It’s been a hectic few months. A lot has been going on in my life and I want to take a few moments today to write about the most significant event and how it has affected me.
I have hesitated to write about this, not because I am unwilling to share it, but because the words just didn’t seem to come out.
On December 2nd, 2013, my mother passed away after a three year battle with cancer. I last saw her the week before, at my family’s Thanksgiving gathering. No one was surprised that she passed. In all frankness, I am surprised she held out as long as she did. At the end she was bed ridden, confused and unable to even roll over without assistance. I am tearing up as I write this, so I am going to move on to the subject I want to share with you.
I have spent the better part of the last 5 months with a low level of “give a damn” when it comes to food. I know that we all mourn loss in different ways and for me a large part of that has been seeking solace in food.
We all develop our relationships with food as children and I of course am no exception. Some of my most treasured and prominent memories of my mother involve being in the kitchen with here as a very young boy while she prepared some amazingly delicious southern-fried goodness. I believe that connection of family/love/food is a very powerful and vital part of our human experience.
I certainly learned it early on. You may not know that I had a pretty bad stutter as a child and I most definitely eased the pain of that with junk food. It most certainly contributed to me being an overweight child and the subsequent mocking and bullying that went along with it.
See, there is a reason for the name “comfort food”. It feels good in the short term. It eases the pain. From a dietary standpoint, I have been partaking of junk food and beer since Mom died with a greater regularity than I can ever remember. And I have been OK with it. I have put on some weight. I am OK with that too.
I have come to uderstand that it has been part of the process of mourning and healing for me. It served it’s purpose and now I am shifting toward the direction of becoming lighter and leaner.
Food does not equal love. Love equals love.
I loved myself enough to allow all the comfort food of the past 5 months without passing judgement, without guilt and without regret. It helped me achieve the goal of making the initial stages of the loss of my mom suck a little bit less.
I also love myself enough to refocus on food that will move me toward the next goal. I prefer being lighter and leaner to the way I am now, so it is time to get after it. I am not sure why I feel compelled to write this and share it. The point is, I guess, that our choices determine a great deal of our reality and situation. I have had enough inner turmoil without beating myself up over food choices for the last 5 months. Perhaps someone reading this will benefit from my account.
Love yourself strongly my friends.
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