WLS and the Holidays

I have been a member of the weight loss surgery community for a little bit over 2 years now. I have found much of my support by watching YouTube videos and joining up with support groups online. One of the groups I follow on YouTube brought up an important subject that I found I had a slightly different feeling about than most of the responses I've seen posted. The subject is basically on whether we are stressed over what struggles the holidays may bring for us, food wise. I realized after about 3 videos that I didn't share the same feelings as most everyone else. For me, I am very stressed over what's going to happen over this holiday season.

 In my family, food has been the focal point of just about every family gathering. We gather together, each family bringing one or two dishes that they only break out for special occasions, and we eat until we are all so sick that we either pass out or become lethargic for most of the rest of the afternoon. There is no judging anybody on how much food is on the plate, there is no questioning about if you should or shouldn't be eating that third piece of pumpkin pie, it's just talking, eating, and enjoying one another's company.

  My problem is that I still struggle on a daily basis with making the right food choices. When I wake up in the morning I have to tell myself "okay, you are going to choose protein first. You are going to stay within your calorie limits, you are going to get in your water, and you are going to have a stellar day". There are days where I listen to myself and then there are days when I basically tell myself to screw off and eat cookies and candy until I feel ill. Luckily, the days of cookies and candy are very few and far between.

  I already know that the second the holiday meal is placed, buffet style, on my mother's kitchen counter, I will be drooling for a bite of every single thing they have there. I am fully aware that I will not be able to consume the massive quantities that I was once able to consume, pre-WLS, but I am also aware that I have no control when it comes to these specific foods. They are comfort foods to me. The foods that only come out during holidays and everybody starts drooling a week in advance in anticipation of eating that egg noodles and gravy dish that Grandma always made.

  Do I dread the holidays? No, not really. Do I stress over them? Yes. I stress because I know what kind of mental battle I have ahead of me. I know that I'm going to be fighting myself not to go overboard after I am full. I know that nobody in that house is going to raise an eyebrow if I decide to go for seconds and that I am the only one capable of stopping myself from a carb-induced coma. I may do just that, OR, I may just have a completely stellar day and not have a single thing to worry about. No matter what goes into my mouth over the holidays, I will own up to any extra pounds I may (or may not) gain and I will move forward the next day and do my best to stick to what I know is right. Until then, let the holidays begin!

Parenting Is A Full Time Job...Not A Floating Holiday

What is it about absence that makes a child’s absent parent (a.k.a. AP) forget they created a child? A child who was, at one point, the center of aforementioned AP’s universe? What makes them think that after years of not sending financial support for said child, and years of no contact or communication whatsoever, they can just waltz back into that child’s life as if no time had gone by since the last time they spoke? If AP has only seen the child a handful of times in 10 years, with most visits lasting less than 1 day, and has not helped to support the child financially (aside from the one time the custodial parent (CP) had no choice but to ask for help to pay for expensive medical equipment the child needed), the LAST thing CP wants to do is pretend like everything is ok.

CP doesn’t want to send the child away (sometimes states away) to stay with someone they don’t know. AP has no idea the child’s likes, dislikes, passions, eccentricities, mannerisms, or even the disciplinary ways that work best with them. It is only natural for CP to be somewhat leery when this ‘stranger’ decides to become a superparent after AP having no contact of any kind for multiple years. The thing about AP Superparentness is that it is usually very short-lived (between 1 week and 3 months). AP will appear out of nowhere and be the most exciting, awesome, money-spending, gift-showering, trip-taking, amusement park-going bundle of fun….and then one day they just disappear as though they never existed. This does a lot of damage to a child’s psyche. Not only does it do damage to the child, but it takes an amazing toll on CP.

There are some difficult things CP has to endure when AP decides to make an appearance (whether it’s via phone or in person) and then if/when AP disappears again…

• Watching the child attempt to trust AP after being hurt every time before.
• Knowing that every attempt AP made before was only kept up for a maximum of 1 month, or until     AP got tired of making the effort to care.
• Knowing that, when AP stops making the attempt to care this time, CP has to watch that child’s heart break and their self-worth shatter into nothing, leaving them broken and hurting, and there being absolutely nothing CP can do to make the pain go away. All CP can do is let the child cry on their shoulder and hug them with all the love their arms can offer… sometimes for hours each day or until the child cries themselves to sleep.
• Having to have the daily discussion with the child about how AP “loves them so much even if they haven’t called yet” until they finally just stop asking.
• Not being able to tell the child that it’s probably going to be another 2 years before they hear anything else from AP again because that’s how it always happens.
• Having to reassure their child that “I love you more than the world…I promise I will always be here for you and I will never forget you” because the child now (again) has the horrible fear that the people they love and trust are going to disappear like AP did and they constantly beg you not to leave.
• Dealing with a very angry teenager when they come to the conclusion that their AP couldn’t care less about them so they decide that hating the whole world is what will make them feel better.
• Watching the child check the mailbox the whole week of every holiday and birthday (because this time AP remembered them on their birthday), only to see the look of disappointment on their faces when the mailbox is empty, then having to say encouraging things like “I’m sure AP just got busy” even though CP knows that AP just plain forgot.

These are just a few of the things I’ve dealt with during the years my son has had an absent parent. I try to be high spirited when AP does make attempts to be there, but it’s hard. I try never to say negative things about AP anywhere even remotely close to being within earshot of my son because I want him to come to his own conclusions based on the actions of AP and not my personal feelings. I have learned to smile and make communication with AP effortless in the hopes that AP won’t say that I was the reason they never called or showed up. So many things are riding on my shoulders when AP enters and exits my son’s life…and it’s exhausting.

My request…is…if you’re going to be there….BE THERE, ALL THE TIME. If you’re just calling because you decided that today would be a good day to be a parent…maybe you just shouldn’t call. I don’t get a break. I don’t get the choice as to whether I want to have my son in my home all week/weekend/month/year. I can’t say “sorry kid, but I don’t have a job, so I can’t put any money towards your care this week/month/year” because he doesn’t have anybody else to provide for him. I can’t rearrange my visitation dates due to being sick because, sick or not, I have to be a properly functioning parental figure in this boy’s life every day of every week of every year whether I have the flu, diarrhea, pneumonia, bad breath, a headache, pimples, cramps, backache, nose bleed, you name it.  AP shouldn’t get to choose either.

Children deserve to be loved all of the time and not just when it’s convenient.

Check out this book: Longing for Dad: Father Loss and Its Impact

Product Description

Dr. Erickson helps readers and therapists identify and pinpoint the causes of father hunger, and explore the spiritual crises that unresolved losses such as this generate. Provocative exercises present strategies for resolving these losses and escaping the cycle of anguish.

About the Author

Beth M. Erickson is a family therapist and divorce mediator in private practice in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is the author of Helping Men Change: The Role of the Female Therapist, and has written numerous articles that stand at the intersection of gender and family therapy. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Family Psychotherapy and is a reviewer for the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.

My Secret to House Cleaning

I don’t know anybody whose day was made better just for the simple fact that they got to clean their house.

“I just had the best day EVER!!! I scrubbed cat vomit out of my carpet in 3, count’em, 3 different places!! Then, to make it even better, I found the most AMAZING hairballs in the drains as I was cleaning the bathtubs! Wish you could have been here!”

As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure that most of my friends abhor the thought of having to scrub another toilet.
I had the pleasure of learning the secret to get yourself motivated to clean. Wanna know what it is? OF COURSE YOU DO! Who wouldn’t want to know this insanely awesome information? Are you ready? Really ready? Ok, here goes….

Set your mind on doing a job that you’ve been dreading for months… (i.e. cleaning your fish tank). Once you have your mind set, your kitchen will magically be buffed and shined better than you’ve ever seen it before. You will be able to see your face in the counters and you will have no trouble sliding across that newly shined kitchen floor in your socks! Every cabinet will be organized, your utensils will be in their designated homes, and unicorns will prance by in the backyard. Ok, not the unicorns. But you hopefully have the idea of how wonderful this trick is and how great it works!

I learned this secret by pure chance. I decided that today was the day that my fish would have a clean home. I had been contemplating cleaning out their tank for a couple weeks and just hadn’t gotten around to it, so, today was the day! I walked over to the tank and gave it a good stare-down, thinking about what to do first. I had to take the filter off and clean up the lid. I had to empty the rocks and other aquarium items as well. In order to clean all the aquarium items, I was going to need a clean sink. There were only a couple dishes to do, but I had to put the clean dishes away in order to have room for the newly washed dishes to dry. As I was putting the dishes away, I noticed that I didn’t have room for all of my glasses. That definitely would not work. I couldn’t have glasses without homes, so I opened all the cabinet doors and decided that in order to make room for everything, I needed to organize. All of the contents of my cabinets were removed and given new homes, as well as the tea glasses that hadn’t had a home since my husband brought them back from his trip to Jordan about a year ago. Hey, tea glasses need homes too! In finding new homes for the glasses, other items were left homeless. This created the need for a total cabinet overhaul. Even the junk spaces got cleaned out. I even found a food processor that I didn’t know I had. Of course, that needed to be washed and played with before it could be put away again.

Once I was satisfied with my squeaky clean cabinets, it was time to start on the fish tank. The stare-down began again. Then it hit me. I’m going to have to have everything out of the way in order to maneuver this fish tank and get all the water out, so I must clean my countertops off. I started by moving the dish drainer out of the way and decided that it was a good time to rearrange things. I mean, you can’t clean a fish tank if your counter is unorganized, right? RIGHT! Every item on my counter was washed and arranged in various locations until they inevitably ended up in the same spot they started out in. That’s ok though because as I was arranging and rearranging, I had my handy dandy Clorox Disinfecting Wipes (the greatest invention since the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser) on hand and scrubbed the counters down as I went. Counter extravaganza complete.

Cleaning off the countertops left a few homeless food items and a few crumbs on the floor. This led to (begin Rocky theme song) the cleaning of my pantry and the sweeping of the floor. I am one of those OCD people who have to have everything in the pantry organized and with “like” items, so I couldn’t just throw the random items in there. They had to have a proper home. Pantry organized? Check! Floor swept? Check!
The only things left untouched in my kitchen were the stove (which had been cleaned the night before), and the fridge. I didn’t want them to feel left out, so I gave them a quick wipe down. There was nothing left to do other than mop the floor. But I figured it would be better to clean the fish tank out first and mop up the mess afterwards. Who knew that cleaning the fish tank would make your kitchen look brand new?

So you see, this really works! If you need to clean the house, do yard work, fold laundry, or do anything that you’ve been putting off for a while, just find a more tedious task and be determined to get that tedious task done at once. Before you know it, your house will look as though you hired professionals!

Writer's Block

What is it about making the choice to start blogging that causes one to have a major case of writer’s block? I was doing alright until a major meltdown happened (which caused the deletion of every post I had previously shared). Once I decided it was ok to start sharing again, I have come up with nothing. I can barely even get a single thought out coherently onto the screen. I even made an attempt to start that book that I’ve been contemplating writing for a great many years, only to come up completely wordless the second I decided to put it into actual words.

I had a ton of great ideas for this blog when I started it, and had quite a decent start the first time around. Now, I can’t even think of what ideas I may have thought about considering making into an article. I have made the assumption that maybe I’m better as a ‘keep it quick’ type of writer rather than someone who can go on an endless writing spree and create books/blog posts that the world will love.

I’m hoping that my creativeness will return quickly as writing has been a life-long dream of mine. I remember attempting to write stories as young as kindergarten but the same thing always happened as soon as the pencil would touch the paper. The things I was thinking, just couldn’t be written down in a way that expressed my thoughts properly and the harder I tried to write my thoughts down, the more blank my mind became until……. …… …… Where were we again? Yeah, it was, and still is that bad.

I read tons of different blogs where it seems that the person wrote effortlessly and came up with something amazing, inspiring, quick-witted, and completely fantastic in no time at all. And then there are those who are able to write a blog every day with (what seems like) no end in sight to their ideas and creativity. Then, here I sit, wordless and wanting so badly to get my thoughts written/typed down and nothing comes out. So, I guess I’ll just hang out and share my frustrations at not being able to come up with anything intriguing to write about until this writer’s block is lifted and my ideas are able to flow freely again.

Thanks for reading,

C.R. Mraiyan

You can't build a snowman out of freezing wind...

Anybody that knows me, knows that I LIVE for snowy weather! It's not really that I'm going to go play in it, rather than I just plain love the feeling that it brings. I love the way it gives you a reason to cuddle up on the couch with a biggole cup of coffee and your big fuzzy blanket to read a book or watch tv because you just flat can't leave the house to do anything. Even power outages aren't so bad so long as you are ready with a gas or kerosene heater (or some alternative form of heat). Power outages are a fantastic time for the family to huddle together and get to know each other again. It's a great time to play board games via candle light or listen to stories from when your parents/grandparents/other family members were younger. Sure, it's a bit nippy, but I think we've all gotten too spoiled and need to remember that there was a time when electricity was no more than a dream and people used blankets, fire places, heaters, and each other to get through the cold times. There's just that natural feeling that comes from situations like that, that are irreplaceable.

I'm sitting here on my loveseat this evening thoroughly enjoying the hideous weather in Houston, TX. The wind is howling so loudly that I'm afraid we may not have a roof by morning. It's a balmy 27 degrees (and dropping). The only problem with this is that where I come from, weather like this is always accompanied by snow.  In Houston, there is this constant layer of "wet" (aka overly excessive amounts of humidity) lingering all over the place, and it takes your super cold day and turns it into a "dear God what the hell have I walked out into" kind of day. The wind is blowing so hard that the "wet" completely bypasses your skin and directly high-fives your bones, leaving you virtually unable to move.

Up North, in my hometown in Missouri, they have gotten over 24 inches of snow today! (My family has been keeping me updated with videos and pictures. All of which are making me extremely homesick, but I love them nonetheless.) This is the way it should be. You wake up, see the snow, and instantly know that you are going to need your thermal underwear and ice scraper if you dare to leave the warmth of your house. You feel the cold wind, see the blanket of white outside, drink your coffee, sip from your bowl of soup, and all is right with the world. Not like in Houston, where you go to bed and sweat your buns off because it's almost 70 degrees outside, then you wake up in a state of convulsing frozenness because you had no idea that it was possible to go from 70 degrees down to 20 in just a few hours.

I guess what I'm trying to say is... You can't build a snowman out of freezing wind, so if it's going to be cold, at least let there be snow to go along with it. That way you can at least build a snowman, sit back and enjoy the beautiful scenery, and enjoy some good-old-fashioned-family-time.

Alone time is a good thing

There's something to be said about alone time. The time when you no longer have to make sure that full meals are prepared on time, the dishes are done, laundry washed and folded, house tidy, etc. The time when you go stock up on junk food and send yourself into a chocolate coma beyond reason and don't plan on returning for a while  because there is nobody there to tell you not to. You let yourself go and enjoy life to the fullest.....until you wake up from your junk food induced coma and look at your house and realize that you no longer enjoy having things in a bit of a mess.

This has recently happened to me and I'm not quite sure what to think of it. I was shocked to find myself vacuuming excessively and scrubbing the floors...and not thinking horrid thoughts of the one who usually forces these duties upon me...I was the one taking the initiative this time. I guess years of living with an obsessive neat freak has rubbed off on me. I did come to the realization that if the obsessor hadn't been overly obsessive, I wouldn't have had this revelation, so therefore, I'm thankful. Strange huh? But I am. That doesn't mean that an early arrival has made my day feel like rainbows and glitter by any means. I'm not looking forward to moving back into the perfection routine, but I can move back into it with this new realization and maybe, just maybe, I won't resent the obsessive tendencies quite as much as before...Time will tell.