A Whole New World

It's getting hot. Next week, we should hit the 100s for the first time this year; it's a couple of weeks later than last year, I should mention. As hot and yucky as it was last summer, it was a mild one, in terms of Austin weather. Even this year, our newish across-the-street neighbor has her windows open almost every day, but she's from Florida, which is even worse than Houston, which is apparently a lot worse than here. So I guess we should count our blessings on our sweaty little fingers.

We've been saving quite a bit of money staying home the past few months, but today we took our car in for $350 worth of stuff to have done, only to realize that our brakes are almost shot and whoever installed the rear tires stripped two of the bolts that hold the hub on, so they can't just sell us new tires... we need one new hub. So now we're looking at $1500 worth of stuff. That needs to be done, so we're sucking it up. But still. Saving money was fun while it lasted. (Losing more than that in our 401k wasn't fun, but that's not a "felt" loss the way that forking over money from the checking or savings accounts is. [That was a grammatically correct sentence, even though it sounds awkward.])

Yesterday, Mal mentioned that he wanted to go see the birds at the aquarium, because he was remembering one of them saying "Hello" to us and was convinced that the bird could full-on talk.

We looked it up today, and the Austin Aquarium just so happened to have reopened on Monday. I bought a Groupon (saved $11!) and we headed over, planning at first just to see how many people were there before making a decision about today.

Turns out there were only 2 other groups there; a largish family of maybe 6-8 folks, and a two-parent/one-kid family. We were never in the same room with another person the whole time we were at the aquarium. They've stopped the "interactive" things like feeding the lemurs and whatnot, but Mal doesn't like animals close-up in that way, anyway, so we've never tried that and didn't miss it. They also had the playground and the interactive floor game thing shut down, which we were expecting.

However.

Mal was freaked out the whole time and begged to leave on multiple occasions during our visit. We had a season pass last year, and while he never really enjoyed the tanks with the big old Texas river fish, he was pretty used to everything else. Today, he vacillated wildly between delight -- the birds! the new otters! the stingrays! -- and sheer terror -- the bearded dragon! the giant tortoise!

First, a few things have changed: The kangaroos are gone, and in their place are two other kinds of lemurs (the ones in the front are ring-tailed, and the new ones are black and white, and brown ruffed lemurs). They built a neat hollowed-out log slide and pond for the new otters, which cheeped at us but didn't feel like swimming when we were around.

There were a couple of added tanks of pretty colorful fish toward the end that I don't remember having been there before.

And they got a pair of toucans!

But back to Mal...

When we paid and walked into the first room, he saw the boat where the bearded dragon sits (and literally does nothing, because... lizard) and said, "I can't go in there!!" When I told him he could hold on to me and I'd stand between him and the display, he was equally chagrined because walking through on my other side would position him near the river fish. Fortunately, I was able to distract him with what I think is a pretty freaky eel, but which happens to look just like the eels from Super Mario Odyssey, so he was willing to look at the eel, and I subtly walked him around the displays he didn't want to see while he focused on that.

Mal did have fun in the stingray room, waving and saying "hi!" to the creatures who were used to having hordes of school children feeding them all day, and seemed energized by the company. But there was a fiberglass shark in this room, and Mal didn't want to walk over to see some coral because of it. He finally did, but I had to finesse that, too.

Posing. But also kind of freaked out by the pirate.

We went through the room with the koi and ducks, and Mal did pretty okay there until he noticed the giant tortoise. Granted, that thing weighs more than Malcolm does, but at least today he wasn't trying to climb the wall and escape like he was the last time we were there.

Mal did get to see the birds, and the one that usually says "hello" was not there. But one was very vocal, and would respond to us when we talked. Of course, it was LOUD. I explained to Mal that they have to be loud to communicate in a dense rainforest.

I also realized that I'd left the earphones in my car, and wasn't super pumped to remind him that those exist.

After he chatted with the birds for a few, he was ready to walk out... but then he saw the albino python. We've seen it MULTIPLE times, but this time, it was too much for him. He started yell crying and put his hand over his ears. I told him he could just walk quickly out of the room, and he said, "How about run?!"

He ran into the next and last room, then looked over to see a life-sized replica of a shark's jaw. He FREAKED OUT. It wad like in a horror movie when the protagonist just keeps running into things at every turn.

I had him look at the baby sharks before we left, because I never like for him to end an experience on a bad note. He said he was glad his younger cousin Chance likes "Baby Shark," and all seemed forgotten.

Until we got into the gift shop. He wanted to look around, then I pointed out to him a pretty big orangutan stuffy on the top shelf. He saw it, blanched, and announced, "We're getting out of here!"

So we did.

He's going to have to relearn how to interact with the world.

Cavities

Hey, so remember last year when Mal had a bunch of cavities and I freaked out and we didn't really do anything about them but up our cleaning game?

Yeah, they've progressed.

I went to a different dentist and while they were able to get x-rays (and only 1 was blurry!), they recommended the same thing: general anesthesia.

I don't like it any more now than I did in September, but: 1) I see how quickly that one tooth is deteriorating, and now one of the surface caries is an actual cavity (there's a difference; feel free to Google); 2) I feel zero anxiety about this office like I did the other one.

I'll be much happier at about 6:30 Monday morning when Mal's securely out and getting fixed up, but my normal parent nervousness about helping him transition to sleep with a scary, weird-smelling mask on his face is not the overwhelming panic and intuition to "STOP!" like it was at the other place.

Also: James made a decision in November to leave a job he'd only had 3 weeks for the job he has now, and I'm SO grateful. He was a contractor at the first job, and the insurance was prohibitively expensive through the tech recruiter.

We are so fortunate to have really good insurance with a low deductible. We are able to process the anesthesiologist through our health insurance, and even with a low $250 deductible after which we pay 10%, we've paid them $900!

The rest *should* be covered by dental, but I think there's a $1500 limit on that, and we might just exhaust our benefits for the year on this one thing. I guess the good news is we've hit Mal's deductible and half of our family deductible, and January's not even over yer.

So wish us luck on Monday! And NO MORE CAVITIES.

Dear 15-year-old me...

Hey, you. I know you're upset right now. Your first experience with a boyfriend just ended, and you're disappointed. I'm sorry. It really does suck. But before you start high school and before you begin a journey that will eat up so much of the next three decades of your life, I want to intervene. I want to assure you that there is another way. And, mostly, I want you to understand how much you can accomplish if you are willing to try to throw off the false messages with which our culture has been bombarding you since the day you were born.

I know something about you that maybe no one else knows. You hate your body. You feel monstrous and huge, completely "other" from even your closest friends. When you sit on the floor, cross-legged, reading notes at a sleepover, you notice how the flesh on your friend's leg doesn't round up at the calves like yours does. You see another friend wearing clothes that you think would look like a clown costume on you, and you're jealous that she can get away with picking anything from the thrift store shelves and it will look nice. You stand in front of your parents' vanity mirror and extend your belly as far as it will go. "I hate you," you tell yourself. "You're disgusting."

That, you will learn, many, MANY years from now, is called "internalized fatphobia." You have bought into the idea that fat people are lazy and gross. You are neither. Your self-talk is making it worse. First of all, isn't true; your future self will look at pictures of you at this time and be shocked at how someone so beautiful could feel so ugly. Secondly, even if it were true that you were exceptionally corpulent, science will bear out that genetics and puberty are the culprits and not your lack of motivation or appreciation of good food or any moral failure on your own part.

But every time you reinforce to yourself the message that you are somehow "less" because you do not meet some arbitrary standard of beauty, you make life worse for yourself.

You do not owe thinness to anyone. Not even yourself. You have believed a lie, and you will waste so much time and emotional energy powering this machine. Please don't. Please try to find the better way.

You don't realize it, but every time you indulge in self-hating fatphobia, you also make life worse for other women. Every time you judge yourself, you judge them, too. Either they're "thinner" than you and therefore an object of envy and resentment, or they're "fatter" than you and a source of judgmental feelings of relief and maybe even superiority.

Other women are not your competition. You don't have competition. This isn't a race or a game to be won. Living that way is isolating. Other women are your comrades. Don't you see how damaging this is to you all? You should all be on the same side. You should be about dismantling this world view, not continuing to prop it up.

Let me give this to you straight: Purposeful weight loss (through dieting and/or exercise) does not work in the long-term. Science has borne this out time and time again. Any program or study that promises or shows weight-loss only follows participants for two years. Within 5 years, 95% of people who lose weight have gained most if not all of it back. I'd cite multiple sources, but you do not have the internet like we do yet. Trust me, the future is great in this regard. You'll have access to so much information and so much validation. I just wish you could believe me in 1987.

Not only does purposeful weight loss not work, it backfires. Your body's metabolism slows down when you lose weight, and it stays slower. This means that the ultra-low-fat diet you will engage in from the time you're 20 until you're 23 will affect your ability to manage weight for the rest of your life. And again when you're 30 and lose weight "healthier." And 33. Every time, it will be harder. Every time, it will require more work. Every time, you'll have to expend more energy to work out and eat fewer and fewer calories. And you'll always gain it back. Always. Even when you keep it off for almost 7 years.

Health-wise, weight cycling like this puts a huge burden on your cardiovascular system. And repeated dieting interferes with your ability to listen to your body's hunger and satiety signals. It will further separate you from your social contacts, when you don't allow yourself to eat after a certain time of day, or when you check out of a conversation early because you cannot miss a workout or terror will ensue.

You're not going to believe this, but this is the most important thing: The best thing you can do for yourself at 15 is to rid yourself of the fatphobic attitudes the culture has given you, and then work on helping everyone else do it, too.

This is actually easier, and much more fulfilling, than hating and berating yourself. It's more productive than engaging in a mental and physical illness to make your body more appealing to yourself and others.

So... what if you do it? What if you manage to chip away at every lie you've ever believed about yourself and your body and decide to dedicate your energy to things like pursuing your passions? There is a two-pronged problem here, and you'll have addressed only one.

The second part is that, yeah, pretty much everyone in our culture has co-opted bigotry toward fat people. This will include men in whom you are interested, and who you want to be interested in you.

I wish you could just forget about dating for the next ten years, but I know you won't, so maybe you'll just take this to heart:

If any man claims to care about you but shows disdain toward your body, HE DOES NOT LOVE YOU. Love is not conditional. He might like your personality. He might find you humorous or think you have a beautiful face or feel like you might make a good partner. However, ultimately, he is selfish and foolish.

Your body is not a shell that holds you. Your body IS you. You are your body. Everything you do -- sleeping, talking, walking, laughing, watching a movie, singing -- EVERYTHING you do is enabled by your amazing body. It's not a shirt you can change to please someone else (though, for what it's worth, if someone doesn't like your shirt and thinks he can tell you to change it, he's probably not great for you, either).

If someone shows disdain for your body, END THE RELATIONSHIP. That might sound drastic, but it is absolutely necessary. There is no getting around or over it. If someone's feelings of affection for you are predicated on your body looking a certain way, that is not unconditional love, and you need to remove yourself from it.

I heard a podcast once (kind of like a radio program) where a woman was saying that she'd realized something about a man she was living with when she was engaging in disordered eating and exercise: He was probably the only person who knew how unraveled her life was, and not only did he not stop it, he encouraged her. He encouraged a woman he alleged to love to continually sacrifice her pleasure and ease (by passing up food she liked, by spending hours doing work-outs she hated, etc.) because her thinness was social currency to him. To put a finer point on it: He shows up with a hottie on his arm, and it make him look like a big deal. So she's doing all of this horrible labor just for him to glean the benefits. That's definitely not love. It's dysfunctional.

And if any man says, "I can't help it; I'm just not attracted to bigger women," then whatever. Good luck to him. He is a bigot, and you don't need that kind of person in your life.

Not at all incidentally, you, too, have that bigotry. It is death, and you need to cut it out immediately. Everyone, including yourself, yes, but EVERY SINGLE PERSON, deserves respect and the freedom to move and exist in the world without harassment regardless of how they look, of their size, of their abilities, of their health, or of anything. Every single person deserves to eat what they want, go where they want, wear what they want, and be who they are without anyone else's opinions being foisted on them. You have to take your thoughts captive and excise them. The phrase, "Do they even own a mirror?" should die on the vine long before it becomes a conscious thought. No one should do this to you. You cannot do it to others. Or yourself.

I'm writing you because I don't want you to look around at the great life you have 30 years from now and wonder how much further along you might be if you could trade those 300,000+ minutes (that's more than half a year!) you spent working out and the countless hours you meal-planned and obsessed over what you were going to eat, and how many calories it had, and how much fat, and when was your next free day, and how many candy corn could you manage in one day when you otherwise ate only dry spinach for doing something that would have made your life or the world at large a better place.

You will get to this place of freedom. It will be a hard-won battle, and, actually, it will be ongoing, as some of these dogmas die more slowly than others. But if you could just start on it now instead of after your second divorce (*wince* I KNOW), you could save yourself a lot of heartache and wasted time.

I know you don't cuss. I wish, just a little bit, that you did. Because instead of responding with silent and hidden hurt when someone judges you as unworthy due to your body type, I really wish you could just happily respond, "F*(4 that" and get on with your life without a second thought. Before you're middle-aged.

In retrospect,
46-year-old me

One Day More....

There was an article by a doctor chastising parents for not disciplining their children enough for him to do his job that made the rounds a few years ago. The guy described a young patient who wouldn't let the doctor examine him, and when the mom answered a question about how long the child had felt bad, said, "Shut up, Mom. You don't know anything." He went on to say "Open your mouth" shouldn't be posed as a question because it's not a request, it's a demand. 

I don't know whether this was a client he saw often, but I can think of plenty of reasons a sick kid (and maybe scared kid) would act like a jerk at the doctor's office. I get that it might be frustrating to deal with anything other than compliant kids. But I'd hate to have a doctor who introduced an article about how parents are failing by using an anecdote about my child.

This is what's on my mind as we look at Mal's first dentist appointment in the morning. We've been planning to get him in for a cleaning and to have his molars "painted" over to keep crud from settling into the folds, but we expedited the plan when I noticed a definite cavity in his lower back left molar this morning. He also has what I suspect is a cavity (or two?) "between" (on the insides of) his front two teeth. Neither of these seem to be causing him any pain, and I do not want to fill them. I'm hoping the dentist can clean out the cavity and tell us what to do to help it get better or at least not get worse.

But I'm on edge, because Mal fights our brushing his teeth every. single. time. He HATES it. And I think back to when he was super panicked before we went in to the water park, and told the girl, "Get that off of me!" when she put the armband on his ankle. He might freak out and not cooperate. He's going to be terrified.

The doctor who wrote that article would argue that it's my fault for coddling him, but honestly, what is a parent to do when faced with their child's abject and sincere fear? Scold them? Spank them? Continue to push on regardless of the trauma?

We tend to use the severity of the situation as our guide. If Mal had a nail stuck through his foot and didn't want the doctor to touch it, we'd of course restrain him and do what needed to be done. But when the stakes aren't that high, then there's time to ease a kid into something. I want him to trust me. I want him to know when I say, "We have to," it's because we actually HAVE to, and not because I want him to and it's embarrassing to me if he doesn't. 

Also, he usually relaxes, after a freak-out period, and goes along with things. But I let him have space to give full vent to his expressions of fear. They are legitimate. 

It's entirely possible that my child will cry through a dental cleaning and exam, but it's never going to be because I spanked, coerced, shamed, or threatened him. And that doctor can stick his opinions where his proctologist might find them.