"My stomach sits on my thighs
like a lumpy toddler with no soul."
I first wrote that sentence in an
email to a friend the year I landed my first teaching job, roughly 18 months after my mother
died.
My lower tummy-inflation was
novel and gave fresh meaning to the term ‘frontal lobe’. I’d turn quickly and snap
short women in the head with this appendage I’d never before had to navigate.
I won't say I was exactly ‘thin’ in
the many months prior to my mother's passing. But I was very “busy” then and had
little time to think about anything cookie or ice-cream related. In fact, during several intense
funerary-arranging days, I subsisted largely on probate forms, attorney fees and
coffee, which didn’t improve during the six months it took to settle
the estate.
I conceded I was down fifteen
pounds by the time I sold her house to a Mafioso-style family who, one day, simply took occupancy of it, painted the interior, stripped the roof of its shingles, began
re-roofing, and cut down several trees … before there was a purchase and sales
agreement. In fact, to acquire access to the inside of the house, they had
jimmied the back-porch door.
“Boy these are motivated buyers!" I reassured anyone willing to listen, then off I went to lick a Rolaid wrapper, full of the electrolytes stressed women need.
These are the occasions for which
chewable vitamin necklaces and Gatorade are made.
I would not earn my paunch-based frontal-lobe
until well after the year 2000, after completing a graduate program in
education, then acquiring my teaching license.
After three months working at an
alternative behavioral site, teaching post-adjudicated children, I was forced to
confront what looked like stillborn ballistic gel that implanted itself under my navel. I say "forced to confront" ... because there it was, squeezed beneath
my keyboard where I was building worksheets, stressing both quad muscles until they started to twitch.
You know how cows twitch their tails
to keep mosquitoes away? My thighs
were trying to ‘twitch off’ my gut.
In nary a single education class had
anyone warned me that schools inflate teacher-waist lines. Although it’s
not the schools as systems that do this. It is the parents of the students who
go there.
They love to love us pretty much each
day, endowing us with endless gastronomical graft.
Teachers become sadly adept at lying to ourselves. “Why,
LOOK at all the work Mrs. Hoffnagel went to, to prepare these treats for us. This
could very well be the day I learn I have been accepted to NASA’s training
program and I might never eat another warm, home-made fudge frosted cupcake
again. It would be rude not to have nine.“
As it turned out, my school didn’t have
parents because, sadly, neither did our student body.
What this site did have was
vocational training. The one responsible for my soul-less frontal lobe was, of
course, Culinary Arts. Specifically, their infamous Phat Fridays. Each week, our students collaborated
to manifest some of the most original cookie designs ever. These children were visionaries: Macadamia and Mocha Drizzle. Oatmeal
Scotchies with Glazed Kilt. Sugar Cookies With Nothing Else.
I was in my early 40s and thought I could still eat
whatever I wanted, but my metabolism had other plans. So after enjoying Phat Fridays to bolster the self-esteems
of our society’s most fragile youth, there in my lap by Thanksgiving Day rested
an unmistakable wobble-paunch, which had grown and evolved, not unlike organic
curriculum.
In all its resplendence, there it sat: a wad that looked like a still-shot of a rolling ocean wave.
In short order I embarked upon the
more stringent Atkins diet (it is much more user-friendly today). If you are
following my blog, which most of you aren’t, you would know that I have a very
rapid-weight loss experience on Atkins for reasons I have been advised not to
re-write publicly.
Weight comes, and weight goes.
And in the last 8 months since my husband’s
diagnosis with a plasma-cell disorder called multiple myeloma, I
decided to respond to this health challenge with exercise, diet, a clear
head. Limited alcohol, no diving into
entire cakes. I used jogs,
skiing, elliptical machines to release endorphins so I could rationally
research treatments and clinical trials best suited to his needs.
My weight was wonderful!
But I ended up dragging stress-symptoms -- albeit fat-free -- to my physician. She is enormously
talented and a non-hysteric: things I admire as, when it comes to
health-crises, I have lots of neither. In fact, having done exhaustive research on my own symptoms, I was reassured to learn I likely had systemic lupus aggravated
by multiple sclerosis with a touch of brain tumor, all confounding an
underlying and undiagnosed diabetic pre-coma.
The thing about hypochondria is that,
when all other diagnoses fail you, at least you’ve got that.
My doctor ruled all of those things
out and came back at me with a diagnosis of Stress. I left with a new diet and
exercise regimen and a list of vitamins, largely to reduce my blood pressure but to additionally quiet my busy
thoughts. I had to return in a couple of
weeks for a re-check of my blood pressure.
Between my first visit where I
presented my doctor with stress symptoms and my blood pressure re-check, my
doctor’s digital-scale informed me I had gained 8 pounds.
“Eight pounds in 13 days?" gawked the digital scale technician. "Maybe we should check your
kidneys." They checked my ankles to make sure they weren’t swollen,
listened to my heart to see if it was beating.
“What are you checking for? Congestive heart failure? End-organ failure from undiagnosed
diabetes? AM I EVEN ALIVE?” none of which boded well for my high blood
pressure.
Meanwhile, my rational doctor simply asked, "Have you changed
... your EATING habits?"
"Well ... if by that you mean
... being forced to engage in three wine and vodka intensive ‘special
memories’ then, yes. I threw one bridal shower then threw myself two follow-up
pity parties. The post-festivus stomach acid didn’t exactly allow me to stick
to my salad with chicken diet plan."
"What kinds of
things would you say you've eaten that were different -- besides wine and vodka
-- in 13 days?"
"Umm... a little bread. The
kind they wrap around double cheese burgers. A vat of home-made macaroni and
cheese. One loaf of breakfast
toast, a box of Italian cookies."
"What about exercise?"
"Exer - who?"
"I see. Let’s give you this NEW
prescription to get your anxiety AND blood pressure down, and get you back on a
treadmill and out of cookie and wine boxes.”
"Elliptical and bottles."
"What?"
"Elliptical, not a tread mill.
And I don't drink wine out of boxes."
"Well you don't drink wine 'Any
More' -- your prescriptions will be at CVS in an hour. You could take a
nice WALK there."
"It's four MILES from
here!"
"Indeed!"
Now that my tummy toddler is back, I
have to say it is a comfort!
It reminds me of 13 glorious years of full-time teaching which I very
much miss, in my rare spare moments.
With my new blood pressure
reducing medication, I feel very calm about my enjoyment of the occasional
rice cracker and gallon of rocky road.
My fitting for the Mother of the
Groom dress comes up on May 11th, but if I pop a blood pressure pill, within an
hour I can calmly note to myself that the color ‘teal’ rhymes with ‘conceal’ and ‘keeps it
real.’
By the time all of my children are
married and have kids of their own, this long-loved lap-land will be amply
ready to accommodate several beautiful grandbabies, so I am wasting not another
nanosecond worrying about my resplendent ocean wave. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Pass the Oreos, please.
