creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

Archives for October 2008

Why there will be no tooth fairy at our house

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Of course I had planned to write about something completely different. Again. I should just get used to it. Do you do that too? Do you have a list with ideas for posts on it that goes back more than a year?

Well, Rae wrote something about the tooth fairy which tied in with the fact that one of my son’s teeth has started to come lose. For about a year now he has asked us if there will be a tooth fairy at our house when he’ll lose his teeth. And for a year (or maybe more) I have said, “I don’t know, I’ll have to talk with your father about it.”

You see, when I was a child there was no talk of tooth fairies here in Germany. Losing a tooth, and especially the first tooth was, of course, a milestone but then you had the option of putting it somewhere safe, or throwing it away. Now that Germany seems to become more US-like every day all of a sudden not only do we celebrate Halloween, but there seem to be Santa Clauses and Tooth Fairies around too. I’m confused.

On the subject of Halloween in Germany I have to say: What? Halloween? Dressing up is what carnival is for, also the 31st of October is Reformation Day, and now do I have to buy candy for tomorrow or not? Because the year before last there were about ten trick or treaters. Last year there was none, not a single one, and I ended up eating all the candy myself. Three years ago there were two, by the way, they knocked on our door two days too early and put liquid soap in our mailbox because I didn’t give them candy on account of thinking they were joking. That’s what happens when you adopt foreign customs, you get them all wrong and get confused. End of Halloween rant.

So, with the tooth fairy. I’m completely opposed to giving children money for something like losing a tooth. My husband feels the same obviously, he mumbled something like, “What will children get money for next, pooping?” Which leaves us with a bit of dilemma nonetheless because, according to our son, he will be the only child in kindergarten (or maybe the whole world) who won’t receive a toy for losing a tooth. Bummer. And again, foreign customs equal confusing because as far as I know in the English-speaking world there will be coins for teeth, not toys.

I haven’t spoken with the other parents about this but I expect it to be a bit like the “tradition” of gift bags for children who attend birthday parties. As far as I know this “custom” is about five years old. But in an act of collective memory loss everybody nowadays knows, of course, that if you’re hosting a birthday party for your offspring, every little guest has to receive a nice little bag with little plastic toys and yet more candy. So far I have avoided the “gift bag issue” by doing making crappy non-fitting pirate hats with the children which they could take home with them. Ahem.

I could tell my son to suck it up, or tell him the truth, “Your parents are mean and do everything different than others, get used to it.” but somehow I think he won’t like it. So once again we’re opting for not lying to our son, there is no tooth fairy, no Easter bunny, and no Santa Claus. We also tell him not to talk about this too much because there are people out there who want their children to believe in these stories, and they don’t like it when you tell them different.

In the end I thought about the underlying need he had. His real reason for asking about the tooth fairy isn’t that he wants his childhood to be more magical. (It’s magical enough as it is because he lives a parallel life where he is the queen of Teddyland. Teddyland is the land where it’s always summer, there are fairies and unicorn dances, and nobody has to brush their teeth. All his stuffed animals are alive there. They also have excursions to Candyland quite often. Just so you know.)

The underlying need is the want for toys and money. He is in a phase where he believes that if only he had all the toys and things and sweets he wants he surely would be happy. We try to tell him otherwise, and we try to help him be happy too but it might take a bit of additional convincing. The concept of money is very fascinating to him, he tries to understand it, and why I get to buy books, and magazines, and yarn, and he doesn’t. At least not as much.

So today, on the spur of the moment, I decided that he will start getting pocket money when his tooth falls out. He found that quite nice, then said, “But I’m getting pocket money already.” No, you’re not. When one gets pocket money one gets it every week. Wow! You should have seen him. Much better than the tooth fairy. Money every week!

And, whoosh, the week went by

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I’m feeling a bit stupid (again), here I am, realizing that the last post I wrote was about weekend to-do-lists, and all of a sudden it’s time for a new weekend. I could swear they are making the weeks shorter, and shorter these days.

I had wanted to write posts about how to learn to love exercise, about me and my son, how we had weeks of fighting and yelling, and now it’s all getting better, about how this same son wakes up early every single day now, so that my poor husband who doesn’t respond well to the traditional fighting over getting dressed, fighting over breakfast, and fighting to get out of the house on time, especially when he had been woken an hour early, resigned himself to sleeping in the guest room, well, I wanted to write about the usual things.

Also I have been on a finishing frenzy, knitting-wise. I’m just about to finish a cardigan, and a huge lace shawl, and then, today, in the middle of the day, just a few minutes before my first student of the day was to arrive I decided to do something wild and crazy and start a completely irrational project just like that.

But then I looked at the yarn and saw that it needed to be wound into balls before I can use it, and while I might be crazy enough to try and start a project in ten minutes, I’m clear enough to see that ten minutes doesn’t work if you have to wind the yarn first.

Time for the next weekend to-do-list, I think.

The weekend to-do-list

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Do you do that too? Make a list of what you want to do on your weekend? And I don’t mean something like a grocery list, or a list of chores, my list is all mixed. Chores, pleasurable things, mundane things.

I think my tendency to make endless lists is stemming from a deep desire to live my life as best as possible. It also stems from the experience that if I don’t make lists, if I don’t write down things nothing will get done, and by the end of the weekend I will feel bad about that.

I wasn’t always like this. Back in my twenties I spend weekends mostly alone, in bed. I kept the lists and the things to do for weekdays only, unless I had a big paper to write or something. I remember when I decided to make Saturday a workday, and felt almost shocked about this. Still, Sundays were spent in bed, reading, doing nothing, with a solitary walk in the afternoon.

Now, my life is much fuller than it used to be, and I have begun putting things on my lists like: “talk with husband”, “play with son”, “read comic”, and “take a shower”.

So, on Friday I made a list, and I did almost all the things I put on it, and now I feel quite good about my weekend and myself, only I have this feeling that I shouldn’t be making these lists all the time.

This was my list:

  • seam, wash and block green cardigan
  • spin
  • block scarf that I made for my husband (has been lying around since April)
  • clean house
  • buy groceries
  • go to hardware store
  • play the guitar
  • continue knitting Mystic Waters shawl
  • read Flash and Firefly-Comics

I did everything on my list apart from cleaning, but then my husband vacuumed the whole house so he did my chore for me. What I didn’t put on my list but what I should have put on there was:

  • practice recorder with son
  • give son a bath
  • exercise

It wasn’t on the list so I didn’t do it. Oops. On the other hand I did spend about an hour on Saturday teaching my son how to crochet. It was all very sweet. He had been studying a children’s catalogue full of clothes and toys, and suddenly he said, “I want to knit a bag like that.” Of course I was interested, and after telling him that it was indeed crochet, and that yes, I would teach him how to do it but only after breakfast, I fetched some yarn and a crochet hook. He’s becoming quite good at the actual crocheting part that you do with your right hand but he is completely unable to hold the yarn, and the piece he’s working on in his left, so for now he needs me to be his left hand. Which led to some frustration on his part when he wanted to work on his bag a little more after lunch, and when I couldn’t help him immediately he tried on his own only to discover that he can’t do it without me. Not the best for building self-esteem.

I don’t remember it being so hard. When thinking about how I learned to crochet and knit, I’m left with a feeling that my mother showed me briefly and then I got it. I remember that learning how to purl was a bit more complicated because I taught myself out of a book, and got it wrong but that was that.

On the other hand I was eight when I learned how to crochet and my son is only five years old. He will learn eventually. At least I hope that he will.

But, back to the list-making, I do find it a bit sad that I have to put things like “read comic” on a list to get them done. It’s only because I’m wading through heaps of unread books, comics, magazines, and blog posts.

So, while the weekend to-do-list does work for me, I still have the feeling that I shouldn’t be having one. And, of course, if my life were in order, I’d do the grocery shopping and other errands during the week.

So, what do you think about weekend to-do-lists? Do you have them? Do they work?

So, yesterday was Blog Action Day and Love Your Body Day

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and I missed them both. Remember, how I told you about blog action day? The theme was poverty. Lucky for me things like that don’t depend on me and there were thousands of posts regarding the subject. Even on blogs about marketing craft. Well, I missed it but I have the excuse that I have written about child poverty in the past (If you’re going over there you also should take a look at the comments).

And then I found out that yesterday was also Love Your Body Day. On the one hand I think that we may have just a few too many blogger holidays (Talk Like a Pirate Day, anyone? Towel Day?) on the other hand, of course, every day is a good day to love your body. In fact since this body might be the only one we have we’d better treat it with respect and love. One of the commenters to my last post called her body a “heap of cells” and I felt quite uneasy about this.

I know it took me quite some time to learn to love my body but it was really worth it. Yes, I am overweight (that’s a fact) but I don’t really feel that there is something to hide. From the inside my body feels good, it’s strong, it’s curvy, my husband likes to look at me, and while I see that it’s aging and far from perfect I can tell you that I felt fatter, less fit, and less lovable at the age of twenty than I feel now.

Then all I could see when I looked in the mirror was a heap of “problems”: butt too big, shoulders too narrow, thighs too big, arms too skinny, waist too narrow. When I dressed I thought about things to hide all the time.

I did learn this from my mother. When she speaks of her body she only speaks about the things she doesn’t love about it. She taught me to wear clothes like tents so that people wouldn’t realized that my bottom part is bigger than the rest. Only later did I find out that the tents actually covered everything so that I looked equally big all over. Only later have I learned that there are indeed people who like women to be on the curvy side. And I learned that I prefer real women over coat hangers every time.

I went to the sauna and the pool and looked at other women’s bodies. Look at them in a friendly way, not the “Look at her, if I were looking like that I wouldn’t wear a …”-mindset. Study other women and find something beautiful about each and every one of them. And look at myself in the mirror every day and learn to love me as I am.

I can tell you that your butt doesn’t get smaller if you hate it. And that there is no magic number on the scale that makes you feel beautiful. I have felt fat at every weight between 57 and 84 kilos. And I have felt more beautiful when I was heavier and older than when I was thinner and younger.

I did write about feeling fat back in June so I won’t do it here again, (instead I’m shamelessly pointing you there). So, let’s all step in front of the mirror, take a look at ourselves, smile (genuine smile, please, no faking) and say, “I love my body. I look fabulous!” Repeat until you really mean it.

The Food Journal

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Some time ago I have written about starting to journal everything I eat in an attempt to help me lose weight. And then, at the beginning of September, I pulled out a nice, small notebook and started my food journal. If you were to look through it you might be surprised that according to the journal I seem to not eat daily, and on the days that I eat, I seem very often to stop eating after breakfast.

Since I never do that (part of me still thinks that if I miss a meal I’ll drop dead) there’s only one conclusion to draw: journaling my food intake isn’t working. I did find journaling useful when I first started to become more conscious about my eating habits years and years ago but these days it’s not as much about the unconscious inhaling of junk food anymore.

As of this day I release myself from the task of writing down everything I eat.

Phew.

So, now what to do about my size and weight? For the past year or so my motto has been “Eat more, move less.” with rather predictable results. Today in the morning before breakfast and dressing I weighed in at 79.2 kilos (174.6 lbs). That’s about ten kilos (almost twenty pounds) more than I feel comfortable with. Though I have to admit that when I was at that weight for the last time I still had the feeling of being too big. (My height is 1.74 m, a bit more than 5 ft. 8.)

In my head I’m still a lean person that’s just been a bit too heavy for a short time but if I’m more realistic I have to say that I have been overweight for about eight years now with a short intermezzo of being merely slightly too heavy for about half a year or so. In my head I have been on the verge of losing weight again any moment now. For more than a year. While constantly gaining.

And it’s not like I don’t know where it’s coming from, I am the one who, every single day, has “just one more treat”, “just one more sandwich”, or “just this snack”. “Just this once” is not helping me if it’s happening every single day. In the past few weeks there have been times when I stole my son’s candy, and when I broke every single rule about food that I ever made to help myself.

This is not about beating me up. It’s just my attempt at looking at the situation just as it is.

So. I’m heavier than I would like to be, and I’m not as fit as I would like to be. Is this really a problem?

No, really. What if I stayed at this weight for the rest of my life? It’s heavy but it’s not grossly overweight. I’m still fitting into regular sized clothes (thanks to stretch jeans). While I do feel a bit uncomfortable in my bathing suit that doesn’t stop me from going swimming. In fact, my weight doesn’t stop me from enjoying anything I like. The only thing is that I have put off buying a new pair of jeans for months now because I still hope to be able to fit into a smaller one. Any day now. It is as if I were secretly waiting for a visit from the weight loss fairy. One morning I’ll wake up and I’ll look the same as in 1996 again. And everything in between would have been a bad dream.

Why 1996, you might ask? Well, in the summer of 1996 I just had lost weight, and I was in the best physical shape of my entire life. I did step-aerobics, weight-lifting, and walking almost every day, and I weighed something around 65 kg. There’s a picture of me, taken at our annual summer party that year where I look really great. I had that picture of me on my fridge for years as a motivational tool, until I suddenly realized I’ll never look like that again, even if I weigh the same, and exercise the same, because I’m actually 12 years older now.

And that’s okay. This is not about turning back time. In fact I’m not so sure what this is about but I find that I don’t care about my weight or appearance enough to change my eating habits consistently. That’s the fact. All this talk about “I have lost a pound, hurray!” and “I have gained a pound, drama!” will amount to nothing.

My lack of fitness is the thing that bothers me more. I don’t like being out of breath so easily, I don’t like not being flexible, and I don’t like that beer cases and the groceries seem to get heavier every week. My current fitness regimen of a leisurely stroll every three days doesn’t really cut it. So, again, for about the hundredth time my goal is to do some moving every other day. Apart from my walks to kindergarten and grocery stores.

As for the eating I’m really tired of hearing myself setting goals and announcing the new shiny me only to revert to my old sluggishness immediately afterwards. On the other hand I was mightily impressed by another blogger’s account of how she quit smoking by just seeing herself as a non-smoker, and I’ll try that again.

You know, I don’t really care for sweets. They make me feel weak. And potato chips. Blech. Who would want to eat potato chips for dinner? I always feel so heavy and bloated afterwards. And really, I’m not that hungry. You know, I really have to move. If I don’t exercise for a day or two I’m going crazy.

Well, at least I’m trying.