A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words...

Or several thousand calories, apparently.

A friend of mine sent me a picture last night. It was sent via email. I clicked on it and seriously gasped when it blossomed up on the screen.

It's a picture of my BFF, her mom, and me. I am easily the fattest one.

I know this is a tired old rant of mine, God knows I'm sick of hearing myself bitch about it. But that picture was like a slap in the face. My BFF and I were pretty much the same size, same proportions just a few months ago. And dare I say, back in my "Wellness" heyday, I think I was maybe even getting smaller than her. Not anymore. She looks like a tan little pixie in the picture, sandwiched between Giant Jenny and her sweet mom.

How does this happen? How does someone go from being on the right track, working out constantly, monitoring what they're putting into their mouth 24 hours a day...to being a big, oafish person trying to shrink themselves for a picture? I think that may be the saddest part of the photo, the way you can see me literally trying to curl my body up into itself in a scrambling attempt to look 4 sizes smaller.

I've had my share of stress. The actual bankruptcy court thing was incredibly anti-climactic. No sexy bailiff in a short robe, no hissing creditors. It took all of 5 minutes, me sitting there clutching my seatbelt purse, my attorney looking bored (the only time he moved was when he had to manually put my hand down after the swearing in process. Apparently you don't keep your right hand up for the entire procedure.) When it ended, I felt ok. Not sad by any stretch of the imagination. I think I'm plum out of tears at this stage in the game.

I felt good, actually. I wish I had done this a long time ago, back before things went from pretty bad to oh-my-god-is-there-a-dead-animal-stuck-under-the-deck awful. But hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it?

Charlie is having issues, just like I feared. Only this time he's lashing out, thank God, instead of inward. He's taking his frustrations out on me. I won't go into all of it now, but over the past week and a half or so he's been awful to me. Trashed my office (like rock star/hotel room trashed), punched my arm, called me some pretty awful names. It got so bad one night my BFF called Big Daddy and asked him to come get Charlie and keep him for a few days. I didn't want that to happen, since that seems to be akin to sending a soldier back to the scene of his scariest battle, but it was the only option at the time. Charlie, and my other kids, need a father figure in their lives, and right now Big Daddy is the only figure we've got.

Secretary hasn't popped yet, that I know of. I've been referring to her as Orca now, thanks to my wry eBay friend who sent me a facebook message the other day. It was one sentence, one short sentence that made me laugh. "When is Orca due?". Thank you, Kelly. I needed that.

And yes, I do see the irony, people. I'm making fun of another woman, a pregnant woman no less, in my very own "Goddammit I'm fat again" post. The irony is thick, and like pea soup dotted with bacon chunks, it's delicious. They could be cutting a hole into the wall of my bedroom and taking my fat ass out of here on a forklift and I'd still be jabbing at Secretary. Because A: she deserves it, and B: it's my favorite defense mechanism.

My mom had a heart attack on May 18th. I haven't written about this one...but I will. I love my mom, of course, but our relationship is a tricky two-step dance with lots of skeletons that trip us up. Seeing her in a hospital bed, and later, in a nursing home room, has changed things. I am realizing that as far as being a daughter goes, I kind of suck. So I'm trying to change that. And that's been a wee bit stressful.

Yeah, there's stress. But nothing like the stress other people are experiencing. Another eBay friend, for instance. Her son wasn't feeling well this Easter. She took him to Urgent Care the next day and by the end of the week this 13 year old kid, this tall, good looking, sweet boy was diagnosed with leukemia. He's fighting it, his mom is fighting it, we are all praying for him and holding both of them tight in an embrace I hope they can feel. That's the kind of stress that makes my shit look like a bubble bath, a walk in the park and a good nap all rolled into one big perfumed ball.

So I can't really be using stress as an excuse for the reappearance of my muffin top. Which has now, once again, passed muffin top and can be classified as something between bundt cake and tire swing.

This was supposed to be my summer. The summer of cap sleeved t-shirts and size 12 capris. Instead it's become another blur of oversized t-shirts, baggy black pants and me avoiding human contact and my dog's hopeful, plaintive stares as I once again tell him, "No Walter, I'm not taking you out on a walk right now. It's daylight and I'm enormous and someone might see me."

This was supposed to be the summer I was maybe going to meet my friend's neighbor at her cabin. The one she's been hoping to fix me up with but has now stopped even mentioning it because I'm not losing weight like I was before.

This was supposed to be the summer when someone looking me up and down wouldn't sting.

Well...it's not. And it's my fault. I'm not blaming anyone, or anything other than me. It's pitchers of margaritas with friends, it's the order of french fries at TGIFriday's on Trivia Night, it's the olive hummus and that damn bag of Stacy's Pita Chips from Costco. The one that can be used as a child size sleeping bag when you've inhaled all the chips. Nobody has forced me to do any of this, there's no gun to my head and some menacing person whispering, "Don't you dare go to the gym, you fat mother-effer".

It's all on me. Literally and figuratively. I'm wearing my old plus-size cloak of awkwardness and anonymity again, and I hate it.

But, I believe in comebacks and second chances. Like Rob Lowe, Drew Barrymore, Charlie Sheen and countless other celebrities I have nothing in common with, I can crawl out of this hole. I can climb this mountain, clear this hurdle and do many other things that I can't think of analogies for at the moment.

So I'm logging back in at MyFitnessPal, I'm taking my dog for a walk, I'm getting my butt and my children's butts to the gym and I'm going to just say no to the pita chips and the french fries and the pitchers of margaritas.

This may have started out as yet another Fat Summer but I cannot, I will not, let it end that way.