Palimpsest Girl

Tags

essay, writing

Palimpsest – 

noun

1. a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

 

Here’s the truth. When I was this girl…

Tennis Girl

I wanted to look like this girl…

New Mom girl

And when I was this girl…

 

I wanted to look like this girl…

Pin up girl

Don’t get me wrong.  I did not want to be the earlier version of myself, I just wanted to look like her.

The girl in this picture did dumb stuff, like let the checking account get down to $ 0.23, like run out of gas and leave the useless car sitting in the middle of the road in the middle of the night (Mom, I know what you mean when you say there are some things you just don’t want to know, but I’d never do this now. Aren’t you glad you didn’t know then?), like send packages in the mail and forget to pay the postage.  This girl is not the girl I turned out to be at all.  So I never wanted to revert to her behaviors, only her appearance.

I’ve been the palimpsest girl for my whole life, scrubbing at my real self, attempting to efface reality and create a scripted version of me that the world might find acceptable.  Why?

Let’s not involve culture, okay?  I did this to myself.  Maybe culture had something to do with it, but since I’m a sentient being, I did not  have to drink the kool-aid.  No one is to blame for my own foolishness, not my mother, not my father, not my teachers, not my husband, and not my children.  Somehow I got the idea in my head that the person I saw in the mirror,  that girl, she needed a shove.

In the effort to create a better script, I  erased myself raw, but like the palimpsest writings, my real script remained, pushing, straining toward the light, and I always burgeoned into a plumper, older version of myself.

All that time, all that effort to look like something I am not, has landed me where I am today.  I have to ask myself,  what would have happened if New Mom girl could have accepted that higher BMI, those rounder curves? What if she hadn’t been so busy kicking the goads, frowning into the mirror?  Could my life have been gentler and happier?  What if, like the Archimedes Palimpsest, I’ve a layer I don’t recognize any longer? What if there’s a great treatise in there that I pushed aside in my hunger to look thinner?

Here’s my greatest regret. I did not model the graceful exchange of age and acceptance for my own children.  They’ve been on this unstable ride with me as I deflate and inflate, and deflate again.  In this I have to look them in the eye and say, “Don’t do this to yourself,” and “I am so, so sorry. Had I known better, I would have done better.”

I’m at the point now where I have no choice but to lose weight.  Health issues hover in the background, and my behavior has had an adverse effect on my husband.  But this time, I’m not erasing anything.  I move more. I eat less.  Sometimes I say no to bad food, sometimes I say yes. I accept that the only true constant is change.  Whatever happens, all of who I am stays on the page.

Real Girl

 

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Back on the Dog’s Path

Tags

essay, health and fitness, walking, weight loss

The Dog’s Path, worn over time, with reckless ferocity

A family of wild hogs lives in the overgrown field running along the back of our property line. Following some sort of biological imperative, the hogs leave their family home as the sun comes up every day, moving along the fence line and ambling across the road to an undetermined location.  In the evening, they reverse their direction and trudge home heavy snouted, ready for a nice wallow and glass of beer.

Our dogs, Luna and Bailey, have a biological imperative of their own which compels them to pelt down to the fence line twice a day and bark furiously at the hog family.  Luna and Bailey are surprised every time the hogs appear, so they guard the property with the same ferocious, joyous abandon every time.

Their pelting has created a path. This path serves them well when spring grasses give way to summer sticker burrs.  Back in October, the dog’s path was where I started, to keep the sticker burrs at bay.  I set my timer for 15 minutes, and I walked up and down the dog’s way.  Luna and Bailey ran trotted up beside me from time to time, peeling away when the grass became too thick.  I looked back every once in a while, and there the two would be, standing together, looking at me, then looking at each other.  That first fifteen minutes seemed to take forever, and produced a flop sweat heretofore only suffered by those kicking a lifelong heroin habit.

Bailey, Captain of the Guard

After Super Husband came home from the doctor with the “weight,” word on his lips, I resolved to take action. I realized that my habits had a direct effect on him, and I wasn’t going to be a bad example any longer. On the morning of October 12, I got up early and put the batteries in the scale.  When I stepped up, I didn’t know what I’d find.  My weight had become, like the numbers that indicate money in the bank, like the popularity of the Kardashians, a mysterious, distant unknown.  For two years, I ignored the mirror’s message; you’re getting fat, girl.

In the beginning, it’s always innocent enough.  I’m sitting in the emergency room all night and after that trauma, who’s thinking about what goes into their mouths?  Not me.  Then the next day comes, and the day after that, and before I know it, I’ve blown it. Again.

I don’t know much about other people, but I’ve been struggling to maintain a healthy weight for my entire adult life.  Having to take care of other things has always been my go-to excuse for getting fatter: the kids needed me, the school needed me, the church needed me, and so I didn’t have time to tend to myself.  The other myth: when things are settled with (insert crisis here) I will have more time to take care of my health.

This time, I pulled it all around me to get away from the hurt I felt. The fear of losing a loved one.  It swirled and coagulated and landed on my belly, my hips, my thighs, my breasts.  The hurt, it took the shape of Buddha and of the whiskey barrel that someone famously used to dive over Niagara Falls.  It took the shape of a second chin and a measuring tape stretched thin and the shape of bobbing up and down in the water like a fishing cork with all this extra blubber.  While the world moved on without me, I sat in my chair and looked out the window.  I congealed.

I hated having to start over in this quest to stay thinner.  I hated that being fat is not understood, not even by the fat.  I hated my explanations, which sounded as thin as a balding pate, as weak as a thin man’s knees, as lame as weak tea. And so I found myself, again, on the dog’s path, walking in the field on our property because I was too ashamed for people to see me out walking, because I was frightened of the road and the path at the park. And forget about the gym.  People would see me at the gym.

The first time the dogs tore down to the back fence to torment the hogs, there was no path.  They paved one over time.  And that’s what I’m doing.  I graduated from the yard to the neighborhood, and to the park.  In a very short amount of time, I’m now able to go several miles without stopping.  SH and I went to the park and hit tennis balls around for almost an hour last weekend.  I didn’t have a heart attack, and neither did he.  Sometime soon, I’m going to give Zumba a try.  In a gym.  Even if the instructor is five feet tall and does the exercises fast, fast, Chipmunk style, I’m going to lumber along in a good natured way.  I’m just going to try it and see what happens.

Luna Lovegood, support personnel

I like the dog’s path better than the other path, the one where I sit in a chair Jabba-the-Hutting.  That’s a path, too, the one where you repeatedly do the wrong thing.  Excusing untenable behavior, also a path.  I can’t talk about tomorrow, but right now, I’m with the dogs.  Maybe someday, I’ll be fit enough to dash headlong toward the back fence with Bailey and Luna and there, salute the wild hogs with unruly abandon.

 

 

 

Our Saturday Walk

Tags

Germany, Linderhof Palace, Neuschwanstein Castle, photography, Vacation

Last Saturday’s walk was a doozy.  We traveled to Munich last week, and on Saturday we took a tour into the Bavarian Alps to view King Ludwig II’s Linderhof Castle, the village of Oberammergau, and Ludwig’s unfinished mountain hideaway, Neuschwanstein Castle.

I’ll be sharing a lot more about this trip in the weeks to come, starting with this sampling of the sights from Saturday, March 21, 2015

Linderhof Castle

King Ludwig II, known as the Mad King and the Fairy Tale King in turns, built Linderhof as a tribute to Louis IV, the Sun King.  It is extremely small by palace standards, but it’s absolutely beautiful.

This small gem is well worth a viewing.

Look at the mountains in the background, not the brave lady about to get “swanned.”

An intrepid traveler(not me) feeds these assertive swans.

Oberammergau

This village is known for the Passion Play that villagers have been performing every ten years since the middle ages, its skilled woodworkers, and the paintings that villagers display on their whitewashed houses.  The guidebooks say this is a cheesy little village, but I happen to like cheese.

Meandering through the village of Oberammergau .

Oberammergau’s next Passion Play is in 2020.

Neuschwanstein Castle

Ludwig II didn’t finish this castle, which he built in the medieval style and in tribute to musician Richard Wagner.  It’s worth the steep 1.5 kilometer climb to the castle grounds the the 300 steps inside the castle to view this work. It’s kind of like viewing the Titanic– Ludwig’s overspending and mania to complete not only this but another huge Versailles -fashioned palace in the region led to his cabinet ministers placing him under house arrest and having him declared mentally incompetent.

Neuschwanstein’s front facade- much of the castle remains unfinished.

What a view! Thanks to Vi for taking the photo.