You Suck Tammy

There’s some mean woman in my head. I’m not sure how she got there. She was most certainly not invited. She likes to show up every now and then and tell me how terrible I’m doing at life.

Karens get a bad wrap, so I’m going to call the mean woman in my head Tammy. Sorry if your name is Tammy and you are a delightful person, I don’t mean to add to your inner-Tammy. If you’re not a nice person to begin with, may I just say: You suck Tammy!

Let’s take today for instance. I have three packages of steak and two pounds of hamburger completely thawed in my refrigerator so Tammy likes to point out what a terrible planner I am because I can’t possibly eat all of that. What was I planning on cooking anyway??? Tammy forgets she’s dealing with a pro-level stress/night/happy/binge eater…yet Tammy has a point, so I decided to make meatloaf for dinner to help with one of my issues.

The girls have photos for one of their extracurricular activities tonight, so I go to check the schedule…oh…oh dang. Miss A needs to be dressed and ready in an hour from…now. I’m at work. My children are at school. They won’t be home for 45 minutes.
I fly home (adhering to all posted speed limit signs and traffic signals-take that Tammy) and find pieces of Miss A’s outfit. The whole time Tammy is prattling away in my head telling me how I suck. I should be more organized. Maybe if I got out of bed at 5 instead of hitting snooze like a lazy bum, etc, etc, etc…

Miss A’s tights and shoes are missing, so I snag her sister’s. Two sizes too big? Who will notice in the photo? “Everyone who sees it”-Tammy. I grab the envelope to order photos and pull out of the driveway to watch the bus go by. I follow it down the street like a stalker and attempt to kidnap my own children from the bus stop before they walk home.

I then drive them the block-ish home explaining our very tight schedule, to pull into our garage so Miss A can change in the comfort and privacy of our garage. I whip her hair into a not-perfect-dance-bun and we drive across town where her shaggy hair stands out like sore thumb, Tammy is berating me for my terrible hairstyle skills, “Isn’t a bun, like the most BASIC of hairstyles?” I even had the opportunity to overhear other moms talking about their nervousness about the perfect bun, but low-and-behold, they all just managed to fall into perfection…CAN YOU BELIEVE IT??? But Miss A is beaming and another girl’s dad wandered in late, without a face mask (GASP). I would have handed him the worst-parent award, but his little girl also had the perfect dance bun, so I held on to my Terrible Mom Trophy that my inner Tammy kept presenting me…over…and over.

Back in the car we head home again. I tell Miss E to find her dance outfit and hair bangle and I’m going to whip up some dinner. Miss A is here to help. We get a meatloaf slapped together. It doesn’t look quite right, thanks for the reminder Tammy, and then I frantically look around my house for bobby-pins. We are a house with three girls, where on God’s green earth did all of the bobby-pins go? “Maybe if you were more organized and not so lazy on the weekend-“. I swear to GAWD Tammy… found the Bobby pins.

I get Miss E’s hair in a kind of decent slightly lopsided bun. Miss A tells her “It’s cute” so obviously it’s bad, but I think the girls sensed me teetering on the edge, so they rolled with it. “They wouldn’t need to if you’d just buy the cheater piece. Aren’t your children worth the maybe $5 it would cost to not look like raggamuffins? Maybe you don’t care if they’re the laughing stalks” For-The-Love-Of-Pete Tammy.

Hubby is now home. The timer is set on the oven. I wish him luck with the meatloaf, Miss E and I go, she gets photographed. Next up: we need to go home, eat and then Miss E has piano via Zoom. Thirty seven minutes. We have thirty seven minutes. “By your children being so busy, are they even getting an opportunity to be kids and explore their own creativity?” I will throat-punch you Tammy.

We get home. Hubby has made grilled cheese and Mac and cheese, because cheese. Apparently cheese is the answer. The meatloaf is out of the oven. Hubby points out it isn’t “the usual” and puts it back in the oven for another 20 minutes. Before this I ate a chunk, so if I die of salmonella, it was the spite-loaf. Tammy tells me how even pioneers without running water and electricity could pull off a friggin meatloaf. I curse her as I look in the pantry to get the taste of undercooked ketchup soaked beef out of my mouth.

The point, if there is one, is: I’m trying. We’re trying. We are all trying, so let’s have a little grace, a little patience, and a little kindness, especially for yourself. After running from one fire to another at work and then at home, we deserve a little peace. Don’t listen to that mean, uninvited woman in your head; also don’t yell “You suck Tammy!” in public, more people are named Tammy than one would think.

A Week Without Facebook

I deactivated my Facebook account. Some of you are breaking into a cold sweat just thinking about it aren’t you? I was. I didn’t think I could do it, and truth-be-told, I didn’t entirely. Throughout the last 7-10 days I did sneak back on a couple times during the week, once to share a local event with some other mom-friends and once to post on a page for accountability, and that was it. Let me tell you what happened…

Guuuuuuurl first of all, deactivating Facebook was very reminiscent of when I quit smoking. I found myself, those first couple days, grabbing for my phone to mindlessly scroll, like I used to grab for a phantom pack of cigarettes when I’d hop in the car, not because I needed it, but because it was a habit. I have programmed myself to get that hit of social network without even noticing. I’d bet I did this a dozen times.

I have more time. I went to the gym. I sat quietly and looked out the window. I walked outside. I wrote three blog posts. I played Monopoly and OG Nintendo with my girls. I asked them if they wanted to play instead of the other way around. I am more present in my life. Is all of this due to getting rid of Facebook, probably not, but it certainly is part of it.

I get to be more intentional with my time. Before I would turn on the tv “for noise” and then scroll through my phone having no idea what was on the blinking box, wasting minutes or hours of my life. I don’t know how many times Hubby or I used to walk in on each other and ask “What are you watching?” and the answer was “I don’t know”. I haven’t been standing in my kitchen and then looking up and it’s 20 minutes later, with nothing to show for it but a cramp in my hand from holding my phone. Now I turn on the tv for my entertainment (weird). I actually watched three movies in the past week…and I can tell you what they’re about!

I turn on the news, and the cool thing is, I can turn off the news. I’m not getting bombarded by stories constantly on my feed. I am not getting lost in the swamp of arguments in the comments and spending minutes or hours reading what strangers think and then watching other strangers attack each other over differing opinions. I’ve had conversations about current events with other humans, with a back-and-forth of opinions and rebuttals, the way humans are supposed to communicate. My week hasn’t been filled with reading one-liners of divisive remarks shot out into the world with little to no consideration behind them. It’s kind of freeing.

I’m not feeling pangs of sadness when I see how much fun my friends and family are having without me or resentment when I see what “my people” are choosing to spend their time doing. I’m not comparing my life to others based on their 2-second snapshot of only their shiniest parts. I’m not getting caught up in those who have blown me off countless times, to only see how and what or who they’re choosing to spend their time with instead.

On Facebook, my magic friend number is 500. I cull the herd of “Facebook friends” to keep it below that number, to some that seems huge, to some that’s a drop in the bucket. When I disappeared from Facebook land, guess how many people noticed enough to reach out to ask me if/why I was gone? Take a wild guess, out of all the acquaintances, family members, associates and friends who had been accepted and requested into my circle, how many noticed my absence enough to ask me? Two humans=.04% So I ask myself for something that is supposed to help “socially network”, what is the quality of that network when my disappearance goes almost entirely unnoticed? Why would I pour so much of my time and energy into something where I am not causing that much of an impact? What if I poured that time and energy into something that can cause an impact, like my family, my marriage, my home and my health?

Am I gone from Facebook forever? Nope. I’m sure I’ll hop back on, maybe later today to share this blog. So you might want to subscribe to my actual blog if you enjoy my ramblings, especially if you only get to read the posts that Facebook presents to you.

12 Freakin Miles

Sometimes I make big goals for myself, so big they can be scary.

I heard of a group who are making a goal of logging 100 miles in 100 days. Holy cow. That sounds big. That sounds huge, especially when I’m not one to log miles, or steps, or anything.

Since I need to do different things to get different results, I joined. I thought one mile a day seems very manageable. Fast forward one month. It seems I’m only good at getting my one mile a day logged a little over half the time, so here I am 31 days in and only 19 miles logged. Oops.

I can’t fail at this. I already ordered the dang shirt. I can’t wear the shirt if I only get 63% of the miles logged, so I decided it was time to kick my own butt.

I set foot into a place I haven’t been for well over a year, and if we are being honest, it might be well over two; the gym.

I sauntered my leggings-clad pile of disappointment up to the front desk, day pass in hand, and asked for a key fob. I had to give her my ID to hold, like a college kid starting a tab at the bar, to make sure I wasn’t going to skip out without paying, or in this case, without returning the fob. With the trade done, I swiped for a green light and walked into the almost-vacant machine room.

A man more than double my age was jogging on a treadmill. I was looking for a recumbent bike and the only one was directly in front of Grandpa. Super. In a room full of unused equipment, I’m going to amble up and make this awkward the first 2 minutes.

After adjusting and reacquainting myself with the machine I started on my mission: 12 miles. I’m going to make up for lost time. A half mile in, I allowed myself to believe this wasn’t an insane goal, considering I haven’t peddled anything for months, I was making good time, the first 1/2 mile clicked by quite quickly. Speaking of time, just then, Father Time came over to ask me if I could use my fob to let him out of the gym. He didn’t want to exit the building, he wanted to go through another area that required a fob to access, and his wasn’t working.

Briefly I thought the Bob Barker lookalike might be a traveling axe murderer and this was his ploy to lure unsuspecting middle aged women so he could chop me to bits and stuff me in a locker. With the other option peddling another 11 1/2 miles, I decided to wander off with the octogenarian and take my chances.

I lived. He went into the next room. I returned to my machine, and it had cleared out my progress. Shit. I briefly debated giving up on this whole mess, but climbed my fluffy-butt back into the machine and started peddling, from scratch.

Six miles in I needed a break to the little girls room. I took a photo for posterity of the machine as proof of the first six miles (not counting before I helped Grandpa beat the fob system). I decided to try another machine.

I chose to go with a kind of elliptical/stepper/bike type thing with all kinds of foot rests and arm levers. It had a dial to track distance and it lit up when I started moving. Good enough.

Dear sweet baby Jesus: why do I love salty snacks and being sedentary so much? I don’t have the stamina for this… I talked myself into going 1/4 mile at a time, cause that’s how I live my life…(if the OG Fast and the Furious just popped into your head, congratulations, we can be friends).

It took me way longer than I was anticipating. I can feel my legs angrily scolding me. My arms are tired. I’m thirsty but worry I’m not coordinated enough to grab my water bottle without taking a swinging arm to the face or accidentally slipping off a pedal, so I keep going, and I finish! I went over 12 miles today!! I took another photo of the second machine.

I went to the front desk to return the fob. Frankie Front Desk said she thought I’d forgotten to come back. Yes. It took so long to finish my workout, staff thought I had left. But guess what? I finished. I shrugged it off. I heard my friend Amy, who has gone Home to Heaven, remind me I out-lapped everyone sitting on the couch. I smiled and hopped in my car to go home. Sometimes I make big goals for myself, so big they can be scary, and it’s really pretty cool when I accomplish them.

Mirages of Macaroni

In my heightened state of starvation, I am starting to see mirages of pastries and macaroni. Just kidding, but my coworkers are still dumping the sweets and treats for the general public and I’ve been listening to how delightful they all taste-while I eat my banana.

I haven’t caved. I mixed it up today with some “light” chicken dip and celery for lunch. I was pretty heavy-handed with the Buffalo sauce, so it was a spicy reprieve from protein shakes.

Today’s snacks were the banana and little dark-chocolate pomegranate things that were delicious and I hid the bag from myself after half of a “serving size”.

Dinner was an altered recipe from my childhood. I swapped out every ingredient for a low-cal option except for the tuna and peas, and reduced the cheese. It tasted better than I was anticipating and I have two more meals ready as my family has zero interest in my concoction.

After dinner, I decided I’d do some writing, so I paced my basement while I write. I’m not moving mountains but I’m not sitting on my butt either. I’m cautiously optimistic on my progress as I haven’t missed a meal or snack in the past few days, which I normally am a terrible meal-skipper AND I’ve kept my calories in check. Win-win!

Hubby and I have a date night planned for Friday night, which will be my first out-to-eat meal since this round of “me trying” started, so I am committed to staying on track with healthy choices until then. I don’t plan to freebase lard or order a family-size chocolate lava cake, but I’m going to enjoy myself.

So besides headaches and my grumbling tummy, this hasn’t been too painful yet… I’m trying to keep focusing on the numbers game of it all: like six first-week pounds down and 3,000 more steps while I type.

Small wins. Small victories. That’s how I’m going to make big victories happen. Every day will not be perfect. I am imperfect, and that’s okay.

Dieting and Swearing

I hate the term “New Year New Me” because it’s annoying. It’s cliched. It’s hard work. I feel like the past decade of my life, when this time of year rolls around I think: this is it-my year, so let me not shine-on the BS of proclaiming my New-Me-Dom. Instead, let me say this: “Last year was a shit show. I’m going to try to do better.”

For one: I am a binge-eater. For reals. It says on my friggin medical chart, that I have a psychological condition where I stuff food into my face at breakneck pace and quantity. Yep. So that’s a thing.

For two: I’m a stress-eater. I’m self-diagnosing now. I’m also a celebratory-eater. I’m just making up my own terms. For…what are we up to? Four? I’m a nostalgia-eater.

I like to eat. This is what I’m saying. Also I have terrible habits like: not eating breakfast, skipping meals, drinking, eating before bed, and (again) eating too much.

Soooo knowing that I have gained 60 pounds over the past four years(yeah…the weight of three cases of beer, six 10-pound bags of sugar, or our big dog, has been added to my 5’3” frame), I’m going to try…something.

Here’s how day one went: I am tracking my food today and I am not going over 1,250 calories. Please don’t get into a discussion of calories vs fats vs carbs debate. I have to do SOMETHING and this is what I am trying. This was my day:

Breakfast (which I usually never have) 8AM protein shake. It was coffee flavored and had a little caffeine so a little nourishment with a little stimulant.

Snack 10AM: banana; this is astonishing because my office is within smelling distance of the break-area/coffee bar, where some well-meaning coworkers brought their leftover holiday treats straight from the gates of Hell and into our office. Then one SOB brought Sandy’s donuts which are one of my FAVORITE treats. I didn’t have ANY. I had to see the piles of goods and listen to several coworkers tell me how delicious everything was: I ate a banana. I chose the mother-F’ing banana.

Lunch 12:45PM: protein shake and a diet Mt Dew. I realize this isn’t really inspired but I needed grab-and-go and this punched the ticket and tasted good, so I didn’t hate it.

Snack 3PM: string cheese. I love cheese and I will cut a bitch before I stop eating cheese. Also Kelli on a diet swears a lot. You’re fucking warned.

Dinner 5:20PM: crusted tilapia, veggie-ball/tots, a couple French fries-6 to be exact, and some ketchup mixed with ranch, since ranch alone is too many calories and I’m Midwestern, so yeah-kranch.

This is where things get tricky because night time is my Achilles heel, so I kept busy. Miss E and I played a game of Monopoly, I felt the pangs of hunger and my head hurt (I’m assuming from the lack of calories and caffeine compared to a “normal” day).

After whooping an 8 year old in Monopoly-SCORE, I went and flossed (my teeth, not the dance) and brushed my mouth with my mintiest of toothpastes, so nothing would taste good. Then I put on a facemask-the kind that cures into a hard shell so your facial movements, like shoveling food into your face, are restricted, and I watched a cartoon with the kiddos before bed.

Pretty sure my stomach was throwing the white flag of surrender toward the snack pantry, in fact I may have actually heard the voice of Dot in there, calling me to her pretzels, but I held strong. I put the big kid to bed, then headed to my own bedroom. It’s early, but if I am sleeping, I am not eating. My stomach is rumbling. My headache has subsided for now. I had several “Screw it! Have a snack!” impulses that I overcame without indulging, so we are calling today a Win.

I realize not all days will be Wins, but some days are better than no days and today is a some day. Tomorrow I plan to repeat my morning/daytime meals and then tomorrow I think a Caesar salad and shrimp are on the menu. I can do this.

I put on 60 pounds by not paying attention. Imagine what I can accomplish if I just pay f’ing attention? Maybe I should start a swear jar? I’d bet I can get to damn-near Alaska by the end of spring.

Fancy New Year Dinner

I find myself so wrapped up sometimes I don’t even acknowledge what’s happening in my own life. This usually happens when I engage in social media, which I hate (because it’s all lies and manipulation), but I’m addicted to it, so be sure to like my post. Aargh!

Take this afternoon: I’m in the kitchen making “Fancy New Year Dinner” and I have talk show videos running in the background. I’m listening to one famous person talk about their holiday traditions and I feel this pang of guilt; I wish we had some kind of fun tradition.

This is where the Kelli-on-my-shoulder should have slapped the scowl right off my face. Fun traditions? Did you miss the part where I said I was actively making “Fancy New Year Dinner”? What the ___ is that?

On New Year’s Day, Hubby and I make a “fancy” dinner and we eat on china, or glass dishes. This year we made steak and shrimp, mashed potatoes, candied carrots, etc. We break out the crystal goblets, that spent the first decade of our marriage being hidden away for a “special occasion”, and drink sparkling juice (or milk is Miss E and Miss A are so inclined). We get sherbet and dish our dessert into icers with liners prior to the meal and marvel how it’s still ice cold by the end.

The girls look forward to this meal. It’s one of their favorite things that we do. We talk about the favorite and least favorite things about the past year and think of something we’d like do in the upcoming year.

The highs this year were our camper road trips and moving to the new house. The lows were Miss A’s accident and Covid. For the upcoming year, we hope to spend time with friends, have Covid be “done”, visit places we didn’t get to go this past year, and go on more camper adventures in the summer.

So here I am in the middle of preparing one of my family’s favorite traditions, “Fancy New Year Dinner” and thinking about how terrible it is that we don’t have traditions. Come the F on. I need to stop being so hard on myself. Get my head up out of comparison-fog and blink a couple times.

It’s a new year. If you’re one to make resolutions, that’s great, being aware of things you can improve and setting goals to do so-solid approach. But if you are anything like me, when you get to ripping yourself apart, remember to also take a tally of what you’re doing right and take a moment to enjoy what you’re already bringing to the table, like Fancy New Year Dinner.