onceafatgirl

Gentle parenting my little addict

At the beginning of this year I had no idea I would be moving out of our suburban house and into a city condo. And here it is, July, and before the end of the summer I will be out of a house that I love and into a high rise condo that I love.

And I am overwhelmed with feelings. 

I want this move. I want to go to the grocery store on foot. I want to go to fun places on the train and the bus. I want to just walk around the city as a pastime!

I used to walk around New York just to be out and about. I tried walking in the early days of suburban living, but walking the suburbs (not to mention when we lived in Texas or Mississippi) is not the same. It doesn’t feel like a solo date the way a city walk can. And now I will be close to both mundane and fancy shopping. The lake and river walks. The beaches. The museums. Little coffee shops. Beautiful views.

But I am also going to miss our house. We renovated it just to our liking. I had a double oven and a high capacity washer and dryer, and a rain shower head plus a handheld shower head, and a weeping cherry tree and a Japanese maple, and 4 tall grasses along our driveway, but one that was always shorter and wider and wilder that we called “Milo.” I had lots of room for clothes and crafts and just stuff in general. A garage. A swing in my back yard. A back yard.

A move like this is a big deal for me. It is a dream come true. It is also a kind of breakthrough in my self. Emotionally and spiritually. To understand “manifestation” differently. To understand how the world works differently. 

But in order to understand something differently, is to change. And change for me is a kind of crisis. Every time. Even now when the change seems to be a wonderful opportunity and a deeper understanding of the power of my own authenticity. 

Getting everything I want is, indeed, a crisis to my nervous system.

It’s just that I have made friends with crisis. 

In child development, they say a secure child is one who has a parent who is both warm and firm. One who can hold a boundary with love. And when I got my eating under control, I had to learn how to do that for the little addict in me, that terrified little girl who was going to DIE if she had to feel this feeling one more minute. 

Yes you are having a crisis. Yes it’s very scary and parts of this are going to be hard and painful. Remember all of the times you thought things would be hard and now you are good at them. No we can’t stop and quit right now. Yes you still have to sign all the paperwork. Maybe later we can go through two drawers and see what we can get rid of. You don’t have to do it right now. You’re doing a great job already. Why don’t you have lunch and then see how you feel. Go to sleep and tomorrow you can decide what you want to do next.

It turns out that gentle parenting my addict lets me take thoughtful action in the face of fear, instead of reacting (usually freezing – so my reaction was generally an entire lack of action.)

To have my feelings be in their proper place, as guideposts and stop signs, is a gift, but it took something. It took changing the way I thought, and the way I thought was enmeshed in the way I ate. I had a bad feeling, I ate a drug food that lit up my brain’s reward center, I was calm enough to not care and not take action, and then soon enough I was sober and still had the same problem, now for longer, and still no solution. And that felt yucky. So I ate a drug food to get rid of that bad feeling.

You can clearly see where this is going…(or can you? I am told there is a literacy crisis.)

By not ever eating drug foods anymore, I stopped using certain thoughts. They never got triggered by the reward cycle. The path got overgrown. New thoughts got used. More and more often. The rewards were for different things, like achieving long term goals, instead of instant gratification.

The reality is, that until we are entirely out of our suburban house, are mostly unpacked from the move, and the keys are in the new owners’ hands, I will not be chill. But on the other side will be a new kind of chill. One I have not experienced yet.

Also, if I can keep my eating boundaries for 20 years, I can manage to keep my shit together for 2 months while we do what regular people do all the time. Move.