Loose Fit

This year has been huge. Obviously not huge in terms of the prolificacy of blog posts.  It’s been huge in terms of life content. Bulging even. I thought about writing a whole series of catch up posts based around each dramatic and thrilling event. Each post would have made you laugh, inhale rapidly, admire, and engage. Each post would have been themed around a life changing event: a house and whole-life relocation, a life-threatening mini-stroke, a deconstruction and revelation of faith and meaning, an impending change of decade. But instead I have chosen to reflect once more on something that is of great concern and interest to us all. Weight loss.

Of all the changes that I have brought upon myself or that have been imposed upon me over these last 6 months, it has been the losing of 3.4kg (and counting) that means the most to me. Is that strange? Dropping a size has been a goal for a few years, but I have never managed to set this sinking ship on that course. Actually managing to stick with it for a month and see some results feels like the best thing I have done in a very long time. I would not have thought myself shallow, and in fact I am not. I think this goes deeper than shallow. I think this has something to do to with vanity and even less to do with health, but more to do with control, achievement, self-validation, self-recognition, boundaries, and self-love. Too much self? Selfish? I don’t think so. 

Oh the cliches of mothers not looking after themselves, forgetting to think straight as they lose themselves in their desperate attempts to hang on to the run-away fiasco that their lives became overnight. I hate cliches and I especially hate motherhood statements about motherhood and how hard it is. But, help! Surprise! They are nearly all true! I suspect all mothers who have felt themselves spinning out of control take a while to get their bearings and grab on to something that floats. Something stable. Tossed out of their tiny canoe trying to keep their head out of the water long enough to breath, down that river of early mornings after not enough sleep, the seemingly endless hours of time to kill with a toddler, or the not enough hours in the week for a preschooler and work…. And the washing! Talk about cliches. Anyway, we grab on to whatever we can to keep us afloat. Looking forward to our first coffee, Playschool, a visit from a grandparent. Online shopping, a veggie patch, chooks. Crafting, baking, switching to cloth nappies. The gym, study, blogging. And if it works, keep doing it. If it makes things worse, stop.

So for me at this time of transition, munching on carrot dipped in cottage cheese and making coffees from white water they are somehow allowed to call “milk” - this craziness is my life jacket. It’s not exactly a hobby, but it is something that is giving me a sense of achievement. Soon I hope to move on. I am itching to do some serious gardening (once the itching and energy sapping of shingles subsides) and I look forward to the fun and new challenges of being a school mum next year. I have plans to study and I still hope to be famous one day! But there’s no hurry, and at least I’ll look HOT.