or thrash someone.
noun
1. A scoundrel; a rogue.

Being a scoundrel and a rogue is so very much cooler than being named after one of Santa’s reindeer, don’t you think? And to think, for 37 years I’ve been blissfully oblivious to this secret and titillating meaning of my name. Some day, my boys are going to thank me for burdening them with those hyphenated surnames!

Progress?

For quite some time, I have been composing a very whiny post in my head. Very whiny. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Ahem. You may not have noticed, since I only blog about it every other day, that I’ve been working hard on this weight-loss thing. But you reading about it occassionally is not nearly so overwhelmingly annoying as me living with it has been. It seems like I’m fighting a battle with my willpower many, many times each day:

Whiner me: I don’t waaaant to work out.
Keener me: Oh, just do it and you’ll feel better.

Whiner me: But I worked out, now I really waaaaant that caramel pecan chocolate chip cookie!
(damn those caramel chocolate pecan cookies, they will be my undoing)
Keener me: No, no, no. You don’t need cookies. Have a piece of lettuce.

Whiner me: Oh but look, chips are on sale. Sale, I say. Chips… I love chips. Chips make me happy, and I deserve to be happy.
Keener me: NO CHIPS! Chips are evil. You are better than chips. Just say NO to chips.

Whiner me: Wah! I’ve been so good all day, I’m tired, I just want to order a pizza for dinner. And the boys won’t eat pizza unless it has double cheese and bacon. C’mon, throw me a bone here, it’s been a long day.
Keener me: Oh come off it. It will take 15 minutes to throw together a veggie stir fry. You can do it!

Lather, rinse and repeat every. single. day. Damn, I’m starting to hate ‘keener me’.

And it wouldn’t have been so very hard to keep up this internal argument if I were making progress. But every Saturday, I would step on to the scale at the gym, and every Saturday the needle would be magnetically drawn to the same place, a full 10 lbs heavier than I’ve ever been. I lost that one pound the first week, gained it back the second week, and it hasn’t budged in four long weeks. It has been, in a word, demoralizing. Why try if it isn’t making any difference? Why work out two or three times a week, why deny myself the treats, why stress myself out for NOTHING?

(Like I said, whiny. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)

BUT!

This Saturday, as I stepped on to the scale, I was braced for the disappointment. I centred my feet in exactly the same spot I always do, leaned forward the way I always do, and damn near fell off the scale when I saw it was down a full five pounds.

Five pounds? FIVE POUNDS? I lost five pounds in just one week?

So I stepped off the scale, did a little shuffle, and stepped back on the scale. I could barely bring myself to look. Still down five pounds.

I left the gym feeling a little shakey, and it wasn’t just from the 25 minutes full-tilt on the elliptical. I wanted to believe, wanted with my whole heart to believe it was true, and yet I couldn’t help but feel that someone was about to snatch this small victory away from me.

I’ve never actually been successful at weight loss before. I’ve lost weight due to stress (lost a bunch when I moved away from home the first time, lost so much when I went through my divorce that I took to saying I’d lost 225 lbs – 25 lbs off me, and another 200 lbs off my back) but I’ve never in the years of trying lost more than a pound or so. I’ve just kind of acclimatized to the new weight every couple of years.

Do you think it’s possible? Did I really lose 5 lbs last week? No wait, shhhhhh, don’t say anything. If I just never step on a scale again, I can live with only having met half my goal. I’m going to scratch this one off as a victory while I still can.