fattypatties

Everyone should take the time to color no matter how old they are. Just my opinion, but it comes from my experience. And, I have to admit it’s been a while. Not as long as you might think. Probably about 5 years. I’ve colored more than most adults, I think.

Coloring is such fun. It is a collaborative effort with an artist that you may or may not know. Someone drew the picture, created the image. You are filling in the spaces with your own imagination, both constrained and inspired by the image provided.

When someone on a list serve introduced Fat Ladies in Spaaaaaace (that’s 6 “a”s for the record), I knew I had to have one. To curb my book habit, my husband talked me into an agreement that I could only have books signed by the author. So I had to have an autographed one!

Nicole Lorenz, creator of the coloring book obliged and I am NOT disappointed! When you live in marginalized identities as I do, seeing images that are more like you can be almost shocking and definitely pleasing. I cried as I leafed through and met the Ladies of Space last night. Yep, cried. Nicole subtitled this book, “A Body Positive Color Book” and nothing could be more true. Each Lady featured is a strong, large, powerful alien who is more familiar to me than most.

I was drawn to the Space Cow Grrl name Joanna Be who lives Persophone. I had to literally dust off my box of crayons (which has a bunch of other ways to “color” in it like paints and pencils and pastels, so I plan to play with different media as well)! I think several people at the Starbux were questioning my sanity.

I have no idea what general age this should appeal to, but I would think, like almost all coloring books, different levels of development will treat the images and words differently and this could be a book that upon revisiting, a child grown into an adult would love. But I do know that anyone who has ever felt that their body was unacceptable would love this book. I plan to take the time to color

I hope Nicole sells a million or more of these and that she will consider telling us more about each lovely Space Lady. I could see a series for each so we can learn more about their lives throughout the universe.

My only regret is that I wish we had titled my memoir, Taking Up Spaaaaaace!

I don't think I've written these words yet in a public forum: I have diabetes.

I started to write "I am a diabetic," but I don't like that construction. I am not diabetes. I am me. But I do struggle with keeping my blood sugar in a healthy range. I have hypothyroidism. I am over 50. I am mostly post-menopausal. It's been a rough few years. I swear I turned 50 and my body fell apart.

I am aware that a lot of people in the world are cheering at these facts about me, as if they prove something. As if my becoming ill justifies all the weight loss schemes and all the risk factor studies. I am a bad fattie. I am one of those people who supposedly demonstrates that being over 300 pounds means instant death or long-term illness or the absolute end of health care as we know it.

I've been hesitant to write about diabetes especially because it is all the rage right now to demonstrate how bad fat is by equating it with diabetes.

But yesterday I had an epiphany of sorts. Or rather the obvious descended upon me with a dull thud. If I really believe in the principles of Health at Every Size®, then someone like me is on the front lines of these ideas. Someone like me is the one who has to fight for medical care that puts my health first rather than my weight. Someone like me has to speak out and say, it is not about weight, it is about health.

There are a multitude of theories on why I am facing these conditions at this time in my life. Weight is only one and it isn't a very good one. My guess is that it is a combination of all the stupid things I did to try to lose weight with all the wonderful genes given to me by my ancestors. In other words, a lot of it is the result of weight stigma and things beyond my control. I have regrets, but being fat is not one of them.

But that is all water under the bridge. The real question is what am I to do about it?

Dr. Sharma would categorize me as a "level 5" bad fattie and punish me with starvation and stomach mutilation (nightmares that sound like science fiction if you think about it outside of our cultural belief that fat is bad) even though his own research shows that it is not weight that determines these conditions.

I think HAES® is needed in cases like mine more than ever because what I need is HEALTH care NOT weight loss. That is the central principle of HAES®--concentrate on health not weight.

My biggest challenge these days are my feet (and some times my hands). I have neuropathic pain daily. I had hoped that control of thyroid and blood sugar would make it go away and so for the past two years we've been trying to address the underlying conditions. But even though I'm stable on thyroid medicine (and symptoms have subsided, except this one) and I'm improving on blood sugar, I still have to fight daily pain. I am finally this summer taking pain medicine. It has helped.

My feet also represent my thorniest issue for my own body love. In short, I've hated my feet most of my life in one way or another. Maybe that's why they're being so mean to me now, eh?

A discussion about shoes with friend of mine on FaceBook this week reminded me of how I loved to run barefoot as a kid. I still don't wear shoes unless I absolutely must. But my feet are damaged goods due to my current battle with neuropathy as well as an injury to my left foot in 2004 that left me a little less able to walk. It is the foot injury that put me in the permanently disabled category and for which I use my scooter and cane. My feet have always been problematic. I had one doctor tell me, however, that it was a good thing that I did go barefoot as a kid because shoes probably would have damaged them more.

They are kind of ugly, I have to admit. And the injury and nerve damage have made them less pretty. I inherited my dad's feet and legs. My mother has beautiful feet and legs. I have my dad's knobby knees, and feet that are shaped more like paddles (narrow heels with wide toes that spread out and look kind of duck-like, except when they are swollen at night). I live in the desert, so they are dry most of the time, even though I put lotion on them frequently. Everyone has a part of their body that they wish at some point or another were different and my feet are that for me. So here's a picture of my feet at their ugliest (night time). However, today, I'm going to celebrate my feet.


Remembering going barefoot as a kid, I'm finding a little love for my feet and all they've done for me for the past 54+ years:

I love the feel of grass between my toes.
Or wet sand sucking at my soles.
I love the way it tickled when an ant crawled over the top.
Or when I hopscotched hurriedly across the gravel drive.
I love the heat from the sidewalk
Or the cold water form the lake.

My feet were the connection between me and the great mother.
I tickled her cheek and she let me feel a world of sensations in return.

Thank you feet.
Thank you dirty earth squished under my heel.
Thank you sand and grass and gravel and concrete and water and ocean and snow and ice.
Thank you for grounding me throughout the years.
Thank you, Gaia for feet!

So I can now say I love myself from my head down to my toes!

And, I can say, I understand now that I am a HAES® warrior. It turns out I'm right on the front line.

I'm impressed with Master Chef, Julie Goodwin. I guess the early reports that she turned down a quarter of a million dollars from Jenny Craig was innaccurate. No figure was apparently discussed, but the person leaving the job was paid a rumored $900K, so I'm sure it was a big pile of money from which she walked away.

I especially liked why she walked away:

"I am less concerned about my weight than about the fact that one in seven people do not have enough food to eat each day and that is why I wanted to be an ambassador for Oxfam Grow" (source: Daily Telegraph)

Yeah I know that she later reassured everyone that she watches what she eats and she didn't think all weight loss was bad and all the other disclaimers about it being her life and her choices, but she's still a hero in my eyes because she walked away from the money and she is doing something more important with her life.

I want to celebrate her decision because as things developed last week regarding Jess Weiner (look it up because I'm over linking to her or providing her with search engine optimization through net attention), I became profoundly disappointed in how contrived and base it all seemed. She was a shill for Dove and now she is going to be a shill for weight loss. Too bad, so sad, and frankly, boring.

The contrast to between Jess and Julie is profound and holds important lessons about self-love and priorities. Julie is okay with being herself, so her priorities can lead her elsewhere. It is her own heart and not money that rules her decisions.

So I just want to give Julie Goodwin a great big shout out for loving her self and loveing others and keeping her priorities straight. If you're on FaceBook, you might go by her page and letting her know you appreciate her. Or better yet, support OxFam in her honor, which I'm sure she'd appreciate.

I am not healthy. I have not been healthy for years. Now you know the obvious. In 1987, I was healthy. I had beautiful metabolic numbers. I walked and jogged a lot. I played tennis regularly. I was 30 years old and most people thought I was under 21. I rarely smoked or drank. I was profoundly unhappy, however. I was in a bad marriage and I was sure I was going to die because I weighed 260 pounds.

Instead of helping me see that I could enjoy my life and my body if I uncovered my own wants, desires and happiness, I got bad advice. I was told I could only be happy if I shed the weight. I was told that my unhappiness didn't come from bad choices or from unresolved past issues or from simply not taking the time to know who I was and what I wanted to be. No, my unhappiness was because I was a thin person living in a fat body.

So a doctor gave this healthy body two prescriptions. Tenuate, which is a synthetic amphetamine and a diuretic to "jump start" my weight loss. Then I went on a 800 calorie diet that I faithfully followed for 2 years. I took my love of movement and turned it into a regimen of running 2 to 4 miles a day. I took my social life and ditched it for a fear of eating. And it turns out I took my healthy body and ruined it's metabolism.

In 1989, I was more messed up that ever emotionally, though I only weighed 130 pounds. I was divorced with no idea of what a good relationship could be. I was suicidal. Oh, and I was addicted not only to the Tenuate but to valuum that I started taking to sleep at night.

I've never been really healthy since that experience. But, hey, I was "success." My "after" picture was taken and I wrote a nice rendition of "my story" that was placed in a book for anyone walking into the bariatric clinic to see so that other's could be sold the path I had taken.

By 1993, most of the weight had come back on, though I was beginning to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be. By 1997, my health got worse and I have been disabled by my chronic conditions every since. So it is hard to say that I am healthy in the normal sense of that word.

The prevailing wisdom would say that it is the weight that created my ill health, but I know better. I know I was healthy at age 30 and that I did things to my body in the name of weight loss that led to disability. I dieted my way into disability and now I have to live with the body those behaviors and bad advice produced.

My first decision to love myself came in December 1990 while in a hospital because I had made a half-assed suicide attmept. I looked around at my surroundings and said, "I'm not crazy and I'm not going to choose to be crazy." I didn't fully understand what that journey meant, but it was definitely a first step towards loving myself because I rejected other people's definitions of me and started seeking my own.

My second decision to love myself came in November 1992 when I was fired from a job I hated and I decided I was never going to work full-time at a job I hated ever again. This decision eventually led to my getting my Ph.D. in Sociology as well as choosing to write, produce and create multi-media, rather than take a traditional academic trajectory.

My third decision to love myself came in August 1997 when I was misdiagnosed with lupus. The diagnosis was wrong but the prognosis was the same, I was facing life with chronic illness. I had to find a way to live that life fully.

The final decision to love myself came in January 2001, when I decided to give up dieting. I decided I was going to be the healthiest and happiest fat, disabled, aging person I could be. The transformation was complete. I loved my mind, I loved my talents, I loved my body.

But here's the thing. I am happier than I ever was. I do more healthy behaviors than I ever did. I love the skin I'm in. I love being me. I don't get up in the morning hoping that the day will be over. I don't dread my work. I don't hate my life.

I have aches and pains, and sometimes, I don't really recognize my aging body with its new wrinkles and new ailments. But I love my body and I care for it and treat as wonderfully as I can.

Life is struggle, but there is a difference between a struggle that feels like it is oppressing you and a struggle that holds the potential for growth and discovery. I prefer the latter.

So I'm fat. I'm disabled. I'm old. I'm not a poster girl for any particular cause. I live outside those boundaries and cannot hold myself up as a shining example of any particular success. But I'd rather be who I am today, than who I was at age 30.

That was my journey and it is one that I have to reaffirm in many ways almost daily, but it is also one that comes as naturally to me now as believing that if I just got skinny life would be okay came to me then.

I tell my journey often not because I necessarily need to do so, though it does help me to share it. I tell it often because it saddens me when I see young people falling for the same lies I fell for. It angers me to know that there are still "helpers" out there who are telling people, "you are not okay, let me sell you this to make you better." But I also tell my story for selfish reasons, because I know that if the market went away for these products, then my life would be easier. I could go through a day without being told how wrong I was. Loving myself would be respected. The more of us who love ourselves and accept ourselves and don't fall for the sales pitch, the easier it will be for all of us.

I wish you a pleasant and adventurous journey.

In the early Summer of of 1987, I took a job with Manpower at Honeywell in Clearwater, Florida. I was assigned to be a secretary for one of the program engineers in the Shuttle division. I learned a lot about aerospace engineering and how governments built space programs. By April 1, 1988, I was given a permanent job as the Project Administrator of the Space Station program. It was a very different idea then. The space station being built now is scaled down from the hopes of the late 80s. My job was to liason between all the engineers and our customer, McDonnell Douglas. By October of 1989, I was laid off in a major "down-sizing" in the company (over 5000 employees company wide, many more cuts were to follow).

In many ways I was proud of my small contribution to the space program. As a kid, I remember the moon landing vividly and I remember a 6th grade science teacher who challenged us to think about space and what it meant to our little planet.

I cried when I watched the video above. I was inspired by our space program and now it seems like it will go the way of all other great American dreams. It will be commodified and sold off to high bidders who will then fashion it as a profitable toys instead of highest aspirations. I spent the week watching old Star Trek episodes and thinking to myself how different the future is from what it was imagined. Star Trek of the 60s makes frequent references to the space program of the 1990s and early 21st century. Most of its references are laughable and seem silly in light of what really has happened.

Some of it is a good -- I mean we were supposed to have had a great World War III with a mass eugenics program and millions, if not billions, dying (check out the first appearance of Kahn in Space Seed for more details. But we also were supposed to be united as a planet and venturing out into deeper and deeper space by now. And we have not.

As a sociologist, I am aware of some of the problems with how the space program developed. The language of the "final frontier" is fraught with colonialism, ethnocentricism and xenophobic references that go unexamined. I know money is needed for more pressing problems and that many progressives fear the space program as much as they do our military industrial complex. There is a definite connection. The builders of the space station almost all have military divisions. And, of course, Reagan's star wars programs of the 1980s were both silly and frightening.

But, dammit, I miss the naivety of the early space program. I miss the feeling of pride and wonder. I miss the visions of a possible future where major human conditions could be solved and equality was the natural outcome. I watch the early Star Trek episodes and I want to live in a place where people are equal. Okay, there is a lot of sexist stuff, but for the 60s, having women in positions of power and working on ships was radical.

So this past week has been a bit emotional for me. Wednesday, July 20th, was not only the 42nd anniversary of the moon landing, but also it would have been my son's 22nd birthday. Thursday, July 21st, was the end of the Shuttle era and there isn't really a whole lot in the works as Congress spends its time posturing over the so-called debt crisis and NASA officials are all smiles about the comming "commercial era."

I feel old. It doesn't help that this coming Thursday, I will turn 54. I miss so many things and I am saddened by the world as it is because I had a vision of what it could be.

But I do know that it can be better. My favorite line from Apollo 13 comes early in the movie, when Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) is talking to his wife Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan) right after the moon walk:

"From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it's not a miracle, we just decided to go"

We could decide again. All we need is the vision.

I've had a few people ask me if I can reveal more about what happened. I will give you an update, but there is an investigation and I am in the process of small claims so at the moment I cannot reveal all.

The scam was a local mobile mechanic who claims to be licensed and insured but is not. He came to my home to look at my van. I described the repair work that had been done. He told me that something needed to be done that I found out later was just another way of saying what had already been done. He asked for cash up front. I paid. He removed a part from my van to be rebuilt. Then he disappeared for 9 days giving me all kinds of lame excuses as to why he could not come back.

I became suspicious and finally confronted him and told him if he didn't come and fix my van by noon the next day, I would be calling my lawyer and then whoever the lawyer suggested.

He showed up at 2p the next day and installed what turned out to be the same thing he took off only spray painted with a non-fuel-resistent paint sprayed OVER dirt (it was gritty). He didn't even put it back together correctly because it didn't work and it was working before. The van was running when he started work on it and he left it not running and demanding that I pay him more money to redo a repair that I had already told him had been done.

He didn't count on the fact that I knew more about cars than most laypersons (especially most women), though I obviously didn't know enough and got scammed anyway. He left saying I had to redo a repair that only had 5K miles on it or he wouldn't honor the "warranty." There was no warranty I have a receipt.

Now that I know what he did, he is insisting that because I had someone else clean up his mess that he cannot give me my money back because he cannot honor the warranty. Again, what warranty? He claims it was rebuilt by a "specialist" and he cannot get his money back, but, of course, he's not offering me the difference between what he claims to have paid for the rebuild and what he charged me for the installation. He has offered no proof that this specialist exists or offered to do anything to make this right.

I have reported him to the DMV investigative division(in Nevada, all mechanic and garage fraud cases are investigated by the DMV) and it turns out they have a case file on him already. From what I can gather from the net, he preys on stranded motorists, women and disabled persons. I have a disabled tag on my van.

I think his scam is to do a series of repairs with the last one fixing the vehicle and the person usually paying many times more than they should for the thing that needed to be done. Not knowing they have been duped, they write glowing reports about him on the net (of course some of those reports could be written by him and his friends). I think I messed him up by calling him on it before he could fix it finally.

I gave him $470 to do the spray paint job on something that didn't need fixing. Because he re-assembled it incorrectly, I had to pay another $135 to fix what he did. So I'm suing him for $605. Not much in some people's world but that's about 2/3of the extra money I made this semester that I set aside to have the van repaired. So to me it was a lot of money and summer is THE worst time to have a set back as I do not have any work right now and can't draw unemployment as a summer break teacher. (Subject for another rant.)

So once I am done with the legal entanglements with this guy I will definitely (if I'm allowed to do so) tell everyone his name. Hopefully, though, when all this is over he will be behind bars where he belongs. At the very least, he will not be out on the road taking advantage of vulnerable people.

By the way, on the emotional side of this, as soon as I heard from the DMV that they knew him and were investigating him, I felt vindicated. I know that if someone like me could be taken in by this guy (and he is a smooth talker until you call him on his shit, then he is a mean sonofabitch), that almost anyone could be taken. I couldn't sit back and let him keep doing this.

I've moved from embarrassed and feeling stupid to kick-ass mad-as-hell. Oh, and it feels a lot better.

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If you live in southern Nevada (or northwest AZ or southeast CA) and are considering a mobile mechanic, please email me and I will let you know who he is and also give you a recommendation for the guy who helped me fix this mess and get my van to pass smog and get back on the road.

Mother's Day is a tough holiday for me personally. There are women like me in the world who appear to the world around us as childless but who have lost one or more children at some point in the stages of becoming/being a mother.

I didn't exactly have a miscarriage. My son died while still inside me and I went through the pain of waiting for my body to figure that out. When that didn't happen, labor was induced. "No heartbeat" still rings in my ears and stings my soul over 21 years later. This is not something that one "gets over." It is something that one "lives with."

The question "Do you have any children?" is an impossible one for me. At one point in my life, I answered "yes" and offered the explanation. Now I sometimes answer "no" because it is easier and less invasive. But the answer "no" pains me nonetheless. I feel like I am betraying something or someone.

There are several times each year that make me pause: January 16, when labor was induced; mid-July when he would have been born; the Christmas season; and Mother's Day. I think today is the toughest because I feel like it's on everyone's mind. But it is also the easiest because I know there are women who feel like I do, who feel left out, who harbor some dread even if they honor their own mothers.

Today is not a happy day for everyone. Please remember on this day several things:

1. That some people do not have good mothers. Women are not instantly good mothers because they had sex and fertile wombs. Motherhood is something that one has to practice and learn. So don't assume that everyone should honor their mother. Some mothers are not worth honoring and children who know that are often better people than the mother's who bore them.

2. That the children of some mothers are no longer with us and that this day might be hard for those mothers.

3. That even women who have no children can be good mothers. We can understand how we are expressions of Mother Earth and we can care for and nurture others, ensuring that their lives are fruitful, peaceful and fulfilling.

4. That men can be good mothers too. All creatures are capable of nurturing and caring. We are all mothers and fathers. We have both natures inside us. These words we construct with masculine and feminine meanings are mere reflections of the deeper capacity all human beings have to care and frankly, right now, this world could use a lot more caring.

5. The origin of this holiday is Mother's Day for Peace. Howe encouraged women to use their experiences of motherhood in the wider social world, to think of a world that is good for all children, including all children who have grown to adulthood. Today should be a call for charity, peace and freedom.

So I write this today as a way to transform my own experience of this day into something more than an annual reminder of personal loss. Today I choose to celebrate motherhood. Yes, I will call my mom, whom I do honor. But I will remember that this is just one expression of what this day could/should mean. Knowing that today should be a call for peace among us humans makes this day easier for me to take.

The events of the last week have weighed heavily on my soul. I long for peace and freedom. So I celebrate today as a reminder of that peace and freedom. I hope others will too.

Happy Mother's Day of Peace.