Living With Fat Posts

With my in-laws in town for a few days, I spent a good chunk of yesterday holed up in my office “working”. By that I mean that I enjoyed a nice, quiet cup of coffee while reading email, then began wading through the stack of magazines that has piled up on my desk since their most recent visit (last month).

My favorite: an essay in December’s This Old House magazine about “house dysmorphia”, a person’s distorted perception that their house is far less nice than it really is. Oh, I can relate.

In the grand scheme of things, my mind tells me that we have a very nice house: three stories on a wooded lot with a creek, a kitchen bigger than my college studio apartment, five bedrooms, four bathrooms including one featuring both a jet shower and a huge whirlpool tub and dual marble bathroom vanities (the real marble, too, not that manufactured stuff).

But all I can see are the cracked tiles in the kitchen floor, the formerly white carpets that have turned gray since we moved in, the splintered wood deck, the fingerprints and gouges on all of the walls and the fact that most of our furniture is more than 10 years old… and looks like it.

Lately, we’ve been trying to do something about my increasingly long list of things I don’t like about our house, and by “we” I mean that I have made the effort of nagging my husband into taking care of it. Unfortunately, that means letting him do things at his own pace (so I don’t have to do them), and I’ve seen snails move faster than he does when tasked with a chore he finds unpleasant.

Since he’s been on winter vacation for two weeks, he’s actually managed to get quite a few things done around the house. He finally painted our kitchen after three years of putting it off, but just as he got ready to repaint the cupboards his parents arrived. So yesterday, while I was “busy working”, he spent the day trying to both socialize with his parents — an act that he believes I forced him into — while also painting the cupboards.

I can’t count the number of times I heard him mutter under his breath because his mother leaned up against the fresh paint while talking to him, which means he had to repaint the same section again and again and again, an experience which seems frighteningly similar to what I go through every time I clean house before he comes home from work.

I’d feel sorry for him, but I don’t. He’s the one who invited his parents, and they are all messing up my house.

Since Christmas is all about giving, I decided to give my husband the exact Christmas dinner he wanted: prime rib with a begrudging serving of green vegetables on the side.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of eating the very same thing. For three days now I’ve regretted my choice. As you can see, that thing was so much closer to rare than medium rare that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find it still breathing as my knife sliced into it. But it was, according to VH, the absolute best meal of the year.

For me, if you’ll pardon my slaughtered metaphor, it was the meal that broke the camel’s back. I am sick of such meals, sick of feeling afterwards like I just want to curl in a ball and not move for days, and really sick of the digestive problems that arise when I actually do something along those lines.

Since Christmas night I’ve been eating nothing but soup. I figure, after consuming that much meat in one sitting, I’m probably good on protein (and saturated fats) for the rest of the year. That’s fine, as far as my husband’s concerned: there are nine pounds of Prime Rib left in the fridge, and he’s laid claim to each and every one of them.

So, how was your Christmas? Did you get jewelry? Pretty new clothes? Sheepskin boots? Do tell!

A friend called me up last night because he just couldn’t wait to tell me what a great gift he’d picked out for his wife. She’s been in a funk lately after giving birth to their fourth child and finding that losing the post-baby weight is a lot harder in her late 30s. She’s been dieting rigorously and using her elliptical machine for an hour each day but really hasn’t seen the pounds coming off as quickly as she’d like.

So what was her husband’s “great idea” for a gift?

He went online and signed her up for one of those “diet meals delivered to your door” plans. NutriSystem, I think he said.

“Isn’t that great? She won’t have to worry about watching what she eats now, and she’s got one less meal to cook!” he raved.

Ummm….NO.

Even if she doesn’t take offense to her husband’s gift basically pointing out that “Yeah, you’re still fat but maybe this will work”, she’s still going to wind up cooking meals for her family while sitting there staring at her bland little box of microwaved food, all the while knowing that she’d be rejecting his gift if she set it aside in favor of eating chicken nuggets with her kids.

This seemed rather obvious to me, and once I put it that way it seemed rather obvious to him, too. So why hadn’t he considered it before?

I suspect it’s because my friend is, unlike his wife, one of those people who really doesn’t give a darn that he’s carrying 35 extra pounds OR that his wife is, too. Oh, sure, his wife’s weight bothers her, although he doesn’t understand why, so he figured his gift was just showing his support for her weight loss goals.

“Okay,” he said, “how about if I give her a negligee and a gift certificate for a full body massage at the salon?”

Yeah, because women who feel bad about their bodies already want to display even more of it than usual for their husband and some massage therapist?

I advised him to think smaller. Much smaller. Like the designer version of the knockoff handbag she’s been carrying around all year, or maybe diamond earrings. From what I could tell, he seemed rather grateful for the advice.

Then I asked him to give my own husband a call and make sure he hadn’t come up with some equally boneheaded gift idea for my Christmas because, God love the man, that sounds exactly like the way he’d think, too.

A couple of months ago, we broke down and hired a cleaning service to come in on Mondays. The decision was mostly mine: I’d reached a point where the struggle to keep the house clean, to homeschool and to do paid work online were all a bit too much to squeeze into Mommy’s 14-hour day.

As soon as I found out that I have fibromyalgia, I knew we’d made the right decision. I need to start thinking of my energy level as potentially finite, rather than something which replenishes itself daily, since there are most definitely days I feel wiped out even after a good 9 hours of solid sleep.

The nice thing about having someone else do our cleaning: I feel like we’re living in one of those luxury homes on Mondays after the cleaning team has been here. They change our sheets, they do the dusting and a pretty decent job of vacuuming. Oh, and finding the end of the toilet paper folded into a nifty little triangle is pretty fun, too.

Unfortunately with the holidays coming the cleaning team has two Mondays in a row off. Rather than cancel on me, they want to come on Saturday morning.

Which means I now have to decide which is more important: having someone else clean my house or getting to sleep in.

This is a far more difficult decision than it sounds like, folks.

Having tidied the house, washed and folded six loads of laundry, wrapped twelve Christmas presents, written three dozen Christmas cards and cleaned two cat boxes, I was a bit too tuckered to think about cooking dinner. So I asked my husband to do it instead.

Big mistake. Big, big, BIG mistake.

Ordinarily, I tend to view “man food” as something verboten. It’s simply too fatty, meaty and greasy for my system to handle, not to mention how those extra calories seem to contain homing signals within them that immediately send them to my stomach and butt.

But somehow I convinced myself that since I was tired it wouldn’t really count. What with all the things I’d accomplished earlier in the day, and how exhausted I was, surely my body would give me a pass and not hold the nutritional nightmare on my plate against me, right?

Big mistake. Big, big, BIG mistake.

VH proudly placed a plate of “Man Eggs”, as he called them, in front of me with a hearty encouragement to “Dig in!” Given the huge pile of bacon encrusted with scrambled eggs and topped with melted slices of cheese, dig was the appropriate word.

But, oh, it tasted so good!

Around 2 o’clock this morning according to my obnoxiously bright bedside clock (which isn’t nearly as reliable as, say, a Technomarine watch but was probably close enough), I woke with abdominal cramps worse than any “time of the month” cramps I’ve ever experienced. I started to roll out of bed rather than risk waking my husband with all of my groaning, only to discover that my midsection felt like someone had planted a 10-pound block of cement midway through my small intestine. So much for even thinking about getting out of bed.

By 3 o’clock, my husband was fully awake and complaining about how I’d been tossing and turning for a full hour. I explained to him that his “Man Eggs” were to blame, and thus it was only fair that he was miserable, too.

His response? “If you can’t handle so much bacon, eggs and cheese, keep me out of the kitchen.”

Thought for the day: hitting one’s spouse with a pillow repeatedly is also aerobic activity.

It never fails. Despite dropping hints all year long — sometimes complete with emailed links to specific items, with color- and size-preferences noted — my husband comes to me in the homestretch before Christmas and says he has absolutely no idea what to get for me.

I, meanwhile, have managed to shop for him, our kids, both of his parents and the one member of his extended family whose name we drew last year for this year’s gift exchange. Oh, and I’ve wrapped all of those presents and picked out stocking stuffers, too.

Am I that hard to shop for? I personally don’t think so. If the email hints weren’t enough, my other areas of interest should be completely obvious to even the most casual of acquaintances: computer and kitchen gadgets, cookbooks, gourmet food and booze. Seriously, how hard is that to figure out after taking a glance at my waistline, much less any one of my four blogs?

A couple of years back, I picked out what I considered the perfect Father’s Day present for my husband, simply by observing what he seemed to enjoy most. I enrolled him in a Beer of the Month club, and every single month since then he’s thanked me for it.

One would think, then, that he’d figure out to enroll me in a wine of the month club in return. It is, after all, the gift that keeps on giving: every 30 days or so I’d get to enjoy a new bottle, with an opportunity to check out a vintage or make that I’ve never experienced before.

Bottles which, I might add, most likely aren’t on the clearance shelf, which is where my husband heads every time I send him to pick up a bottle of wine to go with dinner. (Let me just tell you now, if it’s on clearance in a liquor store it means even the winos won’t drink it!)

Come to think of it, a club membership like that would also save him 12 trips to the liquor store, many of which are often in the hurried 10 minutes before the place closes. Why, think of all the gas we’d save!

Hmm…. doesn’t that make it an environmentally friendly gift, too? I’ll drink to that.

I have a feeling that, if done properly, banging one’s head against the wall in frustration might just be an effective method for weight loss. I can’t tell you for certain whether that’s true or not since I’m still a bit too dizzy to actually read what the scale says. And, darn, my forehead hurts.

What’s brought all this on? Oh, perhaps it was the nearly two hours I spent today deleting spam from my InBox and all four blogs. Sure, I’ve got programs that are supposed to filter that stuff out so I don’t have to deal with it, but somehow the spammers always seem to figure out how to slip past them.

Why can’t The Powers That Be who make spam filters can’t figure out that a spammer determined to leave a comment promoting, say, hoodia can easily squeak past the filter by spelling it with two zeros instead of “O”s?

Meanwhile, having waded through all of the adult-variety spam, my skin is crawling. Seriously, I thought I was somewhat twisted, and I do have an admittedly dark side. But compared to some of the crap the spammers are promoting these days, I look like an angel!

Cooking is one of my favorite ways to unwind, which probably explains why I find it so very difficult to diet. After all, chopping vegetables for a salad just isn’t as rewarding as, say, putting together individual Beef Wellingtons with a side of mashed red potatoes with garlic and Parmesan.

Oh, man, I just made myself hungry.

As far as my husband’s concerned, if it’s not red meat it’s barely worth sitting down for. He’d gladly live off PB&J sandwiches rather than actually eat chicken and fish for an entire week, and I can pretty much count on one hand the number of times he’s eaten a salad in the nine years we’ve been married.

So when I told him a while back that I planned to cut all fried food, gluten and sugar out of our diets — while bringing our fruit- and vegetable-intake up to the recommended levels — he immediately went out and stocked up on ready-made “man meals”. You know the kind: congealed, gravy-topped blobs of stuff that calls itself meat and sits nestled in a compartment that ensures it will never touch the tiny portion of limp vegetables that come along with it.

Come dinnertime, he’ll pop a couple of those into our microwave ovens then sit nibbling chips and dip while they cook.

I, meanwhile, find myself standing in the kitchen trying to come up with a way to make yet another salad somehow interesting, then eventually abandon the effort because I’m so darned hungry. While I’m nibbling on a boring green salad spritzed with a low-fat dressing, he sits down next to me and starts sucking down something claiming to be Salisbury Steak which he washes down by drinking egg nog directly out of the carton.

The man has lost nine pounds in the past two weeks eating this way. Nine pounds.

Me? I’ve gained one. Eating salads. How on earth did that happen?

But I’m not angry. Nah, I’m not even bitter. As far as I’m concerned, the more weight he loses, the smaller the grave I’ll have to dig.

When I told my husband that I’d been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, his first reaction was “Oh, so in other words they STILL don’t know what’s wrong with you.” So I sat him down in front of the computer and pointed him to the Mayo Clinic page on it so he could find out a bit more.

I probably should have known better than to actually expect him to read anything, because not 15 minutes later he walked up and said, “OK, so the doctor thinks you’ve got this but she can’t fix it. That sucks. What’s for dinner?”

See, in my husband’s way of thinking if something can’t be fixed — which, when it comes to medical conditions, means actually cured — then it’s not really a problem. Because, as we all know, problems can be solved and therefore something unsolvable isn’t really a problem.

Bless his heart.

Needless to say, I did NOT react well to this attitude. I’ve been fuming, as a matter of fact. Not that he’d know it. I haven’t given him the silent treatment and I’ve still been keeping up with the cooking, dishes and laundry. I’ve just been P.O.’d while doing it but don’t have the energy to deal with a big argument right now.

Today he called from work to tell me that he’s been thinking about how awful I’ve been feeling lately, so he’s bringing me home a “surprise”. Naturally, I started trying to imagine what on earth it could be. Ice cream? No, he knows I’m not a huge fan. Vodka? Wait, I’ve got plenty of that in the house. Maybe he’s going for an all-out splurge and finally picked up the Wii I’ve been wanting for a year now.

Silly me.

He walked in the door with a mostly empty bag from Wal-Mart in his hand, at which point I knew I probably should’ve kept my hopes small. And what did he bring me? Aspirin. A big bottle of aspirin.

“Maybe this will help with the pain,” he suggested with a huge, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin on his face like I should fall down on my knees then and there and praise him for having gone to such magnificent lengths. (It was very much like the time he said he’d found something to help with my year-round allergy problems and came home bearing a lint b gone roller.)

But, really, I don’t want to discourage his first baby steps at being supportive over all of this, so I hugged him and thanked him for thinking of me.

Then I decided tonight I’m doing exactly what the directions on the back of the aspirin bottle advise: I’m taking two then keeping away from small children.

Tonight, my husband’s on Parenting Duty. Me? I’m going to slip into a hot bath with a cold martini and staying in there as long as our water heater can hold out.