One Small Step for Allison-kind

Okay.  I'm fat.  We all know this.  No big surprise.  But why am I fat?  Why can't I lose the weight I want to lose?  Why do I keep eating the very food that is killing me?  I mean I love my life.  I love my husband.  I want to adopt a baby.  I want to live long enough to retire and even longer.  So, What. Is. The. Deal?

I keep going back to when I lost Miller and thinking, why didn't I just do what the doctor said before I got pregnant:  lost weight and tried again?  Would the outcome had been different?  What stopped me from taking his advice and giving it the good ol' college try before continuing to try to get pregnant?

Well, the answer to this one is easy:  I was addicted to the trying.  No.  Not THAT part of the trying.  But rather the part where having a child to increase our family went from being a dream to a mission.  I was addicted to the hormone swings.  The constant blood draws.  The embarrassing ultrasounds.  It was like I was in a competition with my own body that I kept trying to make it do what I wanted it to do and it kept giving me the finger.

Then once that was taken from me and the Reproductive Endocrinologist said, "no more until you lose weight" I gave him the finger.

So, once my regular gynecologist gave me a 3 months supply of Clomid, I decided, in my addicted state, to play doctor.  I took 200mg a month instead of 150.  And it worked.  Ha!  Take that stupid RE Doctor.

But the joke was on me.  For some reason, not sure of which one, I was pregnant for 9 weeks. 9 stinking short weeks.  If you're looking for the reason that I lost Miller, just pick up a baseball bat and start swinging at the Pinata that is my life, and instead of candy, you'll see that my PCOS, MTHFR mutation, infertility, and fat will rain on your head.

I don't claim to suffer the loss of a child as much as a parent whose child actually was born and lived on this earth.  But whether you choose to accept it or not isn't important.  I lost a child.  A child that my family never got to know.  But, honestly, I'm not upset about it anymore.  I've moved on.

However, prior to getting to the "I've moved on" part, I knew all I had to do was lose weight and try again.  The medicine worked and if I could have just lost as little as 30 pounds it would have made a huge difference in my ability to become and, hopefully, remain pregnant. But I didn't.  Instead I gained weight.

I've used this disgusting fat suit to hide from a multitude of emotional pains. The irony is that the very thing you use to hide from the emotional traumas of your past becomes another emotional pain to bear AND it also becomes a physical pain.

As we prepare to adopt, I get nervous about how we'll ever do it financially, and if a birth mother will choose us.  I keep going back to "if I just would have lost weight and tried again before opting for surgery to render me completely infertile forever then we might have this worry."  And after repeating this to myself over and over and over again, I've come to realize that the answer is pretty simple.

I was afraid of getting pregnant again and losing another child.  I don't know how woman who have had multiple miscarriages survived the second one and each one after that because I barely survived the first one.  To have gotten pregnant again and lost another child would have devastated me and I don't know if I could have ever recovered.  So, once again, the cruise control that is my mind, sought refuge in my fat suit so I wouldn't get pregnant again so I didn't have to worry about opening myself up to that pain again. 

Now, I've accepted our loss.  I've grieved Miller.  I'm so excited about enriching our family by the adoption of our precious child one day.  So why the hell am I still fat?

The only thing I can think of is:  Yes.  I want to lose the weight.  Yes.  All I have to do to increase my life span and my health is losing just 50-75 pounds.  But every night I go to bed feeling like a big fat swollen walrus and swear I'll do it right this time.  That I'll start eating right and losing weight.  Then I wake up the next morning in a hungover stupor from all the medication I have to take to combat the physical pain from my Fibromyaliga and Rheumatoid Arthritis that I don't even think about starting the day off right.  I just go on autopilot until I lay back down in bed at night where the cycle of pity repeats itself.

So, since I've got some kind of rational logic behind why I didn't lose weight to be able to get pregnant on my own, then I should apply the same rational logic to why I'm not losing weight to adopt.

It's not that I don't want it bad enough.  I do.  So much so I've driven my family and most of my friends crazy with my constant adoption talk.  I want to be a mom so bad I can't stand it.  But like I was afraid to lose weight to get pregnant again and face another miscarriage, I'm afraid to get healthy enough to adopt and NEVER get picked. Or get picked just to have the mother change her mind. 

I'm scared to death.  To death.  I'm not scared of death since I'm obviously killing myself one Pepsi and potato chip at a time.  I'm not frightened of my own mortality.  Not frightened enough to actually do something about it.  But I'm scared to death of being judged.

I've been judged for the majority of my life. The judgement is why I wear this fat suit and I'm scared of opening myself up to more judgement .  I went from a very confident young teen to someone who is more worried about what others think of her than what she thinks of herself. 

Jeff and I will be judged on if we have a nice enough house, baby nursery pictures, bank account, marriage, age, education, and whatever else the social worker, adoption agency, and birth mother can think to judge our ability to be parents on.  I'm so afraid of being hurt again.  Afraid to open myself up to getting hurt again.

I've got to find the detour to this roadblock in my head.  I just can't escape it. 

I've been struggling with bitterness lately.  I just get mad at myself for being such a damn coward that I gave up before I even tried.

But as it's true about most things in life, when something becomes so bitter in your soul that you can taste it in your mouth, and you try to suppress it, repress it, or give it to God, it becomes the one thing you are faced with over and over again.  Like a test of your Emergency Pregnancy/Trying To Conceive Alert System.

I'm excited to be an aunt.  I'm excited for all my friends who are on the path of parenthood regardless of the stage they are in or what path they are walking.  But deep down I am angry at myself for giving up.  And that's exactly what I did.  I. Gave. Up.

And I hate myself for it.  So much so, that I keep putting myself in time out.  But instead of doing something like eating right and exercising, my time out is made up of a sedentary lifestyle and eating fattening foods.

So, any suggestions as to how I can find a detour around that roadblock?