Eat It • All By Myself & Corporate Skullduggery • Binges• Poison

Four things:
1 • Why is it that the little ladies will turn their little button noses up at food when they are in their high chairs, but as soon as they are released and free range again, they will gobble up food from the floor as if they are starving? I really do have a hard time understanding the capricious food whims of children. One day peaches are coveted and eaten with relish (not relish relish, but relish) and the next the carefully cut up peach ends up in the garbage. Pizza seems to be a consistent hit, as well as pasta with red sauce and ricotta. Everything else is on their Thanks For Making Me Chicken Cutlets, But You Can Just Throw That In The Garbage Because I Don’t like It Anymore list. I cannot handle food waste. It seems so…wasteful.

2 • Why is it is took Nicole and I thirteen months to realize that we are not always in after-work, end-of-the-day sync? After a day of being with the girls allllll byyyyyyy myyyyyselffff (that song is in my head), I really look forward to the paradigm shift that occurs when the other mommy comes home. I like the company and family time, first and foremost. But I also like the help. Having the chance to do something while the girls are completely occupied and out of my eyesight is an amazing luxury. Instead of a half hour to fold the laundry, I can power through that task in 15 minutes. I can make dinner without having to relocate little girls who like to get underfoot, literally. I can run down to throw laundry in without strapping a baby on my chest and strapping one in the stroller and dragging the heavy hamper with one hand while pushing the thrashing-about baby in the stroller with another. I can put things away and organize and clean up without feeling like Sisyphus.

But but but, and this is important, after a day of dealing with corporate skullduggery and pressures and hassles, Nicole just wants to come home and not get swept up into the Chores Olympics. She only has about an hour with the girls (if that) before they go to bed and corralling them away from whatever I am doing is not top on her list. I can see that, because as soon as the girls figure out I am doing something as fantastic as folding laundry in the bedroom, they MUST be involved and will bang on the door until they are let in. It becomes an exercise in Relocation and Attempted Distraction, which usually doesn’t end well.

3 • Why is it no one has written the article “Anatomy of a Binge?” If I could magically drum up an extra three hours every day I would write the article myself. Maybe I will. Maybe I will dust off my old journalism credentials and sharpen my pencils and flip open one of those Reporter’s Notebooks and start making some phone calls. Maybe maybe maybe.

The article would talk about how “binge” is relative, so while on one hand, eating 15 pounds of candy for one person might qualify as a binge, eating two big pieces of cake might qualify for another. And both are equally traumatizing for the binger. What I find so interesting about binges is that they are single moments and decisions that set forth a gush of motion that is hard to stop. So after a bad day someone might eat half a pint of ice cream, then go to bed. That’s not so bad, right? But what is bad is that is sets off three weeks of bad choices, misery, despair, feelings of being out of control, depression, and apathy. Well, at least it usually does for me.

I am not in a binge mode now. At the tail end of vacation, I did overdo it on donuts, which lead to the next day of overindulging in my own way, which lead to a third day and maybe a fourth, I don’t remember. And my binge is not textbook scary. But for me, it represents no control, and that is not good. But it is over and done and I have moved on to normalcy and control. I don’t always. Usually I hit the Fuck It wall, and it is a really hard wall to scale.

This phantom article might dissect the reasons why people binge and explain how to get back on track quickly, instead of lingering in that bad place for weeks. Most important, it will explain how a day or two of binge eating (or gym skipping or any unwanted behavior, really) will not destroy your health or body or sanity or mind. We can bend without snapping. That is what I am trying to learn myself.

4 • The final piece of my random pie: Why is it we humans are so drawn to dark, toxic, unsatisfying relationships? I am a participant in a toxic relationship that rears its head every now and then. And when it did rear its head this time, I wanted to rear back in a negative and unhealthy way. But I didn’t. I just left it all as if and walked away. At least for today I did. We will see what happens tomorrow and the ext day and the next. It is so easy to get sucked into the undertow of negative. But for now, I made the right choice.

Pictured above, the donut and cake that spurned a few days of bad choices. It’s kind of pathetic to say that my mind thinks “Well, since I ate two slices of birthday cake, I might as well eat everything until I explode” but I would be lying if I pretended that thoughts like that didn’t cross my mind from time to time.