One of the hardest things about parenting - for me, anyway - has been listening to this constant refrain, everywhere I go:
"Enjoy every minute. It goes so fast."
Are you a parent? You know exactly what I'm talking about.
{ New Mexico road trip with my then-boyfriend Jason | 2005 }
For about four years in my mid-twenties (roughly ages 22 to 26), I was anorexic.
Just typing out that sentence is a big deal for me, because for a long, long time it wasn't something I admitted even to myself, and certainly not to anyone else. I've always referred to it as "that time when I was super fucked-up" or "that time when I decided not to eat ever again" - jokey, hyperbolic half-truths intended to swing the conversation towards lighter subjects. I've never even said the word "anorexia" to my mother; I called her yesterday to talk to her about this post so she wouldn't be blindsided (although of course she knew anyway). But over the past few weeks, I've found myself saying out loud to one friend or another, whenever a related subject comes up, "Oh yeah, I was anorexic." And we talk about it or we don't, but it's out there either way.
I expected my breasts to change after breastfeeding two children, but I didn't expect them to change quite as much as they did. Going from a C to a G to a god-knows-what-I-was-when-my-milk-came-in and back down to a B twice in three years apparently does a bit of a number on you, and when everything finally "settled," as it were, it settled down (...ha?).
But it wasn't "what I looked like" that was the problem, exactly - it was how I felt. I mean it when I say that I'm more or less happy with my body - sometimes I love it, sometimes I wish some things about it looked a little different, just like anyone. It hasn't always been this way - I've written here and there about the anorexia I suffered from when I was in my early twenties (and will write about it more one day, when I can) - and trust me: after that experience I'm well aware of what it feels like to hate your body.
I don't hate my body. I don't hate my breasts, either. But after having two children, and having them go through such dramatic changes, they ended up virtually unrecognizable to me; they barely even felt like mine. I had no sense of them as a part of my body, and certainly didn't connect them to my sense of sexual identity.
Let me tell you about the moment when I realized that even though my work is incredibly important to me, I need more separation, and I need to be able to shut off sometimes - not just in a half-assed way (where I'm technically playing with my kids but 60% of my brain is devoted to the email I need to remember to send by the end of the day), but all the way.
And I need to do this on purpose, because it doesn't come naturally.
This realization has happened to various degrees many times over the years, but it really happened - like, can't-get-it-out-of-my-head-happened - a little less than a year ago, when I was visiting a Children's Science Museum with Indy and Goldie. They were playing with this massive model of hills and trees and buffalos, and I was half-watching them play and half-checking my text messages because even though I'd taken the afternoon off I still needed (wanted?) to make sure everything was cool work-wise, and suddenly I looked up and realized how photogenic and symmetrical the background was and how great the colors were, and thought, oh hey - I should Instagram this! It's cute! And symmetrical! And those colors!
For a long time - longer than I wanted to admit, and certainly longer than felt "okay" - Kendrick and I were not getting along.
I wrote about it in this post, back in January '15, at a point when I thought we were on the way up towards a place where we'd be better - back to the couple I know we are, or at least want us to be - but it took much, much longer than that.
I've gotten emails from a few readers, and a few comments here and there - "I've noticed you haven't been writing much personal stuff; are you okay?" - and the answer is...well first, damn you guys are observant. And second: no, I wasn't okay, and part of why I wasn't okay was because I was trying to - to some extent, anyway - pretend that I was, because while I write about my life on this site, there are some things that are too upsetting to present for public consumption, like my fear that my marriage wasn’t everything I wanted it to be.
