buh-bye!

Today I’m off for my overnight getaway, and I am giddy with anticipation. Wow. I didn’t realize until just now, zipping up my suitcase, how much I need this. I am very grateful that I am able to spend a night away from home, away from the dishes and macaroni and strewn toys that need to be picked up, from the overflowing trash can and the pile of laundry. I am grateful that my in-laws live nearby and have the kind of relationship with my kids that provides a good time for everybody when my boys spend the night there. I’m grateful that my husband will also have some much needed time to himself to write, sleep, watch sports or do whatever it is that he feels like doing, in the moment he feels like doing it. I’m grateful that we have the resources, the money, the time, the car that enables me to go away for a night and come home again, refreshed. And I am so, so grateful for a friend with whom I can go, knowing that the time together will be fun and easy, deep and healing.
I am sending out a little payer for all the mothers and women everywhere who are so lucky as me.

all clean?

Well. That’s better. Last night I went for my colonic. I’ve had a few in the past, but it’s been years. I called around to a couple of different places and booked my appointment with the first one that returned my call. The place was nice, the practitioner friendly, but not too much so, which I appreciated. She escorted me to the treatment room and explained what would happen. Told me how much to undress and where to sit, etc. Then she said – and I found this odd – “It’s okay to talk on the phone during your treatment, so you can keep your phone with you.”
While I lay there trying to relax while feeling the rush of fluids in and out of my body, I thought about how GRATEFUL I am that I do not have the kind of lifestyle which would necessitate my taking a phone call while getting a colonic.
Well, the treatment certainly got things moving, and I am, to a certain extent, relieved. I’m still experiencing some pain and bloating, however. I could burp for about 5 minutes straight. While both my sons might find this hilarious, it is a bit uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, my period started yesterday. Hmm, interesting. On one of the websites, it said that IBS is often triggered by the onset of menstruation. This is not a normal period, either, I might add. It was 44 days in coming, which is long, even for me, and I usually go 34-36 days. And it’s not really flowing either. It’s like everything in my body is just sitting there, held in, waiting for something.
Clearly, something is not right. So now what?
I’d love to get some acupuncture. I think it would help immensely. The question is how? I can’t afford a ton of treatments, but even if I could, I have no time. I currently have about one hour a week during which I am both kid-free and not doing some kind of paid work. I’ve taken my younger child to therapy with me, but he was still crawling then, so it was a bit more manageable. Last week I brought him with to my pap smear, and that was a bit of a challenge, but do-able. My older son goes to the chiropractor with me and has a good enough time. Somehow, though, it seems like it could be counterproductive having the needles in and trying to keep Elijah from uprooting the lucking bamboo while also keeping Caleb entertained by making up stories for him on demand. I could hire a sitter, but then that would just add to the cost, obviously.
I could have a conversation with my husband during which I tell him my needs and we negotiate our schedules.
Wait, what?
The good news is that I’m leaving town tomorrow with a friend. We’re going away for what maybe becoming our annual garage-sale funded birthday celebration night away. Can’t wait.

now what?

Okay, so now I think I have irritable bowel syndrome. God. I feel like I’m turning into one of those people who can only talk about her ailments, but I have not felt this bad in years. I went through this period about five or six years ago when I would have these bouts or, as I thought of them, “attacks” during which I would be seriously constipated for days, weeks, accompanied by intense stomach pain. My belly would distend, and I literally could not eat anything that would not cause pain and bloating. Even chicken broth would bring this on.
Then, mysteriously, it would go away. Then come back. I couldn’t seem to find a pattern. I went to various doctors and practitioners, one of whom was a proctologist. I told him my symptoms. He said, “Eat more fiber.” At the time, I was literally eating nothing but fiber, three times amount he recommended. I tried to explain this, and he gave me a pamphlet with drawings of fruits vegetables and grains illustrating what he meant by “fiber.” I said I thought I might have irritable bowel syndrome. He laughed. He said if I did, I would not be constipated, I would have diarrhea. About a year later, I saw a commercial on TV for a new drug, just for women that treated IBS with constipation. I’m actually grateful the doctor did not prescribe it, or I’d probably have gone the drug route, and if possible, I would rather not.
The naprapath I was seeing at the time suggested that my symptoms were allergy-related. Not food allergies, but seasonal. That was also during the fall, so she may have been on to something there. She also recommended that I eat a chopped-up apple sprinkled with flax seeds before going to bed at night, and to avoid raw vegetables.
These things seemed to help.
Since then, I’ve had a few bouts of this now and then, but nothing as severe as that, until now. I checked a few websites (I know, I know) to get more info about “triggering foods.” I’m not eating any fried or greasy foods or white flour, which are major culprits. But I have been eating a lot more nut butter than I usually do, and carob, both of which can cause an attack of IBS. Crap. So there are two more things to eliminate from my already fairly restricted diet.
I don’t even know if I have it or not, but in any case, I am very grateful that for my birthday, my husband gave me a gift certificate for a colonic. (Yes, this was a request, not a random stab and what I might possibly want as a gift this year ). I am going to redeem it at 7:00 tonight. I am in a lot of pain at the moment, and I am counting the minutes.

another day of graditude

I teach a writing class on Tuesday nights, and my mom usually babysits. My folks are vacationing in Mexico this week, so I called the kid across the alley to see if he could sit. He has done so before, with mixed results. Nothing “bad” has ever happened when the kids are in his care, but he’s done things like forget to turn off the overhead light when putting the baby to bed, and last time, he wouldn’t let my older son put the CD’s in the boom box because he didn’t believe we would allow this. He is very earnest and took a Red Cross Babysitting course and brought his certificate to show us when he came for his “interview” (a meeting which he insisted on having). But, he has just turned 13, and since a three-year-old and one-year-old are a lot for ME to handle, we generally use his services when we’re going out after the kids are in bed.
Tonight he didn’t show up. My class starts at 6:30, and he was to arrive at 5:30, which would give me just enough time to drive across town, park, check in at the office and get to my class. At 6:40 I phoned my brother’s house since they live close to the campus where I’m teaching to see if they would be home, but they were going out. I am GRATEFUL that the sitter they had hired for the evening to watch my niece happens to be the same woman who babysits in the nursery of the church we attend, so my kids know her. So, when I pulled up in the dark alley behind their building and handed my kids off saying, “the baby’s got teeth coming in and he’s been really fussy all day and neither one of them has napped and I hope no one poops because I forgot the diaper bag tim will be here by 7:30 to pick them up my class starts in three minutes gotta run bye,” I was very GRATEFUL it was someone they knew and I didn’t have to speed out of there leaving them in the dust with a complete stranger.

back on the wagon?

So I guess I need to figure out what I am doing, whether it’s taking things one day at a time, re-committing to this diet, blowing it off and eating what I want, or, having cut my sugar cravings, moving forward with my new lifestyle, which includes eating small amounts of sugar once in a great while.
The last one here is my favorite, but it’s the “once in a while” bit that throws me. Does “once in a while” mean special occasions? And if so, how are those defined? Does it mean once a week? Birthday parties? Tuedays?
With the holidays approaching, I feel like I need to at least have some kind of game plan in place, and then if I choose to deviate from that fine, but right now things feel sort of like a free-for-all.
Sometimes, I have felt as if I could go on following the diet as I have been for a long time. I’ve gotten somewhat used to it, the sugar cravings have subsided a great deal, and I’m getting back into the habit of cooking, which is a huge part of it. And sometimes I really did think, maybe I just won’t eat sugar at all anymore. But then it was my birthday and I found that I wanted to eat a piece of the molten chocolate cake my sister-in-law made. And have a glass of wine. And I felt okay about doing that at the time.
So then I thought, well, I can go along like this, as long as I can make exceptions now and then. But the holidays are coming up, and let’s face it, there’s a “special occasion” every other day. So then what? Decide in the moment? That doesn’t feel safe to me. Do what I can until after the first of the year and then get serious again? Decide that I’m just not going to eat any sugar, period?
Would I feel too desolate, like I’m denying myself too much?
I try not to live in a black-and-white manner, but maybe I need to.
I recently read a post on this subject that I found very enlightening. Reading Mama Dharma’s thoughts on sugar consumption made me think that maybe, as she says, the most compassionate thing for me to do for myself is to just not eat sugar, at all. The back-and-forth cravings swing is just too hard.
I’m still thinking about it.
Meanwhile, I’ve been in denial about my really “needing” to do this diet/detox program. I thought that if I did actually have candida, it was a mild case and could be eradicated with a fairly modified version of the diet. I really felt like I was doing this whole thing more for spiritual or energetic reasons than for physical ones. I thought that I could do it for a month and then move on. I thought that I could pick and choose the parts I liked of the many versions of the diet, and/or that not eating sugar and wheat would be enough of a shift in my eating habits to kill the candida.
Well, I still have it, so now what? And, as I said in my last post, it wasn’t a surprise that I still had it, but still, having it confirmed with an actual test makes it hard to kid myself any more.
Then again, why am I doing this exactly? Does it really matter if I have candida? Depending on whom you ask, 30% or 80% of people are walking around with candida and don’t know it. So what’s the big deal. It’s not like I feel like I need to be totally pure and clean to be okay. I live in a city, after all. There is no totally pure and clean here.
And let’s face it – it’s not like I have felt that great on the diet. I lost ten pounds (or seven, depending on the day), which is nice, but I’ve been tired as hell, crabby, and, as I said, so damn constipated I could scream. Until today. Now I have the other problem, the one I can never spell.
Anyway. Lots of unanswered questions for the time being.
While swimming in uncertainty about so many things, I have decided to take up the challenge and try to post something for which I am grateful (almost)everyday for November. This much I know:
I am grateful that I have a choice to either eat sugar or not. That I live in a place and time and culture of abundance (excess perhaps, but I’m being grateful), so that I can choose how and when and what to eat.
I’m grateful that I don’t have diabetes or another disease that makes the consequences of these choices potentially much more dire.
This will sound strange, but I’m actually grateful I have diarrhea at the moment. After feeling so completely blocked for a month, this latest “symptom” is a welcome relief! And I’m grateful, again that I live a life where this is actually welcome and not life-threatening.
I’m grateful for you, reading this.

I'm back?

I’ve been AWOL. Had pretty much been thinking in terms of having completely abandoned the whole blog business because I’ve been feeling too entirely overwhelmed by everything and can’t manage to even keep up with reading the blogs that I have come to enjoy in the short time since I’ve entered this strange world of blogging, let alone compose posts of my own. Besides I have found myself lately in a profoundly non-verbal space which is strange for me and not a little frightening, to tell you the truth, but that’s where I’ve been.
Plus, both my kids seem to have given up napping, so that’s been fun.
And then there’s the fact that I’ve been playing martyr in my marriage and offering up the minute parcels of “time to myself” that I have to my husband because he does, after all, earn (most of)the money and has been up nights finishing his work, and so who am I to claim need of such a thing as “time to write.” Ha. Not real healthy, I know, but for now, it's all I know how to do.
Meanwhile, I had my pap smear appointment the other day and talked to my midwife about what’s been going on with me and she did a test, which shows I have…..YEAST!! yes, five weeks into doing the candida diet yeast is still present in my body. I was not shocked. Disappointed, yes. Surprised, no. The good news is that she did not see it when she was down there,which means there was not a full-blown yeast infection. So that’s something.
Still. I’m still fighting the fungus.
That was the day before Halloween, so you can imagine what went down with all that candy in the house.
And the next two days I was involved in a focus group for…..SNACK CAKES!! I was asked to sample cream-filled, vanilla snack cakes. Four on the first day, three on the second, and then give my opinion.
Honestly, they were a little disgusting. It wasn’t just the sugar, but the artificial-ness of them. Yuck.
And since then, I’ve been giving myself a break from the diet. I’ll get back on track tomorrow, I think. It’s been interesting. I have not gone SUGAR CRAZY since its reintroduction into my system as I might have in the past. I haven’t thought, well, I’m “cheating” today, so I might as well eat complete crap all day long. There has been some new and different behavior going on here, which feels good. It's as if some kind of growth has occurred while I was looking elsewhere.
Today, for breakfast I might have had any number of things I’ve been “denying” myself for the past month, and might have even put pressure on myself to “live it up” while I’m “taking the day off.” But what I really wanted was a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and a little honey. So that’s what I had. Not exactly candida-diet friendly, but not a bowl of Sugar Snaps in chocolate milk, either.
So, anyway. I’ve been feeling a little nutty. Like thinking that I might actually be making a long-term lifestyle change, as opposed to a 30-day “diet” which is what I thought I was doing, and the shift in thinking has thrown me for a loop. I had no idea how much the things I eat are tied up with my identity. Also, how much of the way I eat is tied in with a lot of stuff about my mother. That both of these things have been so shocking has itself been a little shocking. These are the kinds of things I know but don’t really know I know or want to know that I know, but they’ve been right in front of me the whole time.
Also, I had such high expectations of this “cleanse.” Like I would struggle with detox the first week or so, and then have a cathartic moment where I would have a good cry and then afterwards I would feel light and clean and all would be right with the world.
Um, no.
The reality is that I still feel really bogged down, emotionally and physically. I have not cried since that day unloading the dishwasher even though I have needed to on several occasions, and I’m so incredibly constipated – despite the use of a two-week Enzymatic Cleasing Kit with includes both fiber and herbal laxative pills – that I literally broke into a cold sweat while sitting on the toilet the other day.
Fun times!
So, I may or may not be adjusting my expectations, and I may or may not explore this and more here. I’m not committing to anything. Everything is turning out to be very different from what I thought, which, I supposed, could be just fine.