Watching a TED talk by one of my favorite journalists, AJ Jacobs, in which he describes his year-long quest to follow several paths of healthful, self-improvement he can find……from following the teachings of the bible, to exercise, to reading the entire encyclopedia, to eliminating germs, to wearing a helmet at all times (to pretty hilarious results).

His takeaway?  None of it means a darn thing without the single most important ingredient:  JOY.  If no pleasure is derived from your lifestyle, it does not actually lead to healthfulness.

Next in my news feed, serendipitously, was the new ad for the Honda CR-V, which features Matthew Broderick reprising his Ferris Bueller role; still very young-at-heart , continuing to take his “day off”, well after he’s left high school.

“Life is packed with things you have to do” he says, “but sometimes you have to live a little!”, as he’s about to take a playful plunge on a roller coaster.

So I propose this: Open up your Google Calendar.  Pick one day, say, every six weeks.  Designate it to be Ferris Bueller Day.  And go look for joy and novelty and peace and beauty.

Your health may depend on it.

Now it was our turn to do the same.  Fair’s fair, right?

I’d sat for a few test photos four months previously, so that we could mock up the image and number and get a visual sense of what we were doing with this project.

My number at that time was 128.

Test shot - 128 pounds

I was about a month shy of fully weaning my second child, but my weight had held steady around 128 for a long enough time that that just seemed like my body’s number.  I had reported this number on my blog a month previously, which had mortified me.

Why? 128’s not so bad, right?  Right. But I had no perspective.  For most of my adult life, my weight fluctuated between 105 and 124.   At 105, I was overly skinny; I didn’t feel attractive or womanly, and was often being told to “eat a burger or something”.  At 124, I always felt embarrassed, pudgy, overindulgent.  Now I was 4 pounds heavier and that was the weight that I was fated to report to the world.
So the embarrassment washed over me; I published it and I didn’t die.  In fact, because I didn’t die, the embarrassment ebbed, and I could finally see it for the “no big deal” that it was.

But now, standing in front of the camera for reals, for the shot with which my weight would be published in book form, I was 130.

I had weaned my child, then quickly lost about 3 pounds.  But then, also pretty quickly, I gained it back.  And then a little more.  When the scale first went to 130, I assumed that I had just eaten too much.

But it stayed there.

I wasn’t doing anything at all differently.  Same basic daily intake of food, same basic exercise; same healthy lifestyle.  It even cracked the low 130s on a few occasions.

And it stuck around and became my new number.  My body had just settled after the birth and weaning of my second child at 130’s doorstep.

This is 12 pounds above my trusty pre-pregnancy weight of 118.

This is my biology in charge.

And I’m fine with it.  Happy.

Our culture and its media seem to have gotten a firm handle on how weight is lost, and what we must do to our bodies in order to reduce their size.

But wouldn’t we all be better off if we also had a handle on how weight is gained?  It’s almost as if our fear of weight gain is so strong that nobody seems to venture much into the territory of how and why our bodies gain (and retain) weight.

“Too many cheeseburgers” is just lazy or resistant thinking.

We are animals.  We have a biology.  That is wired a certain way from birth.  That is optimized for our very survival.  That has very many moving parts, all designed to keep us nourished and protected based on the genes that we received at conception; the genes that see us through all phases of life.

My weight fluctuates by the day and week, but 5 months after the shoot, I remain pretty solidly at 130.

I will not ever seek to weigh 118 pounds again.  Or 128, for that matter.  To do so would involve fighting with my basic biology, and pivot me instead towards an UNhealthy routine; fixating me on a number for direction rather than a way of life.

Instead, all of my focus goes to having and maintaining a healthy and happy lifestyle, knowing that I’m doing my best and the rest is up to my genes.
But I owe all of this confidence to the simple fact that I made my weight public.  And in making it public, I owned it.  That was my tipping point to allow me to focus instead on the all-important big picture, rather than the niggling insecurities fed to me by the fluctuations on the bathroom scale.

I am 130.

The book shot - 130 lbs. Notice a difference? There is none.

superwoman byالنار السوداء

Where I am at 41:

I’m pretty firmly rooted in tradition.  But still open to new traditions.

There are plenty of things that I am still learning in my life.

How to be playful
How to be spontaneous
How to be comfortable in my own skin
How to fully love and be loved
How to be present in the lives of others
How to cook an excellent meal from ingredients that are already in my pantry, without a recipe

And plenty of things in which I feel some sense of mastery:

How to be patient
How to pick my battles
How to take calculated risks
How not to sweat the small stuff
How to choose all things carefully
How to see things in the big picture
How to be confident
How to listen
How to be open minded

Some of these things are in direct opposition to each other, so I’m pretty sure that will keep things lively in my life for a while to come.

His little hands grab firmly to my pant leg as I turn to go.  I glance back at him; his eyes well up with tears as his arms outstretch to me, like a sunflower.  When I make only tentative movements, he begins to jump up and down wildly.

“I don’t want to go to school”. He whispers in my ear as I crouch back down to comfort him, his eyes searching the room ahead.

It’s the second week of his new class.

“Usually worse than the first”, the teacher says with a wink, over her shoulder with a cadre of other kids nipping at their heels, bidding for attention.

“Just let us know how you’d like to handle this”

How I would like to handle this.  Love is a dance, I say to myself.  To and fro; synchronicity, and discord.  He’s moved towards me and I’m trying to move away, but I’ve inadvertently stepped on his heart.

Can you help me pick it back up? It’s too close to my feet! I want to say to the teachers, but what comes out is “Thanks, but we’ll be OK”.

In that moment, I try hard to see the big picture; the dueling needs for security and independence that are fighting it out in both of our brains.  We need one another.  We need different things, too.  Love is a dance.

I hold him tightly and rock him back and forth, too proud to tell the teachers that I don’t actually know how to handle this.  I close my eyes and breathe him in; wet pebbles, biscuits and warm milk.

More parents shuffle in the classroom, and in clockwork motion, remove the coats from their children, hang them up, give kiss goodbye, and walk out the door, their hard soled shoes tapping out the seconds as we perch there together on the floor.  Click-clock.

On her way out, one mother stops her clockwork gait to lean down to me and, in a low voice she says,

“It’s a band-aid”, gesturing to our frozen-in-time embrace, “Rip it off”.  And just like that, my primal trance is broken; we have to keep moving.

And I am somehow carried out the door with the click clock of the other parents, moving with a tailwind at this impulse that is not my own.  He is reaching for me, the volume of his voice rising as I open the door to leave “Mmmmmmommmmmmmyyyyy!”.

And I am out the door.  Synapses in my brain firing, forming new pathways; I feel as if I have done something terribly wrong.  Out into the falling snow and piercing cold.

Later in the afternoon I arrive back at the same door to pick him up, and find him sprawled out in the center of the room’s carpet, playing with a dollhouse, busily rearranging little tables and chairs for the dolls to have their breakfast.

“I don’t want to go home”, he’s now saying, as I’m reaching for his coat. The teacher approaches and opens her hands to reveal a folded piece of red construction paper and two little pink hearts.

“We were about to make a card with these.  Why don’t you take them home with you?” She says.

I reach for them, trying to grab all three pieces while holding his still-empty coat.  The two pink paper hearts fall, fluttering onto the floor below.

“Can you pick those up for me?” I ask him.

“Sure, Mommy.”  And with that, he delicately retrieves the two hearts and deposits them, safe and sound, into the red construction paper card.

“Let’s go now.”

Dear Body,

It is only in my 40th year that I realize how long I’ve taken you for granted.

It’s been like an arranged marriage, you and I.  We were presented to each other at birth, and it has been our job to walk together through this life.  You are my vessel and I am your steward.  Together, we could do anything.  The world was our oyster.

We started out well on our journey: learning as a team how to move around and be joyful in our life together.  Running, playing, working as a team to get full enjoyment out of everything.

But we haven’t really worked together very well since then, have we?  And I know that it’s my fault.  It’s easy for me to point my finger at our culture and our media as the bad influence, which at every turn, tries to place a veil of shame between you and I.

As a result, as soon as I realized that I was expected to have a beautiful appearance, I started to pay attention to you only when I thought you were doing something wrong.  And even then, the attention would take the form of trying to “fix” whatever wrong I believed you to be incurring.

I believed that you were too big in some places, and too small in others.  I believed that your skin was the wrong shade and too blotchy.  Hair texture wrong.  And I tried very hard, every day, to convert you.  I spent a lot of money.  But I was exasperated at the end.  You were just gonna be the way you were gonna be.  And the way that you were gonna be was patently not like the photoshopped models that were used to advertise what beauty should look like.  And I was stuck in this daily cycle of trying to reinvent you as that impossible standard that the magazines were showing me.

So, shame then.  You were my inescapable daily announcement to the world that I was not perfect.  Here I am, Ms. imperfect.

And you did things.  Things that made me crazy.  Getting hungry for the wrong things.  Not digesting properly.  Getting sick.  Farting.  Stinking.  Menstruating.  Getting tired at the wrong time.  You were a real drag sometimes.

Luckily, I could do my best to fix that, too: Tums, deodorant, Beano, coffee……money could buy me an arsenal of products to fix your inconvenient ills.  I’d show you who’s boss.

It wasn’t until well into my third decade that you showed me what wonderful things you were capable of doing all on your own: and that came in the form of two beautiful bouncing baby boys.  It is this spark that brought us back together; forcing us to work as a team once again.  I had to take exceptionally good care of you so that you could take exceptionally good care of them.  The stakes were raised.

And I learned what it meant to give you a different kind of attention.  To stop the negative attention cycle and just listen carefully to what messages you were sending.  I had never really listened before.  And this profoundly changed my experience of what it was to be human.

You are a symphony, body, full of the sweetest melodies of sight, of taste, of touch.  Full of signals about how best to operate so that we can get synced up.   To be dynamic together.  And it kills me to think that you’ve been there all along in this marriage; waiting to participate fully while I’ve willfully shut you out.

No more.  I’ve been wrong about this for far too long.  That veil of shame?  In the garbage. We’ve got some catching up to do.

I am surrounded by the most wonderful people, and the most wonderful things in this life.  If you and I can work as a team again, just like in the old days, I know that we’ll be able to get the maximum enjoyment out of what’s left in our life together.

I’m proud of you.  And the world is our oyster.

If you recall my post from earlier this year which delved into the taboo of weight, here is its end result:  A book.  With pictures.  Of women just like you.  And the number that their scale read that morning.

You step on your bathroom scale and take a glance downward at the number the scale reads. But how do you process that information?
If you’re like most of us, you have anxiety about it no matter what the number is.
Perhaps you are ashamed of your weight because you feel that you need to lose 10 or 20 or 100 pounds to be closer to what your estimate of the “ideal” weight is. Perhaps you are ashamed of your weight because you are often teased for being so skinny.
Perhaps you have no idea what anyone else weighs either, so always feel that your weight is wrong, wrong, wrong. And as a result, you are insecure about it.
And that is tough. To let that number, which you feel is wrong, dictate how you feel about yourself. To let it interfere with your relationship to food, to exercise, to clothes, to each other. Sucking the joy out of those relationships which are meant to nourish us, protect us, and make us stronger.

But can it just be what it is? Can we, for once, own our weight and offer no apology? Would we burst into flames?

Our hypothesis was that making this private, embarrassing information public would be a helpful thing. That it would give the rest of us some kind of real-life compass when we’re staring down at our own bathroom scales; an example beyond the photoshopped 100lb models in the size zero jeans. That women of all sizes have the awesome; it’s not reserved for those of us close enough to the diabolical cultural standard, because the awesome comes from within. From our enjoyment of life, our families and friends, and the world around us.

The end result: A photobook featuring 24 women and the number that is their weight. Putting it out there for the world to see. No apologies. No hedging. Letting it be what is it is, and opening up the secret for you, so you can see that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, stigma be damned.

Surprise and serendipity await.

Read more about it and take a look at some of the images from the book

Check it out at Amazon.com

Check it out at Goodreads.com

Check it out at Barnes and Noble

Yes, with my new crown, I was officially becoming a Queen.  That seemed right.

But it got me wondering: why does no one aspire to be the Queen?  For all of the little girl culture surrounding Princesses, the goal never seems to be Queen.

Instead, it goes:  Meet Prince.  Become Princess.  Live happily ever after.

What gives, little girl culture?  What is ‘happily ever after’, anyway?  Why not have Queen as the ultimate goal?  Princess is a fine rank, but it really doesn’t come with any weight.  Once you’ve earned your chops as Princess, you ought to become Queen.

Rule that country.  Put your face on its dollar bills.  Toss your Royal weight around.

What better way to enter middle age?

Hold the phone!  There is a reason that does not include disinterest nor laziness!

I’ve been writing a regular column for Chambanamoms about our family’s adventures in househunting; please be sure to visit me over there every Thursday.

But there’s more:  a big reason that is soon to transform itself into a book.  A real, live book.  Sprung from one of the posts on this very blog.

Read all about it here, on its very own Tumblr page, and like it, if you so choose, on Facebook.

The House that Got Away

All told, I was there for about an hour.  Walking through, sighing heavily once again, just as I did when I first saw it…….only the sighs this time were not out of love, but of regret.  Okay, what the heck – they were still out of love, just a lot more bittersweet this time around.

The house was far emptier than it had been when I first saw it – not so much a composed symphony, as it had been, as some random notes played out from the 40 years that she had been inhabited by the Gladney family.  But I wanted to sort through all of those random notes so that I could pick something meaningful from the bunch to carry with me, and to remember her by.

I toyed with the idea of the period Empire secretary that had descended through their family – what a grand token that would be:

But what captured my heart during my walk through was something far smaller, far simpler.  And to me, it represents that feeling that I had about the house; in a way that’s almost inexplicable.  Something in its craftsmanship, something in the unexpected delight of it, of not having seen anything quite like it before, and being able to use it in my own life, starting right away:

The silver spoon

Now.  Can I get some closure with that?