Altogether things aren’t so bad. If you looked at my life from the outside you’d think ‘pull yourself together, woman’, but then you’d be assuming that all there was to this woman was outside. There’s inside too, and inside things could be much better. I’ve been floundering* recently, finding the fight to make some space for me and the things I enjoy doing far too tiring. For a while the answer was to just give up and sit (with cake). There is a flaw in this plan, which is that it feels like a life of pure diet, and makes me resentful, gloomy and dreadful company. But I can’t go back to the life of pure butter, where I could immerse myself in learning a new skill or do a new project for hours on end, because there is the boy and my hours are limited.
*also known as miserable
All or nothing doesn’t work.
Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve bought a hundred books on this, that or the other, with the firm belief that if I get this new fabulous system/habit/routine going I will be thinner, fitter, wealthier, happier. Am I? No, of course not.
Why not? The books are full of sensible advice and testimonials from satisfied converts, so why don’t they transform my life in the same way? Because these systems belong to other people; people who, if they have time to write a book devoted to one thing, probably don’t really think about other things that much. I don’t have the personality to be so one track about eating wholegrains or doing ten minutes of exercise every morning, much less the time. So the ‘miracle’ system fails when my normal life takes over, and I go back to thinking it’s me that the problem and the failure.
So what’s next? If I’m sitting here feeling like something has to give or I’m going to get all Betty Draper with a shotgun, how do I make it better? I need my own goddamn system, that’s what next.
Diet and Butter.
People keep saying you can’t have it all. So depressing. But what if I could have most of it, just not all the time? What if I start living in the middle gray area instead of at the extremes?
A couple of weeks ago I was talking with Isaac about food. That man has seen me do some crazy stuff involving both not eating and eating. This time I was moaning about how dieting was so boring and you can’t have any cake. He looked at me like I was more bonkers than usual, and said, “Of course you can have cake, just as long as you accept that you’ll get where you’re going a bit slower.”
Ding.
Bizarrely it was the first time I truly understood that it was me deciding to eat less, and therefore if I so chose I could eat more. No one had a gun to my head to do either of those things. Some days I could say no to cake, and some days I could say yes, if I really wanted to. Most importantly, eating a piece of cake doesn’t mean I’ve failed and therefore may as well give up altogether. That’s the line I’ve always taken in the past, and not just with food.
I’ve had four weeks of living with diet and butter when it comes to my diet. I’m four pounds lighter. There is a part of me thinking that I could have lost twice that, but there’s another part of me that’s mindful that I could have faltered, and thrown it all away.
So what would it be like if I applied diet and butter philosophy to the rest of my life? The dark corners that I don’t attend to, the housework that bores me, the passions I abandon because I can’t spend entire days with them. What if I accepted that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, and that a little bit of everything here and there might be enough to stave off the craziness and the emptiness? For every bit of diet (emptying the dishwasher and looking up the postcode for the sat nav before bed) there could be a corresponding bit of butter (a stressfree morning with an outing to a new place, and an hour at naptime to do what I want).
That’s the big idea then. February is a nice short month, so I’m going to spend it following the thought and see where it gets me. Heaven knows I’ve been in worse places, but there’s a chance I might end up somewhere slightly better. And if I don’t, at least I haven’t spent £8.99 on another fix-it-all quick book.
This doesn’t work with everyone, but it works for me as a working single parent in terms of having my cake and eating it too. I don’t do anything home/kid/chore related in the evenings. The evenings are all mine. Ok, I lied, I do the laundry 1-2 times a week. I have a cleaning lady come every other week and let everything go except for the dishes and laundry in between. I do the dishes in the morning before work. I put Jack to bed between 7-8pm and from 8pm on until I decide to go to bed are all mine. I watch tv, go on the internet, or sew, sometimes all at once.
Yes, my house is not company worthy. Yes, my sewing is permanently and messily all over the living rm/dining rm. Yes, I’m tired most days due to lack of sleep (self-induced mostly). BUT, I am sane. I don’t feel like part of me has been chopped away just because I became a mother.
I know not everyone can afford a cleaning lady, and to be honest, I probably can’t either, but somehow I manage the finances. But my evenings are still my own and I guard them jealously.
Just some thoughts for you to digest with your butter and cake.
Well, I confess to have a cleaner every fortnight too, and I wouldn’t be without them, and like you, everything else gets left aside from laundry and dishes. My problem recently has been losing those precious evening hours to god knows what (wallowing possibly) instead of doing things I like, for no good reason other than having some kind of monumental strop/gloom/ about things not being perfect. I like your approach to staying sane, and I’m aiming to cement the things I need to do to stay sane myself.
I think we all make choices as adults, some good, some not so much – but the thing is to make sure you find the time to do what it means to be you, because, sure as eggs is eggs, without that time, you will be a lot less happy and a lot heavier. My biggest choice was to only eat butter on my Sunday toast. That way I feel like it’s a well deserved treat. I don’t even have it on sandwiches – it took a while to get used to, but now I find it way to greasy. I would personally go with Elizabeth’s method, sneak the cleaner in the door (only once a month for me) but in between I only do stuff that would otherwise render the house too disgusting to contemplate. Sometimes subterfuge is the only way!
So first: losing four pounds in four weeks? That’s amazingly fast. When I lose weight (as I am now, hurray) I tend to lose about 400 grams per month. this time I’m aiming a bit higher (or lower), and try for a kilo a month.
Diet mentality doesn’t work because of that all or nothing attitude. I know that if somebody told me I had to give up all of something I would instantly rebel. So I have a “no sweets” rule that I modify by a piece of dark chocolate now and then. And cake is possible as well but not the whole cake every day.
As a parent one has to learn how to make the best of small spaces. Think about your story while sitting on the playground, and write it down in the evening. Or if you’re like me, set your alarm a little bit earlier and write then.
There were a few “me times” per day that I have been defending against everything. Writing in my diary in the morning. Exercise. Watching a bit of TV. And when my son was young I sometimes wrote in my journal while he was wailing outside the door, and I did my exercise while he was telling me he didn’t want to stay in the stroller anymore. My message is, “Now we’re doing something that’s fun for me, and later we’ll be doing something that’s fun for you.
As for the housework, small thing help a lot there too. Wiping the sink after using it, putting all the dishes away immediately, putting things back, dust one room, you get the idea.
And when you know that there’s more to your life than housework you might enjoy it a bit more as well.
I was listening to a podcast a few years ago and they started talking about how good for you butter and beef and the like is… and at the time I was vegan and thought they were nuts!!
But, they were speaking about a book called Nourishing Traditions, so I check it out at the library (because I figured it was a load of hogwash, naturally) but once I cracked it open and read it… I was astounded. Since then I’ve completely change my diet and I feel so very much better. I try to tell anyone I can about that heavenly book, now, just as the folks on that podcast did so long ago. A traditional diet of meat, eggs, greens, and unprocessed fats really just makes sense – people lived on these pure diets for thousands of years before modern science came in and deemed it all ‘unhealthy’.
Worth a shot. I’m no longer hungry all the time and I eat like royalty most days. Which is saying a lot coming from someone who suffered from eating disorders most of my life.
Hey, I’m 4 lbs in 4 weeks too. I’m not into 100% denial (too greedy) and I know I’d just rebel and want to eat masses of cake.
And I reward myself for being ‘good’ (doing grotty housework) by an equivalent time doing something nice for me (sewing or blog surfing!).
Hoping your February plan works out for you.
Good luck Jo with the new approach. I know that I am only successful with things in the long term when I take baby steps. I can get all excited and focussed on initiatives. – sewing, exercising, decorating etc and spend hours immersed in them, but I’ve learnt that in the end this is not sustainable. It’s a cliche, I know, but slow and steady really does win the race in my mind.