A love letter to my pregnant friends, or: why getting fat is always hard

I've never been pregnant. I've never really wanted to be pregnant; wanted to have kids someday, yeah, but the few pregnancy tests I've taken in my life have all been accompanied by nervous stomachs, crossed fingers, and a three-days-late start to my otherwise clockwork-like period. But each time I've peed on those innocuous-looking sticks, I've gotten them back negative, and been much relieved.

However, much like pregnant women, I do have vast and varied experience with gaining weight. So I can talk about that.

In 2009, I was the fittest I'd ever been in my adult life. I was commuting twenty kilometers a day by bike, I was running three times a week, and lifting weights twice a week. In August, two friends and I biked to Guelph, a day-long trip that was challenging and exhilarating. I was also sticking my fingers down my throat to throw up meals I had just eaten, and I was taking laxatives to shit out what I couldn't purge, something I had been doing off and on for the past twelve years. I weighed 108 pounds. I hated my body, but I looked amazing.

In the fall of 2009, I threw a house party where I drank a bottle of wine for dinner and blacked out well before ten PM. I woke up the next day and I had no food in my house. My parents were coming over to take me out for dinner, and I spent the entire day shaking on my bathroom floor, trying to throw up and having nothing. When they arrived, I tried to stand up and nearly fainted. My disapproving mother found a bag of pasta somewhere deep in my pantry and made me cheesy macaroni. I was so embarrassed.

I got help. I never know what to call it: "rehab" sounds so dire, and "treatment" is what my sister calls the six-month period when she was receiving chemo. For eight months, I went twice a week to CAMH's Eating Disorders and Addictions program: once to a group therapy session, and once to meet one-on-one with a counselor. The program was successful enough, I guess; I stopped binging and purging, but I never figured out why I struggled with those problems in the first place.

I also started gaining weight. A little, at first: chalk it up to quitting my job and losing my commute. Then more: blame that on actually keeping my food down. Then more and more, until three years later, I was 158 pounds.

I was humiliated. My BMI was at 29.9; for all intents and purposes, I was obese. I was horrified. I was wearing sizes I had never worn before. I was bloated. My skin was gray. I cried every time I got on the scale, every time I tried on old clothes, every time I went to the gym. Nothing seemed to work. I wasn't bulimic anymore, but I didn't want to love this big body of mine. I felt like I couldn't.

Everywhere we go, we get messages about how we're supposed to look. We get them from the media, sure — pregnant and ballooning celebrities are a specialty of judgey tabloids — but we also get them from our friends, families, and partners. We hear from a friend about how cutting out Coke and fast food made them lose fifteen pounds, how going paleo made their skin clear up, about how they stopped losing weight once they figured out they were lactose intolerant. We hear from from our parents, who compliment us on weight loss ("I had the flu, mom."), or who offer diet advice followed directly by cookies. We hear it from our partners, who love our bodies, but who sometimes say boneheaded things about other women's bodies, either in admiration or in disgust, that we internalize.

Everyone knows it's hard to lose weight, but it's a little-discussed secret that gaining weight is also tough. It comes up in small ways (sleep positions change dramatically when you're carrying an extra forty pounds, for instance), and in large ones: emotional health, self-perception, self-love. I have nothing but sympathy for pregnant women, especially those balancing between the first trimester and the day when your bellybutton pops — the women who aren't always obviously pregnant; who might have just, you know, stopped running, or decided that cupcakes are an all-the-time food. Trying to remember that you're growing a whole other person inside your body is hard when you can't get your pants done up and you want to throw yourself down on the bed and cry. And, because the universe is a bully sometimes, it's the thinnest women — the ones who work hardest at keeping tiny and toned — who invariably end up showing first.

My weight gain was the result of some pretty bad depression, a total rewiring of the way I looked at food (friend! Not enemy!), and maybe some genetics. Your weight gain is the result of some cray-cray hormones, and the desire to make a family. I'm well aware that pregnancy comes with a host of other bummers, like nausea, exhaustion, constipation, and yeast infections, on top of gaining weight. There's also a certain pressure to pretend like every step of pregnancy is a moment of growth and gentle, maternal love, when I'm sure all some of you want to do is weep angrily while burning down your local fat-unfriendly LuluLemon store.

I don't know what to say except: I feel you, girl. I know that weight changes aren't easy, either going up or going down. I know what it's like to look down at a stomach that wasn't there a few months ago and despair, and to dislike the change even when it's a result of something positive. Hang in there: in a few months, you'll get to meet the reason for your new waistline, and something tells me it might be worth it.

Personal Culture

Culture is more than beliefs, practices, and values. Culture has commonly been defined as the worldview, lifestyle, learned, and shared beliefs and values, knowledge, symbols, and rules that guide behaviour and create shared meanings within a group of people.

— F.E. Racher & R.C. Annis, Respecting culture and honoring diversity in community practice. Research and Theory for Nursing Practice 21

This past year, I've been thinking a lot about how I define myself: what's important to me? What values do I hold dear? What traditions make me cringe? And how do I feel about myself when I choose to diverge from the choices around me?

It's complicated stuff, yo! And just to make things more bananas, there are personal cultures, family cultures, religious cultures, and professional cultures, each with its own set of values, symbols and worldviews. For example, when I was growing up, my family culture was semi-nomadic: we moved from city to city every few years. As a result, I looked with suspicion on people who had spent their whole lives in one town — in one house, even! — because it was just not how things were done in my house. Even smaller family practices have influenced me: sitting down to dinner together is important, as is mixing a can of tuna into a box of Kraft Dinner. But to other people, that's crazytalk.

It's important to identify the things that are important about your own personal culture, I think. For example, my boyfriend loves all things horror-related. Horror movies, bands who use Dias de los Muertos imagery, action figures wielding knives, and jump-scare video games. And when I ask him why, he tells me that fear is cathartic and he likes being scared. Now, to me, fear is something to be avoided, and cathartic feelings spring from heartfelt emails to long-lost friends. Different personal cultures makes for different responses to common emotions. There's no real right answer; I leave him alone when he's watching C.H.U.D-centric movies, and he listens to my nervous self-talks before I hit the reply button.

When I moved into a housing co-op, I felt like I had found a culture that really spoke to me. Here was a housing situation that let me have a say — I sat on the board of directors for four years, which set  the co-op's direction on issues like rent, community spirit, and food — but it also exposed me to a huge range of people I otherwise would never have met. There was a DIY spirit to the place (the stove is filthy? Clean it! And then go talk to the bum who dirtied it in the first place!) that fed me. I'm not saying it's all sunshine and roses. For instance, most people get to choose their roommates, which wasn't my experience, and interpersonal conflict ran rampant. But there was a ramshackle loveliness that colours my memories of the place and my time there.

When I left the co-op, I moved in with my boyfriend. I encountered a bit of culture shock. He's lovely, and his friends are lovely, but they're kind of different from my hippie love tribe. Hell, even my own friends are changing, even if they're originally from the hippie love tribe. Many of them are married, for instance. Some of them own their own homes. Families are getting started. And without the comforting struts of my co-op lifestyle, I was left wondering, is that what I should be doing too?

I don't have an answer. I want to get married someday. I want to have kids. But today? Not today. As the culture around me changes, I have to wonder if I'm capable of figuring out who I am, and where I fit. The values and lifestyles of my friends are shifting — I'm making new friends, and my old friends are making Big Life Changes — and I've never done the work of sitting down to figure out which parts of their culture appeals to me, and what I want to hang onto from my younger, wilder, less traditional days.

It's funny to think of a bunch of strangers together in a house as having any particular form of "culture," but that's what we made for ourselves to bind us together. There were family breakfasts on Sunday mornings, communal meals for sixty people, shared laundry, and drunken spin-the-bottle. These are things I missed when I moved away. Furthermore, they're things I'd love to give back to my friends and family someday (especially those makeout sessions....wink!)

I was kind of hoping that this thought process would happen on a subliminal level, but I don't think things really work like that. Cultures are not preserved by ignoring them. I think people need to choose to hang onto the useful parts of their pasts, and be selective about what parts of the evolving personal cultures around them we choose to adopt. I'd love to live in a co-housing development, for example, even if some of my friend would die before sharing an oven with anyone else. Some of my friends will choose to remain childless, while I definitely want to have a family. And there are personal choices — raising a paleo kid? renting v. owning? long hair v. "mom hair"? therapy v. drinking my emotions? — that we'll encounter only in the future. It's all a part of it.

Over the next while, I'd like to set down a vision of my life: things from my past I want to preserve, and new ideas I want to explore. Nothing too intense: it'll be less of a five-year plan, more of a dream board. The best thing about this process will be that it's happening at all. Paying attention to how I live is part of my personal culture is something that I definitely plan on hanging onto.

Orange is the New Black is the New Must-See TV

So, uh, raise your hand if you expected your favourite shows this year to come from Netflix.

Raise your hand if you expected to be able to sit down and watch thirteen hours of quality television, on demand, whenever you felt like it. In the middle of the night. When you have the sniffles and need a day on the couch. Maybe, if you're old school, you've been spreading them out, a few episodes each week; if you're really old-school, you might only be watching one episode a week, like they did in the 1980s, those Dark Ages.

We've had Tivo for a long time now (since the '90s = forever), so we're used to being able to pause our shows and come back after we get an ice cream sandwhich from the kitchen. And we've gotten used to paying for must-see TV — HBO has trained us well —and expecting stars to occasionally pop up. Hello, Steve Buscemi! I see you, playing a gangster! You're adorable. (Call me!)

When Netflix said it would begin offering original programming, I was skeptical. Netflix routinely recommends titles like, I don't know, Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned, so I was worried that we were going to end up with some truly execrable television experiences. I've seen Two and a Half Men. I know what television producers are capable of.

I ignored Lilyhammer, Netflix's first original offering. I saw a few print ads for it, and read a couple reviews, but there was nothing that said "Must-See TV!" It was impossible to ignore the next few original series, though: House of Cards was uniformly admired, and the return of Arrested Development was one of the most anticipated media events of the last few years. Suddenly, Netflix was a media darling: innovative, fresh, and catering the type of audience who binge watches entire seasons of New Girl in less than a week.

So, you know: everyone.

Now, with Orange is the New Black, I think the burgeoning...network? media entity? programmer?...is hitting its stride. OITNB is funny, it's well-written and (mostly) well-acted, which are pre-requisites for any classic show; since it was created by Jenji Kohan, the brains behind Weeds, I'm not surprised. And it can't be denied that Kohan has a knack for catchy theme songs.

But OITNB is more than that: while Piper Chapman, the nice white lady who goes to jail, is the series's theoretical center, the show is most effective when it's focusing on the other characters. Why? Because their stories are stories we haven't seen before. (I know it seems crazy, but it turns out there's more to feminism than white ladies! Who knew?!) We get to see a lot of upper-East-Side white ladies who run cupcake shops/artesian lotion start-ups/gluten-free consulting firms in movies (ex: every romantic comedy ever produced), but we don't get to see a lot of Black women, or trans women, or lesbians, or drug addicts, or immigrants. At best, they're relegated to the sassy receptionist/real-talk best friend role; at worst, they're just not in the picture.

So getting a whole bunch of them, in one place? With backstories and everything? What a treat. Seriously. I love Nicki, the mouthy, matted-haired lesbian/recovering junkie; I love the love-hate relationship between Daya and her volatile mother; I love Poussay and Tastee's genuine affection and unspoken, totally heterosexual love for each other. I love seeing trans actress Laverne Cox as trans prisoner Sophia Burset. I love that neither Cox or Sophia's trans-ness is erased or marginalized, but I also love that there's more to Sophia than her being trans: she's smart, and pushes for better health care inside the prison. I love that. And it doesn't matter what colour those characters are. I mean, it does, because, you know: identities and cultures and politics. But their ethnicities and sexual orientations and gender genesis don't preclude them from being interesting to watch onscreen, right? Which seems to be a radical idea, but it shouldn't be.

Piper Chapman is not a particular compelling character, and her hook — how did this nice lady who is Just Like Us end up in prison? — dissolved the second she told her disbelieving mother than she was no better than any other prisoner, and that she actually deserved to be there. True say. Now get out of the way, because there are other, more interesting stories to tell.

Dance Dance Revolution

While I was doing my Nia White Belt, I had this strange moment that I'm going to share, even though it makes me blush.

Nia, which is a dance fitness practice, often focuses on "freedance" movement; that is, dancing in a way that feels amazing in your body. Sometimes this matches with the music; many times, it doesn't. It's pure movement, pure pleasure, and sometimes it can be tough for me to really let go and get into the movement: I try to choreograph my dancing, strive for symmetry, and do other type-A stuff that lessens the pleasure. Sometimes, freedancing is nothing more than sitting on the ground and flexing your fingers: hell, if it feels good, just a gentle sway can be a freedance. Really appreciating the way muscles slide over bone, how fascia creates support, how breath energizes the whole body. It's amazing, but it's also tough. It requires mindfulness and nonjudgement — how often does that come naturally?

While I was taking my White Belt a couple months ago, we did a lot of freedancing. And there was a moment, when the Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes song "Time of my Life" was being played, when I got legitimately teary-eyed. This surprised me: I've never loved Dirty Dancing, and I generally roll my eyes when that song comes on, but in the moment, it struck me in a very real, raw, emotional place. It was unexpected, and very vulnerable.

Part of this is rediscovering my longstanding love of electronic music. Since I first heard "Block Rockin' Beats" at the age of thirteen, I've loved computer-driven music. Sure, I can get down with some guitars, but I'll always love Robyn and Fever Ray more than some arena-rocker or pop star. And Nia often thrives when there's a solid foundation of easily-followed beats. But it's not just Nia, and it's not just electronic music: one of my favourite images of my boyfriend is him singing along, at the top of his lungs, to his favourite ska songs on a tiny, sweaty dancefloor in one of our favourite bars. It's my parents stomp-dancing around the cottage after a wine-fueled dinner, fists pumping in the air to my dad's favourite song. It's my sister twerking in my living, just because she can.

I'm excited to be a part of a practice that encourages people to feel good in their bodies, and to move to music that makes them feel good, too. I love Nia because it's transformed by body, but it's also made inroads in plenty of other areas of my life: my music tastes, my ability to be mindful, my ability to choose joy. It's transformative. 

Doing Nia has allowed my relationship with music to evolve. I've become more aware of my body as I move through space; I've become more confident in my own particular brand of booty-shaking on any given dancefloor; it's helped me forge emotional connections to the music I'm listening to; and it helps me focus on how to lead other people to move, as well. I love beats — I always have — but I'm starting to think of them like clothing hangers: convenient places to hang a particular move, or feeling, or expression of joy.

And I can't deny, I'm excited to build playlists for dancing. Should I lead with some GusGus? Cool down with Massive Attack, and get the blood pumping with A Tribe Called Red? This stuff feeds me.

Jorbs

I was lying in bed last night, and between macabre fantasies of zombies lurking in my halls, and macabre fantasies of what might be slithering around under my bed, I was staring at the ceiling, slowly realizing that I have completely lost the plot on what I want to be when I grow up.

When I was nine, a family friend asked me what I would be when I grew up; I shirtily replied that I wanted to be a political analyst, despite the fact that I wasn't totally clear on what that person would actually, y'know, do. In high school, I raised my hand and asked what someone had to do to become a stay-at-home mom, which gave the teacher only slight pause before returning to the lesson at hand. University was an eight-year marathon of "who the hell knows that this degree is going to get me?" and my post-graduation career has been scattershot at best.

I have no clear idea in my head of what my business card should say, or even what I would want it to say. This is frustrating, because as my friends start businesses/head back to school to get college diplomas/entire second or masters degrees/climb the corporate ladder to a comfortable middle rung/pay off their student loans/start families/be actual, functioning adults, I'm still at a loss when someone makes smalltalk at a party by asking what I do.

What I do, these days, is write. I make crafts. I take baths and read comic books. I spend hours thinking about my stupid reproductive system and the various ways it's going to let me down. I meet friends for lunch and I hang out with my boyfriend. I cook. I job-hunt. I dance. And while it's all soul-nourishing, it doesn't exactly pay the rent.

Realizing I have no professional goals to speak of is terrifying. Unlike my friends in the service industry, I don't want to open my own themed bar. I have a horror of amassing more student debt by going back to school, and I have no idea how professional journalists get paid unless they're Lewis Lapham. I feel adrift, aimless, and worst of all, boring.

Sometimes I daydream about living in one of those dystopian worlds where your profession is assigned to you at birth, or halfway through your bar mitzvah — I mean, those places have some downfalls, but at least people have some focus. I took a quiz online that suggested that my ability to innovate and direct might make me ideal for a job in fields like wedding planning or Chinese medicine, but somehow, those don't really jump-start my engine, you know?

So I dunno. I'm open to suggestions. My boyfriend just came into my office and asked me what I was working on; when I told him about this blog post, he said, "Well, you're a writer!" which is both deeply encouraging and also like, dude: blogging doesn't pay my bills. I need some ideas on how to pay my bills without completely losing my mind (and I think, to the eternal disappointment of my nine-year-old-self, that political analyst is pretty much out of the picture by now. Bummer).

Baby Baby

Kids have been on my mind lately. Friends of mine are starting to get pregnant (a few years behind the 20-something bracket, but I run with a pretty financially savvy crowd). I don't exactly feel that stereotypical baby-ache — supposedly, a longing feeling coming from somewhere near my uterus whenever a stroller wheels by. Instead, I find that I'm peering curiously inside the bassinets, wondering to myself, "What's it really like to have someone like you?"

I've been thinking a lot about it lately for a number of reasons: I'm in the midst of fertility tests, those aforementioned pregnant friends, and Jean Twenge's article in The Atlantic called "How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby." Presumably, the "you" in that title is intended generally, but I read the article as though it was going to personally deliver me some bad news. The article talked about a couple fertility cliffs — one at 27, so that ship's long since sailed, and another around 38 — and the how fertility-rate statistics are often manufactured from outdated or poorly interpreted evidence, and presented in a breathless catastrophe narrative that tells women of 35 their eggs are stale and their uterus is toxic. The article's counter-narrative was, perhaps, a little too rosy, but it was nice to have a reprieve from the usual discourse.

Of course, statistics about other women do nothing to assuage my personal anxieties. I have no idea if I'm running out of time, or if my levels are abundant. I don't know if my eggs are dumb, with Neanderthal brows and a tendency to miscarry. I don't know if it'll be easy to get pregnant because I've never tried; the fact that I've never had an accident or a scare makes me feel like less of a birth-control champion and more like something is awry.

And that's before the kid is even born! Then I have to worry about work-life balance, about keeping the romance with my partner alive, about money — always about money! — about what happens when our upstairs neighbours smoke, about playschool and which books to read them and food allergies. I want, fiercely, to be a mom, and to have a partner who wants to be a father; I also suffer from ambivalence about what I might lose when I become one. I know I'm not alone in this.

Tonight, I was buttonholed by a friend of mine who proclaimed that couples should be married for at least five years before they have kids. This was awkward, because this person is neither in a relationship nor a parent, and when I mentioned that a five-year window probably wasn't in the cards for me, became insistent. "You need to get your fights out," he said solemnly. I'm not convinced that crossing the five-year threshold puts a moratorium on conflict, but it's an interesting theory. I just don't have that kind of time.

These feelings aren't going to go away: as more and more of my friends become happily, easily, joyously pregnant, the more convinced I am that I'm part of the infertile minority. After all, someone has to take on that role. It's exhausting: trying to balance the knowledge of not-being-ready-now in so many ways (financially, in my relationship, possibly in my body, in my living arrangement) with that curiosity, burning ever brighter, about what's really inside all those baby carriages.

Iceland-Mind

I'm not going to lie: I have a travel bug. Not, like, Montezuma's revenge (gross!), but a real desire to get somewhere wild for a little while.

I haven't always been that way. I'm kind of a homebody, to be honest: I like to curl up in bed with a nice book and some gluten-free cookies. Maybe if I'm getting really wild, lunch at a previously untested restaurant will be on the books. I've never been one to dive off bridges, dance on the table, or run with the bulls.

However! Things change. A couple years ago, we went camping. Eight days in the wilderness, canoeing from site to site, getting eaten by blackflies and hissing "You have to tell me when you're going to switch sides with your paddle!" at each other. It was kind of horrible, to be honest: physically demanding, emotionally draining, and I felt left out of the tight-knit group who had organized it. Plus, did you know that there are spiders in the forest? Big ones? It was tremendously challenging.

But it's funny, because looking back on that trip, there are some shining moments. I learned how to canoe. Mark read aloud from his hard-boiled detective story as we listened, intent and exhausted, around a campfire. I had sex in a tent, like any good Canadian should. The risotto was delicious. The campsites were magical. And we made it out alive: my relationship with my boyfriend survived the trip, and I made it out relatively unscathed. Nobody got eaten by a bear.

It turns out that trying new things—even things that might make us uncomfortable—is a secret to happiness. I've been trying this approach in my life lately, and it's led to some interesting results. Keeping an open mind about the little things, wether it's trying a new flavour of ice cream or turning an unexplored corner on an evening walk, lets our brains discover new sources of pleasure. And while there is pleasure in the tried-and-true way of being, these new exercises are mental calisthenics, forcing me to pay attention—do I like this? Why or why not?—and pleasure often emerges as a result.

This extends to big-picture items as well. I read an article recently where the author considered the idea of putting his partner at the centre of his life. For people who have been together since their teens, this might be second nature, but for those of us who spent a good portion of our 20s on our own, it can be tough to shift from "me" to "us." It's scary to give up on being "right," to start asking "what's best for us?" instead of "how do I come out ahead in this?" But being conscious of the need for this shift, and working on stretching those us-muscles (m-us-cles?), is rewarding, even when it requires a mental backbend or an emotional time-out.

Since I'm trying new things in several aspects of my life, it makes sense to savour travel opportunities as well. Last summer's trip to Iceland created for me what I like to refer to as my "Iceland-mind:" that is, the feeling of freedom, joy, and support that comes when I'm doing something I really love. It comes when I'm cooking, or when I'm doing Nia. It comes when I'm walking with my boyfriend, or writing fiction. And  I want to create other "minds" to go with it. Maybe "Tokyo-mind" will be my busy, workaholic aspect, primed and attuned to do my most focused work. Maybe "San Francisco-mind" will nurture my hippie-ish side, where I talk freely and unabashedly about my co-housing dreams and attend desert raves. Who knows what other minds are out there, waiting to be discovered. I won't know until I try a few on for size.