This service also marks the beginning Great Lent of our journey into Pascha.  We have several “Lents” during the church year, but this is the only one we call, “Great,” because it leads to the feast of feasts, Pascha, when our Lord is resurrected from the dead, and thus rescued us sinners from death.  God’s great compassion shines down on us and I don’t think anyone can truly comprehend  fully what this means.  Maybe some more holy and learned than I are able, but I can only stand in awe.  This  Great Lenten fast is also the most grueling in what it expects of us, more services, restricted eating and less “entertainment”  thereby removing distractions that normally prevent us from focusing attention on the ways we have been drawn into personal sins that have caused a breech in our relationship with God and ultimately all who share the world with us.

Earlier in the day, I told the kids that Lent would begin sometime in the middle of the Vespers service.  “Watch for the Vestments to change from white to purple.  When that happens, you know Lent has begun.”  And so, somewhere in the middle of the Vespers service, David poked me in order to get my attention, as he often does in church and I leaned down to hear what he has to say.  He pointed his thumb towards the altar where the altar party was re-assembling and said in his very innocent and matter of fact wide eyed way, “It’s Lent,” and then he turned his attention back to the service book.

Yup.  It’s Lent alright and I’m already feeling the hunger pangs.  Unfortunately, I was and am nowhere near ready for this Lent.  It has come remarkably early this year, just about 8 weeks after Christmas.  It seems as though I lost a week of my life shoveling out from two different blizzards over the course of 5 days…not a “snow event” we’re used to dealing with here in the mid-Atlantic.  I feel a little bit lost and disoriented.  Lent or not, I find myself double checking the calendar for the date and sometimes even the day of the week.  The feeling almost reminds of me of some of the confused expressions my former stroke patients would give me when I asked them for the date. 

But, Lent comes as it does every year, whether I am truly ready or not.  By about Sunday I will have settled in and be feeling OK with whole idea of Lent.  After about three weeks, I will start looking at the calendar and counting down the days.  At week 5, I’ve usually just sort of “given in” to the struggle.  The Great Canon of St. Andrew takes on particular meaning at this point. It helps, having done this before to know that I will “get there,” but it’s always a little tough at the beginning.

A blessed Lent to you if you follow this observance…if not, but your journey to springtime be joyous!

As I entered my mid to late thirties (I’m firmly in the late period now), I put on a little bit of weight, probably 20 pounds or so.  I decided not to worry too much about it, which is of course, nearly impossible in America today, but I tried.  My cholesterol, blood pressure and sugar levels all were well within normal limits.  Many of the women in my family have/had body types just like mine, extremely pear shaped with smaller waists.  If you have to have extra weight, mine is the best kind to have, one, because it puts less stress on the heart, and, two because it’s easier to hide.  It was easy to “be reasonable” about the whole thing.

Until my feet started hurting so badly when I got out of bed every morning I wanted to cry.  I had experienced this to some degree when I was pregnant with both kids.  After I delivered the babies, my feet stopped hurting in the morning.  My mom told it was probably plantar fasciitis.  The pain went away for years and then came crushing back last year towards the end of the school year.  It wasn’t just in the morning either.  Every time I got out of the car or up from sitting for any period of time, my feet hurt.  I figured it would just be part of “getting older” for me, like those grey hairs that keep appearing just above my left temple.

At the time, we were still on a COBRA insurance plan and paying $1200 out of pocket each month for insurance.  I didn’t want to see a podiatrist and possibly incur even more medical costs, so I waited until we had employee-sponsored insurance again and made appointments with a podiatrist and my gynecologist for a yearly check up.  The podiatrist confirmed my Mom’s suspicions.  I did indeed have plantar fasciitis.  The gynecologist appointment revealed that I had gained 14 pounds over the past year.  I now weighed as much as I did when I was pregnant with the kids, the last time I had such pain in my feet.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one out, now does it?

I decided that at least *some* of the weight had to come off, at least enough to relieve some of the pain.  Had I a desk job that allowed me to sit most of the day it wouldn’t have been such a big deal.  But, as a speech therapist to sometimes very wiggly developmentally disabled preschoolers whom have a tendency to jump out of their chairs and start climbing on anything available, I needed to be able to move quickly.  You can’t hobble and perform my job.

I won’t bore you with diet/exercises plans.  These are quite google-able and there are a million of them, but I would recommend eating more protein and not worrying quite so much about fat.  You feel more satisfied with real food and you don’t need to eat as much.  Period.

What amazed me as I entered this season of weight loss was how much I had come to let food control me.  I love to eat, really love to eat good food on special occasions.  But I discovered as I started planning out what I would eat every day, that eating had almost become a sort of a habit.  I once thought I was an emotional eater, and I do think there is a degree of emotion tied up in the whole thing, especially when I think I *must* have chocolate.  For the most part, however, I ate because I thought I had to, not necessarily because I needed to.  Or, I ate because I thought I wanted something to eat, not because I was hungry.  I didn’t even always taste what I was eating or stop when I felt full.

Eventually, I started to really appreciate what I did eat.  I started to look forward to that special snack or that little bit of chocolate I allowed myself (every day I ate chocolate-the darker the better, drank small glass of wine, *and* lost weight, good food is good for you!).  I became very grateful for food, real food with texture, smell and taste.  And then I found that I didn’t necessarily need quite so much of it. During this short season of shoveling snow, I’ve felt more hunger, and I’ve allowed myself to eat out of plan.  Somehow, I’ve reconnected a little bit with my body’s natural signals.  This is a good thing, I think.  For the first time in my life, it almost seems “healthy.”

Losing weight is never easy and I’m sure I have much more to learn about my relationship with food.  I’m sure the upcoming Great Lenten fast will teach me even more, especially as, led by my husband, we are trying to eat more protein, less carbs and more “whole food.”  But I did learn that parts of my relationship with food continue to be disordered and I continue to need to work out how it is bound up with my spiritual life.

And if you’re wondering, yes I did lose weight.  My feet don’t hurt any longer which is absolutely wonderful.  I’m hoping that I will find a weight that I can maintain without too much of my family life being taken over by trips the gym, etc.  I think balance is one thing I will struggle with for the rest of my life.  Food is just one of the more obvious signposts of that difficulty.



Fortunately, I documented them, publicly, yes.  Perhaps that was a bit vain of me, but I reasoned at the time that I couldn’t be the only one feeling and experiencing these things and maybe it would be of service to some other mom out there in need of commiseration, a virtual trip to the coffee shop if you will, even if it happened after a 2 AM feeding when the house was finally, blessedly devoid of crying children and other assorted creatures vying for attention.  But anyway, fortunately I documented my entry level motherhood experiences because I’m not sure I’d remember them otherwise.  I joke, with a degree of wistfulness, that David’s first year of life is mostly a blur in my mind.  Bits and pieces tumble back, especially when I kiss him good night for the last time and the ghost of his baby face is most visible in his peaceful, sleeping face. 

As Jim read back over those entries he remarked, “The first years of our kids lives are all documented.”  I asked, “Was anything I wrote even worth reading?”  I think he told me it was.  At the time, I developed a small “audience” of readers who regularly commented on the blog.  Some of them I now consider friends, though I’ve never met them, in real life as the saying goes these days.  We read (past tense) and read (present tense) each others blogs.  I now keep up with many of those same folks via facebook.

As the years moved on, the blog postings became less frequent, as I began to doubt my ability to write.  I attempted to publish children’s books, to no avail.  Sent a few articles out to magazines…same experience.  No one really seemed interested in what I had to say.  My life also changed.  Increasingly, I took on more responsibilities.  First, I worked at home as our church’s secretary, to bring in money…then part time and now full time outside of the home with a 30 to 45 minute one-way commute.  Life, it sometimes seems, wants to squeeze me into pieces.  Somewhere in the midst of that transition, one of my cyber friends remarked, “your writing doesn’t seem like you any more.”  It probably didn’t, because, once again, I wasn’t sure who I was.

I’m still not.  Is anyone really ever?  I wasn’t sure I was a writer at that time my friends made that comment.  Perhaps I was just fooling myself.  The blog-o-sphere almost seemed like an egotistical joke to me.  Anyone, after all, can write a blog.  All you have to do is be semi-literate and think hightly enough of yourself to believe your opinion/thoughts/experiences, etc. are worth spewing into cyber space (admittedly, just like I am doing right now).  I stopped writing.  My last post here was some time in June, 2009, pretty much around the time I started my new job.

But, after writing more than one status update in Facebook that exceeded the character limit, and becoming frustrated with that limitation,  after reading my daughters short story, “Nail Polish,” and seeing her delight in the process of creating, after watching my son build a rocket in the middle of the living room floor last night and wearing underwear on his head and calling it a helmet, I thought, “well, maybe I do have something to say.  The claw hammer that pulled out the nail in the coffin were my husband’s numerous hints of me being some kind of writer, culminating with a “writer’s life” sort of quote in my email this morning, I decided I might have something to say.  Whether I like it or not, I think I might be a writer.  Perhaps a not very good, non-publishable writer, but a writer nontheless.

Thus, I’m going to be doing a little dusting around here…hence the sneezing and watery eyes.  I’m not really sure what it all might look like, especially considering that my life has changed and is parsed pretty much to bits.  It’s not kosher for me to talk much about my work as I need to respect the confidentiality of my students and their families.  But, I’m sure there remains some fodder for reflection.  And, I’ve decided I’m only going to the gym four mornings a week now, which leaves me one morning a week for writing…but I don’t want to make any promises.  Life is never smooth sailing, no matter how calm those waters might apear on the surface.

Blessings.

The quote Jim sent me this morning from today’s Writer’s Almanac, which, interestingly enough, I am subscribed to, but never seem to get in my inbox:

It’s the birthday of the man who said: “Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.” Paul Auster, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1947), is the author of The New York Trilogy (1985–86),a set of idiosyncratic detective stories that deal with questions of identity and existential thought, as well as a memoir, The Invention of Solitude (1982), and several other books, including the novels Moon Palace (1989), Oracle Night (2004), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and recently Man in the Dark (2008) and Invisible (2009).

*Damn, it’s scary hitting that “publish” button.*

PS…I couldn’t get the ole spell check to work, so, there may be numerous errors…