Objects In The Mirror May Appear Larger Than They Are

Anyone who has come out of an eating disorder is aware than the mind can play tricks. You may only weigh 90 pounds but when you look in the mirror your eyes are able to double or triple that until you take up the whole mirror. This playing with perception has never really left me though the days of dieting (or not eating) have long gone. Usually I am aware of my brain’s love of playing games and have a variety of tricks that I use to offset any craziness. Then pregnancy happened and that meant all of my little tricks became useless. Mostly because I was larger – 55 pounds larger and my body was no longer mine.

When I came out of the pregnancy in a fit of momentary madness I decided to clean my closet of all of my pre-pregnancy clothes as my hormone laden mind believed that there was no way that my body was ever going to fit those clothes again. So I packed everything up, pointedly ignoring Ryan’s gentle remonstrations to ‘maybe just put them away in the storage locker,’ and dropped the garbage bag off at the Salvation Army. I wore my maternity clothes, purchased some clothing on sale and continued on with my life. That was until the day my pants fell down as I was walking. Fortunately for everyone involved, Imogen and Sabine were the only witnesses and I managed to find a belt to hold the pants up. Cleaning out my closet I found a couple of pants that had escaped the purge and fortunately I had never had the heart to give up my skirts so I had something to wear that didn’t fall off. I was comfortable with the status quo until this week. Tomorrow I am going to a friend’s art opening and realised that I own nothing that is appropriate that fits.  Ryan put Imogen to bed and I went to the mall.

I actually argued with the salesperson who was helping me as she handed me a dress and I said that I needed to have a larger size and then grabbed one that was 3 sizes larger. She grabbed it back from me and gave me another dress one size larger. We continued this pattern as she helped me find a dress to wear. I took the dresses and went and tried them on. In the first one I felt NAKED. It wasn’t low cut, it had sleeves and hit just above the knee but I felt naked and realised that at some point I had disconnected from my body. What it did do was skim my body – a body that I no longer recognised as my own. The dress was SEXY and I am not sexy. I wound up getting another dress because I just couldn’t bring myself to commit to the SEXY dress. I left and went and bought some pants, tops and another skirt that fits me. By me, I mean the one that is actually in front of the mirror and not the one that I have been seeing in the mirror.

It was more of a sour grapes than an emerald green.

On Saturday we decided to have a family day and go to the Green Living Show. We were hoping to see something that we would be able to incorporate into the house. I was really hoping that there would be something on worm composting as I was hoping to start one this summer (assuming that the Strata lets me, I do know that there are rats, raccoons, coyotes and other wildlife living around us.) I was also hoping that there might be some booths devoted to food, cleaning and well things to do with living. What we got was rather disappointing. There was really not much of anything. We wandered around and looked at stuff, ate overpriced food and left with a sense of blah.

Talking about it afterwards we both realised that we were frustrated by the lack of anything new and the dismal showing of local businesses. WalMart, Chevrolet and Home Depot were there (I know the first people I think of when I am thinking of green businesses, though to be fair WalMart actually does have some very green practices as they actually result in cost savings.) but there was no representation from the local farmer’s markets, organic food chains (including SPUDS) or really any new ideas for living green. Having been researching environmentally friendly paints and other green building supplies it amazed me that there was nothing on green renovations.

The question is was this lack of representation and innovative ideas because of the marketers of the show or was it the lack of interest on the part of potential vendors? Sometimes I wish I had gone into marketing rather than teaching as it kills me to see good ideas and concepts under-utilised and is the kind of projects that I love to do. Thinking about it makes me get angry about New Westminster Quay all over again. There is a place that could do with an overhaul and is such a sad place and yet there is so much potential if the off-shore owners, community and city council actually decided to do something about it. Of course we are talking about the New West city council that was worried about having the farmer’s market at City Hall because of the garbage but have absolutely no problems in handing land to condo developers with no real benefit to the denizens of the city. (How about a new park, funding for the Mundy Park Pool …).

I have also been thinking about the concerns about the cost of food that has been in the news lately. I don’t know why anyone is particularly surprised about the increase in cost. Considering the cost of oil has gone up (which is used to make fertilisers, pesticides and run the machinery and transport the goods) and that more crops are being used as bio fuel. Why we thought using bio fuel would be better is beyond me. The crops used for bio fuel are still being grown with a dependency on oil which means that we are still reliant on the very thing that the bio fuel is supposed to be replacing. What I am hoping is that the increase cost in oil and the resulting increase in costs for farmers (and the corporations) will actually mean that more farmers may start looking at changing their farming practices. Especially if the difference in price between organically or biodynamically grown food and ‘regularily’ grown food is diminished.

I also find it mildly amusing that our incredibly forward-thinking government is promoting eating local foods and at the same time remove land from the agriculture land reserve and closed down farm run slaughter houses.

No Cry My Ass

It is now past noon and I have been “putting my child to sleep” for two and a half hours.  Is she asleep?  Hell no!  For the first hour and a half she cried and it didn’t matter if I was holding her, placing her in her crib, patting her back, talking to her, singing to her, and/or sitting beside her.  Oh, there were moments of silence.  There was even two minutes when she was actually almost asleep and then she woke herself up screaming again.  At the hour and forty-five minute mark she decided to stop yelling and start doing her “ba, ba, baing” thing which is what she does if she needs to tell me that I am a bad person and that she disagrees vehemently with whatever it is that I am or not doing .  This continued for awhile longer and then she went back to the crying.

At the moment I am reading a variety of books on getting babies to sleep.  All of them supposedly ‘no cry’ but nowhere in any of them do they talk about the child that just cries as soon as the idea of sleep is suggested.  The Baby Whisperer” suggest the ‘pick up, put down’ method.  Apparently as soon as they start crying you are supposed to pick them up, hold them (NO BOUNCING OR ROCKING though ’cause that is just BAD BAD BAD) and then as soon as they stop crying, you put them down.  When they cry again, you pick them up and so it goes.  At no point does she talk about the baby that has entwined her fingers into your hair and that the moment you lean uses the hair as handle holds to hang on.  As I  try to pry her one hand out of my hair, the other invariably has grabbed onto something else by which to ensure that she is permanently attached to my body.  This can also include but is not limited to my lips, shirt, crib, and air.  The No Cry Method does not even mention what to do if your child has decided to cry for two hours.  Somehow you are just supposed to include a variety of rituals and then Voila you have a baby that sleeps with no crying. My reading has not been limited to these two books but have included a vast array of internet sites, books from the shelves of the local bookstore or library and anyone who has a child that does not have bags under their eyes (the child I mean, not the parent.  The parent can have bags under their eyes for good reasons like staying up late and actually having sex with their partner, or going to a movie, or reading a book or well the options are limitless.)

The hardest part is that if I laid down with her in our bed, gave her some milk and then sat there with her she would have been asleep in twenty minutes.  However, due to her crawling and moving we can no longer put her to sleep for her naps on our bed.  So here I am – obsessing and waiting for the knock on the door from child services because of the complaints that have been made about the screaming child.  Though, we do have double-glazed windows so maybe she can’t be heard from the outside.  Part of the problem with this morning was that I was so conscious of her crying and worrying about what people would think.  There is something to be said for the anonymity of a an apartment versus where we our living now.

I am also worried that this is what my life has become – my biggest concern in the world and the only thing on my mind is whether or not Pumpkin sleeps in her crib.  There are political scandals to analyse, educational and environmental policies to critique, literature to read, music to hear and a mind to cultivate and all me efforts are consumed with the sleeping behaviour of an eight and half month old.   Has my life become so pedestrian?

Well, it is almost time for her afternoon nap.