lighterthanair | Entries tagged with family

I just checked this morning. I've lost 14 pounds. While normally this may be cause for celebration (I can't say I'm entire unhappy about it, because I do want to lose weight and did recently join Weight Watchers to help me do so), I didn't lose this weight because I made an effort to eat better or exercise more.

I lost it from being sick.

For the past 3 weeks, I've been sick, in one form or another. If it's not pain, it's nausea, or flu symptoms, just generally feeling like ass, and along with it all I've had no appetite. I've been eating, but not much. Usually mugs of tea, and I've probably been averaging a bowl of soup or stew a day for the past few weeks.

I knew this was taking a toll on me. I knew I was feeling tired more, sleeping more, had less energy. I didn't know how bad I'd gotten until I tried to walk up a flight of stairs yesterday and nearly blacked out at the top. I had to sit for five minutes in the middle of City Market, waiting for the lightheaded feeling and the overheated nauseous feeling to go away before I could keep walking to the bus stop and go to work.

I weighed myself this morning. I'm down 14 pounds. 14 pounds in less than a month is not a healthy rate at which to lose weight.

I posted about this on Facebook. I mean, I'm happy that it's weight that I don't have to lose later on, but I'm not happy about the way I lost it, and I even said in the post that I lost the weight due to illness.

So what does my mother do? Post: "I think I've lost about the same amount since coming back. WTG to us both." And make a comment about wearing bikinis soon.

If she was here, I'd smack her for that. Don't congratulate me for being sick, moron! Don't congratulate me on being unable to eat, for being so sick that I can't take care of myself properly, for reaching a point where walking too quickly and climbing a flight of stairs is too much for my body to handle.

I tried eating a normal-sized meal the other day. My body was so unused to that much food that it gave me gut pain for a day following, even waking me up at night. I need to be really careful for the next little while, to reintroduce food slowly into my diet, and to make sure I still get proper nutrition. I bought some bottles of Ensure that were on sale at the pharmacy, and I'm making a point of drinking them now to help my body get back what it's lost, but I know that solid food will be slow going for a bit, and I'm not looking forward to trying to sort out that balance.

But ugh, that woman's insensitive comments just pissed me off! I'm not proud of getting this sick! I'm not proud of losing that much weight not due to a better diet but due to being unable to eat anything! It's not something an intelligent person says, "way to go," to!

But then again, I never did accuse my mother of being intelligent...

I saw my mother off at the airport today. She's returning to England. It was a sad moment, lots of tears, but I firmly believe that she's making the right decision for herself. She's got more family back there, more friends, more government support, and just as much chance of getting a job there as here. I support her decision. But it's weird to realize that at this very moment, she's over international waters, not even in the same country as me anymore. You'd think I'd be used to that, after all the time she spent in the States with my father, but that wasn't quite the same. It's a bit of a heavy feeling. I'll adjust in time, of course, but for the moment, it's still sinking in that I won't just be able to call her tomorrow and go out for tea if I want.

I decided against selling at the ren faire this year. I didn't give myself enough time to get stock together, and by the end, when it came to crunch time I just had too much stress on my shoulders to keep going. So I cancelled my table there. I still went to look around, and had a good time. I watched a wonderful belly dancing display, bought some polished stones, and some delicious strawberry-chocolate-mint homemade jam. I'm going to try harder to make things through this coming year so that I can have a table there next year instead.

I've started watching Juuni Kokki again. It's just as addictive as I remember it, and I have no idea why I never finished watching it the first time around. Also, after all this time, I still ship Enki/En-ou. I really wish that more of the novels were published in English, too, so that I could read them.

Catching up with my reading. I've just started Gwenda Bond's Blackwood, which I'm hoping will pick up soon, because with few exceptions, it seems like a standard YA supernatural novel at the moment. Admittedly, I'm not very far into it, so I'll give it a chance. Still have to write up reviews for Martha Wells's The Serpent Sea and Catherynne M Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which might just win some sort of award for the longest book titles in recent years.

I think I might spend some time this weekend making some more paper beads and bracelets. I had inspiration for a different style of bracelet than the ones I normally make, and I want to give them a try and see if they'll work out as well as I think they will. Also, I have a lot of paper strips cut for beads, and more magazine pages than that waiting to be cut into strips, so I really ought to make some better use of them. It'll give me a little break from sewing so much, too.

Speaking of crafts, I do have a whole bunch of embroidered bookmarks that I need to put a backing on. I made about 30 for the ren faire, but as I previously mentioned, didn't actually sell anything there. So now I've got a bunch of bookmarks sitting around. I'll probably list them in my Etsy store in a day or so, since there's been some people interested in them.

Been feeling the urge to do some fiction writing again. A friend and I have talked idly about giving each other writing challenges, the way we used to years ago. I hope something will come of it. I really miss having so much inspiration to write, having my fingers dance across the keyboard and having stories flow from my mind onto the screen. Hmm, probably should also go back and rework some older things that I wrote, too...

Current Music: Trans-Siberian Orchestra - promises to Keep

I feel like a bitch right now.

I fostered a pregnant cat a few months ago. The kittens, all four of them, are happy and healthy and old enough to be adopted out to their (hopefully) forever-homes. There's only one problem with this.

My mother wants one.

My mother is, shall we say, not the most responsible person I have come across. She has, while trying to leave my father, come back to this city, gotten a job, made plans, and then run away with my father without telling anybody, deliberately hiding from those who try to contact her so that she doesn't have to face her responsibilities. I am one of the people she hid from. Multiple times. I considered myself lucky when she sent me an email full of lies about why she was leaving again, because at least then she acknowledged that she was leaving.

I once got cats, when she was living with me. She and I agreed to care for them together. She insisted, because she didn't want them in her room at night and because she refused to sleep with her bedroom door closed, that they be locked in the bathroom each night when she went to bed. She eventually got tired of having to care for them and told me to find them a new home.

I have them back now, of course. She no longer lives with me, and no longer has any say in what happens to them.

But now she wants one of the kittens. While it isn't solely my decision, I told her that I didn't recommend it. She's on unemployment right now and doesn't have a job. She lives in a shared apartment that she wants to leave soon in favour of getting her own apartment, and people rent that other room quite often, and the cat she wants is more shy than the others and isn't as cuddly. Her landlord doesn't allow cats, either, but she planned to beg him for one and say that she would stay there on a long-term basis so he would have guaranteed income from her if he'd only let her adopt.

I told her my reasons for discouraging this desire of hers. I phrased it as politely and diplomatically as I could, and she said that she'd abandon the idea for now, but I feel awful about what I did and said. I feel like I crushed her dream, like I might have made her cry. I know it was the right thing to do, not just for her sake but for the sake of the kitten she wanted to adopt, but knowing that I very likely hurt her makes me want to curl up and cry, until all my frustration and guilt is gone. But it doesn't go away so easily. From experience, that guilt will stay with me for months, maybe longer, far beyond what's necessary or even logical for me to feel it.

In many ways, I wish that she wasn't such a foolish and irresponsible woman. Then I might have been glad to help her adopt a kitten of her own, and I would be able to stay in contact with something I have helped raise since birth. But that dream can't be realized here, and in order to protect everybody involved, I had to be hurtful and say that which I didn't want to have to say.

I know that doing the right thing can be hard sometimes. I only wish it didn't have to hurt so very much.