Weighty

I'm trying very hard to gain weight.  Actually, that's not accurate.  It's not that I'm trying to gain weight - it's that I'm trying to eat "enough," which naturally leads to weight gain from a state of being underweight.  We're talking fruit for breakfast, a salad with protein and some carbohydrates for lunch, a snack of carbohydrates and protein/fat, and dinner including *gasp* all major food groups.

It really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really sucks.  To put an image to the feeling:

Lost Fairy by Pygar

Seriously.  Seriously.

Rituals

Today was my ten-month-old niece's naming.  Jewish families famously have a bris for their newborn boys, but girls have their own ceremony too, which is necessarily much more cheerful since no one is slicing into baby flesh and making the new mother watch.  The mohelet who performed the naming ceremony also performed my nephew's bris.  In addition to being a mohelet she is also a pediatrician and a grandmother, so she brings a unique perspective (to a bris, particularly).  

Most of the family stayed around after the ceremony for lunch, but I headed right out to get work done and clean/do laundry before we head to Miami on Monday.  The mohelet and I were waiting for the elevator in BIL and SIL's elevator foyer.  There's a big black and white framed fashion photo on the wall across from the elevator bay.  "Is that [your SIL]?" the mohelet asked me when she noticed the picture.  "Nope," I said, "That's Twiggy."  (BIL and SIL are into retro decor.)  

"Oh," she continued, "I should have known that!"  Then she paused and sighed.  "That was right at the beginning of the whole anorexia thing."

"Yeah."

She shook her head.  "I see that a lot in my practice."  

"In pediatrics?  Really?"  Naïveté is me.

"Sure, well, teenagers.  Twelve-year-olds.  It's horrible."

I literally didn't know what to say.  For a moment I thought of mentioning an old friend from treatment who developed classic anorexia at twelve and had the left femur of a fifty-year-old by age twenty.  But it didn't seem a topic upon which to dwell when leaving a little baby girl's Simach Bat.


Fortunately, we moved on to, "Were you at the bris?"  "Yes, I'm [BIL]'s younger brother's wife."  "Ah."  "But I was raised Catholic, so this is all new to me."  "Well.  We can work on you."


That's a whole other kettle of carp.

Daemons

Luna by Jo Whaley

I have a certain small group of close friends who all trade various nicknames/identities.  For instance, I'm a Blue Fairy, and we have a Purple Fairy, Green Fairy...  We have a River Tam, a Zoe-Jayne, and an Inara Serra.  If I stumbled into the world of His Dark Materials my daemon would be a Merlin falcon, and we have a snow leopard and a ptarmigan.  If we suddenly found ourselves in the world of Harry Potter, I strongly suspect my Patronus would be a luna moth.  


So it was last night that the Purple Fairy sent me the above picture.  I emailed in reply:

Oooh!  Obrigado!  Muito bonita.  ^_^

I was obsessed with these things when I was little.  They were the first things I ever heard of that lived so briefly and had no need (or ability) to eat.  I mean, an animal with no mouth.  I just found that so fascinating.

And then I reread the email.  And I did one of these:  o_O  


When I said "little," I meant seven or eight years old.  After I reread the email, I didn't know whether to cackle at the futility or cringe at it, or just wad up the various celebrity rags with articles about celebrity weight loss and gain, and use them to bludgeon people who assume that eating disorders and body dissatisfaction are purely the result of culture, and can be solved as easily as applying logic and willpower, prevented as easily as promoting body acceptance.


I never experienced trauma.  I was never abused.  My parents always demonstrated to me that I was loved and valued, and as I got older, respected.  Like so infuriatingly many women with increasingly long-standing eating disorders, I have never been able to pin down a "reason."  But looking at that email... I mean, feck.  It's like something was coiled in my eight-year-old brain just waiting to be sprung.  Now, what the hell do you do to prevent that?

Passover: In the End...

In the end, it turned into the other kind of frightening statement:  "You look great."

"So, what did I look like before?  I must have looked fat before.  I desperately need to stay this weight and no higher.  If I keep gaining weight, I'm going to look disgusting in the space of a week.  Forget the part where my husband was asking me to please gain weight right before we left for dinner.  I probably already look disgusting; they're just being nice."

Yikes, people.  Yikes.  This is what our heads do, the heads of the cognitively distorted.

(Yes, I know that's not what was meant by "you look great" at all.  What was probably meant was, "You look nice with that lipstick," or, "Cute haircut," or, "You seem happy."  You know.  Any of those.)

Passover

Mary Magdalene in the Cave

Jules Joseph Lefebvre

Last year before going to his brother's for the first seder, I mentioned to the husband that I found it strange that a high holiday celebrates (and is named after) the killing of thousands of innocent children (the Egyptian firstborn).  The husband was unthinkingly sadistic enough to repeat this - identifying it as my own question - at the seder table.  While that was momentarily awkward, it was also kind of awesome, since I stand by the question.

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Moral and ethical dissonance of the God of Abraham aside, Passover is primarily a see-family holiday in non-observant families, much like Easter has become for my family.  Yes, the husband's family goes through the motions of the barest of seder stories, and yes they keep kosher today and tomorrow (the husband doesn't), but this isn't a family who does Passover cleaning or observes any of the work rules around the holiday.  

Since this is a family holiday, I'll be seeing some of the husband's extended family for the first time in several months.  On the one hand, I'm queasily considering whether I'll get any negative/concerned comments about, "You've lost weight!"  On the other hand, this morning my weight hit its highest number in three months, right at the cusp of "minimum acceptable weight," and I'm literally having heart palpitations over it.  Cognitive dissonance: achieved.

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The date for Passover (like Easter) depends on the moon.  The full moon falls at 2:25 a.m. tonight, GMT, 10:25 p.m. EDT.  The March moon is known by various names, but it's generally considered the moon of intuition and inspiration.  Meh.

There is a pan-cultural ritual called "full moon purging" (though these days it's associated mostly with Wicca/neo-paganism).  You create a sacred space and release unwanted intentions, attitudes and fixations into a fire.  Tonight would be a super night not to live in a flammable Manhattan apartment.  I suppose I will have to improvise.