This post is part of the "Weight and See" series and will be archived with those posts. Part of any effort to make the much needed lifesaving lifestyle changes is addressing the emotional issues that impact not only mental health, but physical health as well. Part of my way of dealing with these issues is to write about them and then focus on changing how I react to the emotional stress and trauma that has led me to emotionally eat myself to near-fatal morbid obesity.
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I am finally able to, well for lack of better wording, give the middle finger to all of those who have been vocally (and some not-so-vocally, more like, veiled and inferred) hateful of my posts where I've delved, on a very personally intimate level, into my past and the emotional issues that have led to my massive weight gain over the last 25 years.
The thing is, if my posts about what led me to become an absentee parent and gain hundreds of pounds, make you in any way, shape or form, uncomfortable, then don't read them. I guess I'm directing this to family as well...maybe especially family, or even former family. Sometimes the truth hurts, even when, try as you may, to deny the truth, it has a way of standing up and slapping you in the face. If you can't handle reading the truth, please, don't read what I write about my life, my experiences (some of which you deem "disgusting", "hateful" and "damning that bitch to an eternity spent roasting in hell!") and how those experiences shaped who I am.
Now that that's out of the way, here's what I'm doing. I have managed to gain a couple of new readers over the last month or so, which probably brings my grand total to whopping ten readers...but anyhow, I wanted to re-cap the first three posts in the series because I'll be posting Part IV tomorrow. I'm just going to keep posting until the entire story runs it's course. It soon became apparent, when I first started to write the series, that what I thought could be told in three parts, needs more time, depth and detail. There's no way I could have condensed it into anything shorter because to do so would have been to leave crucial information out....not only crucial to those reading it and wondering how it came to be that I was absent from my older children's lives for eight years, but it would have been unfair to me - the woman behind the keyboard who is using these [sometimes very painful] words as a cathartic means to help heal myself and understand how my behavior - sometimes destructive behavior, led to not just the physical fat, but the emotional fat as well.
Below I've excerpted each of the first three posts with links to the rest of the posts in their entirety for those who haven't read them, or for those who just want to rewind a little bit before moving forward to part IV.
As always, I love your comments, even when they question me, challenge me, as well as those which are supporting and encouraging. However I won't put up with anything hateful, demeaning, or a comment which is defamatory in any form.
Emotional Fat I
Yesterday I wrote about a huge milestone Gaby has coming up...loosing her first tooth. I mentioned that this was the first time in my twenty plus years as a parent to five children, that I've been there for this particular "first."
I'll give you a moment to let that sink in. I've written briefly about my nervous breakdown in 1995, in the midst of this post, but have never really delved into the nitty-gritty of what happened that led me to not be the primary parent in my older children's lives from November of 1995 to May of 2003.
My first child, Joshua, was only two when he died in 1990. Too young to have lost any teeth. Then in 1995 Joshua's father and I divorced after not quite ten years together, nearly eight of them married. Our surviving children, Matt and Meg, our twins - were five at the time, and Zach was two. It's what led to the divorce that is the crucial part of all this. Whilst Joshua's death played a huge part in steamrolling our marriage into divorce, it would be dishonest if I said that our marriage probably wasn't doomed to fail from the start.
"M" and I first met almost as soon as I graduated from high school...
Continue reading Part I, here.
Emotional Far Part II
One of the hardest things I'm dealing with when writing about being an "absentee mother" is the anger I'm dealing with. There is so much of it. The anger at the entire world for Joshua's death. The anger at God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost and whoever else might be floating around up there. The anger at myself. My God the anger at myself is overwhelming sometimes. If anger had a scent I'm positive it would be the bitter scent of vinegar; something which would be seeping through my pores on an almost constant basis. I'm angry that I wasn't smart enough and prepared enough to make it on my own with three small children. I'm angry that poor decisions lead to horrible consequences.
However, I'm also angry with the people who did surround my children during my absence. And that right there, that anger - an anger which is so red-hot and volatile and threatening to burst forth like livid orange-red lava from a volcano - that anger is the one I'm trying to not let color my words tonight. It's always there though.
I don't remember a great deal in the surrounding weeks following Joshua's death...
Continue reading Part II here.
Emotional Fat Part III
When digging into my past and trying to sort out my feelings I often read through the journals I've kept over the years. I've been keeping personal journals since roughly 1980. Some have survived whilst others have either been lost or destroyed. I do still have in my possession the journals I kept during the last year I was married to M. Throughout this post I'll intersperse entries from that journal.
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In the late spring of 1995 after finishing physical therapy (something which my former in-laws took for me having an affair - they'd state they would see me drive off and assume I was driving off to meet a clandestine lover, when in fact I drove no more than 500 yards to the little strip mall where my PT office was located! I'd never once given anyone cause to believe I was having an affair, yet when I started to lose weight, work hard at physical therapy and change my appearance on the outside, the accusations would fly!), I went back to work at the airline. I enjoyed my job but more than anything, it was an excuse to get out of the house and away from M. I was still crumbling emotionally and being around M and often times the kids was like being overwhelmed with things I could no longer deal with.
From my journal in May of 1995.
I didn't wake up this morning before M got home from work. It was the usual...
Continue reading Part III here.
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