Getting Waisted (25 page)

I didn’t want to feel bad; I was not good at it. I sunk lower and lower, wishing he would leave me so I could close the blinds and put on the old flannel nightie, not an item of clothing I would ever have worn in my marital bed.
I had sexy onesies with feet and a trap door for that.
I wanted to take to my bed with several large tubs of ice cream and not have any witnesses. He had struck a nerve. He wanted to fix me and that made things worse. I was not a vacuum cleaner; well I was, but not in the way he meant. I was not an appliance that could have its dials adjusted.
If only.

As usual, a bolt of clarity arrived just before dawn when everything was dangerously quiet. I understood what Gilles was saying to me. I was stuck playing an old tape in my head, one that screamed at me that I wasn’t good enough, so I made jokes in order to deflect and erase the negative. Funny thing, people were always trying to protect me from myself whenever I would make a smart-ass or disparaging joke about my body, but I didn’t need that kind of protection. The jokes were not the problem. I liked jokes; they gave me perspective and they allowed me to throw up a smoke screen while examining the work in progress that was me. They let me spit everything out in ways that made me laugh and kept anyone else from tearing me down. These jokes were not self-sabotage, just the opposite in fact; I felt quite detached from them. Sometimes, funny is just funny. But what was true was how I behaved, not what I said.

Something shifted and it wasn’t comfortable. I needed to change that tape; I needed to find a better way to handle stress. The habit of stuffing my face when my demons reared their ugly heads was the real problem. These demons, the ones we all have, are bigger than we are. They
are
demons! They had fire and serpent-like tails that could crush all my good intentions. The idea that I could control them suddenly seemed ridiculous. I was loved deeply, by Gilles and by so many other people. Not once did he judge me. It was time for me to change the tape, get over myself, and find a better way.

I hauled myself out of bed, cleaned myself up, and found a hypnotherapist. The practice had been around for six thousand years; I figured if they could make legions of people quack like ducks and flap their arms like chickens, they might be able to get me to shut my mouth.

Dr. Victor was a very nice man with a very good reputation but he had his work cut out for him when he met me. He was quite clear when he said it would most likely take several sessions to see a change, as shifting an ingrained belief system didn’t happen with the snap of some fingers the way it was shown on television. He explained that I would retain total control, even when he put me under, and assured me I wouldn’t do anything I didn’t want to do. It was more like a truly deep state of relaxation, all the clatter stilled, allowing for hypnotic suggestion to have a place to land. With the rules explained, I was ready to play the game. I was a little disappointed Dr. Victor didn’t use a dangling pocket watch swinging back and forth to lull me into a deep trance. He simply spoke in a calm and steady way much like in a yoga meditation, and the more he spoke and guided me through some deep breathing, the more I felt the chatterboxes slowing down. They were still there waiting to get back in control but somehow I didn’t want them to. It was when he began talking about my body, guiding me through visualizations that were supposed to change the way I saw myself, that I could feel the chatterboxes stir to life. They resented being managed and they resisted. And the more he talked, the more I felt he was talking about someone else. That smaller-waisted woman he wanted me to see and believe in was not me. Putting my head on that body was not a good fit. I felt the chatterboxes rise up in unison, and we were done. Bye-bye
hippotherapy.

The experience reminded me of a dinner-party story a psychotherapist friend of mine had told me. I was pretty sure it was apocryphal but it was still a good tale. A woman had been referred to a therapist because she had begun walking down a staircase as if she were carrying something heavy. She did the same thing when she sat and she always twisted her body to allow for whatever she was carrying when she passed through a door frame. After several sessions she revealed she was carrying a treasure chest in her head and it kept her awake at night because she couldn’t ever get comfortable. After a few months of talk therapy that wasn’t getting anywhere and several consultations with a psychiatrist colleague, they got the woman’s permission to perform surgery to remove it. The doctors all knew it was psychosomatic but very real to her. She was admitted to the hospital and she was put under, her head shaved and bandaged. When she woke up, they told her the surgery had been successful and they had removed the treasure chest. Lying next to her on the bedside table they had placed a large chest filled with baubles and coins. She took one look at it and said. “That’s not mine.” I knew exactly what she meant.

Sitting outside that evening, I told Gilles that, while feeling deeply relaxed, I still had a touch of a night watchman’s vigilance when being asked to accept Dr. Victor’s very positive imagery, which I felt was similar to wanting me to believe I was driving a fully kitted-out Ferrari after having spent years in a very comfy four-door sedan.

I sat outside for a long time, thinking about the hundreds of pounds I had dropped over my life and how often they were called back for active duty. And still, with all my introspection and self-awareness, I didn’t believe I was intended to be fat. Something
had
gone wrong in the shipping department; they had sent out my head attached to the wrong body.

23

Butter

Cost
$1,500 but not for food

Weight lost
None

Weight gained
Sure

I wanted a baby.
I didn’t
really
want a baby.
I wanted to stop thinking about my body. I wanted to be
legally
fat. Gilles was apprehensive and it surprised me to witness my man being fearful of anything. He was the one always rushing to my side to bear the brunt of whatever obstacle, emotional or physical, that might be panicking me. He couldn’t or wouldn’t put into words what was bothering him, so I tried playing twenty questions to see if could get him to explain what was freaking him out. He just kept saying he wasn’t ready. It didn’t make sense; this man was the most ready person I knew.

I tried wheedling, pleading, and then negotiating. “Honey, honey, come on, we have plants and they are doing well; well, surviving mostly. We’re great doggie parents buying the best treats, and she’s extremely popular with all the other dogs at the park, if not their owners.”

It all became clear when Gilles said, “Dogs are not babies. Babies are expensive.” It was about money. But then I began to think it was more about being responsible for someone’s life, not just financially, but in every way and forever. It was a daunting prospect, the notion of becoming a parent, putting us right on the fast track to adulthood. And for Gilles, that required pause and reflection. It was about looking at all sides as if every question was like a tetrahedron. It was part of his process; he needed to look at all the pros and cons, and then decide. For me, it took the blink of an eye. I relished snap decisions; this was where I had absolute confidence in that I trusted my gut.

I tried to leave it alone and allow him the time he needed, but he needed a lot of time. Just sitting in a restaurant while he ordered from the menu was an exercise in the art of Zen. Not my forte. I was fidgeting and twitching like a four-year-old while he ruminated. I had had enough. I was on a mission and I didn’t want to be given a no.
I didn’t like no.
I leapt onto him and thrust my chest in his face. “Babies are cheap . . . look at these tatas and think of a neon-lit, full-service, open twenty-four-seven bar. What baby wouldn’t want to sidle up to that watering hole? Children may be expensive, but by then we’ll have lots and lots of money, won’t we?” Gilles, good naturedly, said he certainly hoped so, because he knew I wouldn’t let this go until he gave in. He thought the giving in part might be fun.

Wham! Bam!
I was pregnant. Gilles was over the moon; it was me who turned out to be the nervous Nellie. What had we done?
I knew what we had done.
We had bought tickets on the biggest roller coaster and it had left the station and there was no way to get off. I couldn’t sleep; what if I turned out to be just like my mother? She had all these really great qualities and she couldn’t have loved me more, but she wasn’t a great mother.

I was standing at the stove making soup, thinking what a wonderful mother Gilles would be. He was always kind and nurturing. I began to feel woozy. Something was not right. I collapsed to the ground in a heap. Moments later I came to and saw the blood on the floor.

I was lying on the examination table and Gilles was holding my hand, looking pale and worried. I tried to cheer him up but that required more energy than I could summon. My doctor came back into the room, still examining the chart. He had trouble reading his own writing, taking more than a couple of stabs at it, but finally, he figured out what he had scribbled and explained something about it being quite early in the pregnancy but the egg had wandered off target, looking for nourishment.
Of course I had a hungry unborn baby.
He added that miscarriages were sometimes the body’s way of ending a pregnancy that got off to a bad start; that it was unfortunately quite a normal occurrence and that I would feel a bit of pain for a couple of days but that in a few weeks, we could try again.

I wasn’t handling the loss well. I didn’t want to have sex; I didn’t want to do much of anything except I suddenly knew how much I wanted to have that baby. I was at loose ends and rudderless, which was bad for so many reasons. I ate whatever I saw that didn’t smell bad. I had no interest in writing. Instead, I abused our dog by using her as a dress-up doll, and not with cute little cuddly-wuddly doggie clothes; I had her wearing a latex Dopey mask from Snow White. I dressed her as a Vegas showgirl, complete with sparkly bra and tassels. Poor Seeya (that was our dog’s name). She was astonishingly patient and sweet with all that I did, unlike her tragically normal behavior with strangers, which varied from aloof to Cujo-like, depending on her mood.

I needed to find something constructive to do with my time besides eating, and humiliating my dog. I walked the perimeter of our home looking for something to inspire my dulled brain. I was standing in our bathroom when suddenly the lack of plushness in our towels began to matter. They were skimpy and mismatched. I moved to our bedroom, which, too, was all wrong. Our sheets had a zero thread count as far as I could see and they certainly weren’t Egyptian cotton. Why that mattered bemused me; I had never cared before if they came from Latvia. Then I discovered painting, but I wasn’t interested in any small canvasses. I wanted full walls. The living room was a lovely shade of Swiss cottage white, but now I wanted it to be a soft yellow. My lovely, loving, and most sainted husband of course complied. He painted the entire room—and it was a big one—yellow. But not the soft butter yellow I had in my mind and that I had described in detail as a creamy, churned butter as-if-lit-by-sunlight, yellow. What I got was more of a Velveeta-cheese-nuclear-waste kind of a yellow; a color that does not exist in nature
.
I wanted to be grateful. He stood in front of his masterpiece, waiting for me to jump up and down with joy. He had a big happy grin of accomplishment and a cute smear of paint on his cheek, but instead I burst into tears. I was an ungrateful bitch. Oh, what was wrong with me that I couldn’t fake it?

We went to the hardware store together. I brought the exact color swatch torn from an Architectural Digest photograph of Barbara Streisand’s kitchen in her Malibu house—not her Beverly Hill’s house, that was more like maize; nor the marigold-yellow from her Aspen place. I wanted it exactly like the Malibu yellow, which looked like creamy churned butter!

My beautiful man repainted the whole living room all over again, but this time under my prison-warden supervision. I loved it. It was creamy, buttery yellow.

I wanted to have sex in the living room as soon as it was dry and only just a little toxic. Could it have been that a paintbrush gently sliding across my wall with just the right shade of butter yellow was making me moist? Hey, whatever it took, I was good to go.

Boom! I was once again pregnant. And I no longer gave a toss about thread count or dressing our dog in stupid outfits. Both Gilles and I were ecstatic.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t thinking about my body—except as a vessel. I was supposed to be large and round and have cravings. It was a first-time ever, wholly sanctioned time in the life of me. Total strangers came up and patted my tummy, as if giving it validation. Wow!
Hey, I had a huge belly before. Where were all of you happy tummy-thumpers back then?
I loved being pregnant. I loved the mystery in the whole blind date-ness of it all, but really, I knew it was a boy. I just knew, and I knew he’d be sweet.

Our friends and family back East wanted to give me a baby shower. We decided we had time for one more road trip before we became a threesome. I was seven months pregnant and as happy as I had ever been. I had an amazing husband who was also my best friend. It was the end of July when we set out on our cross-country drive. On the first day we burned right through blazingly hot Las Vegas and onto the north rim of the Grand Canyon where we had a hotel ready and waiting. It was close to midnight when we pulled up to the gorgeous timbered lodge and then to our cabin, which we were told stood close to the edge of one of the world’s greatest views. All we could see was a black void under a canopy of stars, but we couldn’t wait to see what we would wake up to in a few hours. We were both exhausted and promptly fell asleep. Twenty minutes later, I was awake, fully alert, and feeling awful. I was in the purest air I had ever been in and I couldn’t breathe properly. Gilles, like a sentry, woke up and asked me what was wrong. We headed to the lodge. It was late, but there were three
dudes
flipping cards at the front desk. I explained my problem. One of them looked me over and grunted, “Uh huh.” I asked what that meant.

One of the other lummoxes answered for him. “Yeah, we see a lot of that, usually it’s old people; oh yeah and some pregnut ones, too.” I looked at him and pointed out that I wasn’t old, but if he paid any attention, he might notice I was quite
pregnut
. The third guy told me I could lose the kid unless I got off the mountain, ’cause I needed more oxygen.

Both Gilles and I became unstrung. “Is there a doctor here?”

“Nope,” came the response. After several more anxiety provoking exchanges with Huey, Dewey, and Louie, I asked if there was a park ranger on site. There was, but it still hadn’t occurred to any of them to call him until Gilles, scorching mad, demanded they do so.

The park ranger had me on oxygen in a heartbeat and in no uncertain terms told us we needed to go down to 5,000 feet, where I would feel far better, as would our unborn child. We were at 8,000 feet. We packed up and left immediately. It was three or four in the morning when we saw the 4,500-foot elevation sign, but another thirty minutes before we found anyplace open and with availability. We spent the rest of that night in a room at the back of a circa 1950s gas station/motel. We didn’t care; I was able to breathe and our baby would be safe. I never did see the Grand Canyon.

The drive through Utah was mind-bendingly beautiful with painted rock formations in pinks, reds, and oranges, and all manner of strange-looking hoodoos—peculiar chimney-shaped rocks—protruding upward from the Badlands. They came in all shapes and sizes, from tall humans to ten-story building heights. Such weird and wonderful nature existed in very few locales; we were enthralled to be in the middle of it. The drive was primarily peaceful and by the time we started to climb the Rockies, it was as if we were seasoned pros. We pulled into the parking lot of Copper Canyon Resort and I went into the lobby in search of a park ranger who could give me oxygen. They were everywhere, carrying portable machines. I stood in front of a friendly and very cute ranger, opened my coat, and he had me hooked up in seconds. Soon I was good to go. When we got back down to the flat fields of the prairies with their endless farms of wheat and corn, I couldn’t help but smile and think of my dad. “Corn, corn, corn . . . what do they do with all that bloody corn”?

My Toronto baby shower was a wonderful reminder of my other family, real and chosen, who showered us with baskets of baby clothes and sweet thoughtful gifts. Most of my time was spent being grilled about the confusion over the actual date of our marriage and whether we had really married twice. It was a bit easier explaining that it happened because my mother had willed it so, but telling the story reminded me of my crazy, headstrong, utterly amazing, and singularly unique Queen Elizabeth.