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.