Millennial Happenings

As mentioned, I have always battled my weight, and have always had a love/hate relationship with food. Looking back, I see how this ran in my family, with my Grandmother speaking of "sinning" when she ate certain foods, and Mother also struggling to lose weight and keep it off.

As I look back at teenage Ali, caught shoplifting and sitting on a bench looking so waif-like, her big blue eyes glaring at me from a pale, drawn face, I see the skinny person who was inside of me, struggling to come out. I realized in that moment how thin she had gotten, and I made mention of this fact to her. As with many observations I have made to her, about her, she shook her head and shrugged off my concern.

Later, when I had ironically lost 80 pounds, in 2008, and she had put on weight because she was with Henry and living what appeared to be a "normal life," we were able to share clothes. For about a year, and then she began to lose again, and I began to gain. For that one year though... things felt in sync. To me, anyway.

I do not mean to imply that Ali's teen and young adult years were miserable for us both. Certainly we had our good moments, and we always knew how to make one another laugh. There is no doubt though, there were struggles. Many times these were the plain and simple result of the two of us being so different.

After years of feeling oppressed and shut down, I was ready to spread my wings and fly, being open and free. However, Ali made it known that many of the things that made "me" me, needed to be hidden in order to respect her comfort level. This mainly centered around my belief in magic and my bisexuality. I distinctly remember having to remove my sexual orientation from my first Myspace way page back in ... oh, 2004 or 2005.

The same held true for politics. I hail from a liberal, progressive background myself and still hold these sort of views. Although Ali did not become more outspoken politically until more recent years, she still made it clear that this was not a discussion she wished to engage in. While she was not yet an announced Christian, she still had respect for my right to engage in alternative spiritual practices, she encouraged me to be discreet about it at the same time. So at least around my daughter and her friends and their families, I was underground.

I guess I funneled a lot of my frustration and desire to be free with myself into online "personas" ... and this was during the early to mid 2000s so there was a lot of new unexplored online territory. My being on the computer so much, between being a college student and conducting part of my social life online, probably helped distance myself even more from Ali and what she was going through at the time.

Once Ali came out of the closet and no longer lived right next door, with Henry, but with her new partner, our relationship changed again. Once more, I did not see her that much, and when I did, there was usually a reason. As I look back, I see that she lost weight once again very quickly. I attributed this to her being with a more slender partner, and perhaps money for food being leaner than it had been when she was more enmeshed in my life.

But yes, looking back she did lose the weight very quickly, in a matter of months. And has never been overweight again. It is true, she has achieved that thing that I always longed for but never attained, long-term, But she has suffered, oh how she has suffered in the quest, the drive, the addiction, to being thin. The price she has paid, has it been worth it for her? Only she could tell you that. I do know that I believed, at the point her severe health problems began, that she had HAD an eating disorder as a teen, and was now struggling to be healthy, while fighting digestive, emotional, and mental hurdles that resulted in irrevocable consequences.

Beginnings

When I look back at my children's lives, I see myself having this huge, wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I blew it.

For all of my children, but especially my oldest and youngest. I made choices that put them into danger. That created instability and fear within their hearts. That traumatized and shattered them, And really, it was all over what strong women around the world who know better now call "a stupid guy" ... and a stupid drug ... meth in a needle.

I chased the guy, well ... once he stopped chasing me, and caught me. You know how that typical tale goes. The quintessential bad boy who claimed to be my knight in shining armor. Turned out I went from one bad mistake to another when it came to men. I was severely co-dependent as well, thinking I needed to have someone in my life to validate me. And of course, he did not validate me. He was a classic, controlling, abusive type ... what I later learned in DV training is called the "Cobra."

At any rate, I wound up throwing away the opportunity to give my children the life they deserved and needed. I take ownership of that and sometimes feel as if I will always be punished on some level for failing them as I did. But in the context of this blog and how this all affected Ali in particular ...

Ali was so young when her father came out of drug treatment and moved back into the house, I want to say at age 2. Within 3 months of his return, he had relapsed and eventually convinced me to start using with him again as well. We started out smoking it this time, a control tactic that lasted about 2 months before we were slamming, and back into the whole rat race life that came with that.

Many stupid and pathetic choices later, we were living in hotels and on people's couches, always out of food, always without resources, always scrounging. People in and out of our lives, and having contact with our family, and having access to our home. It is true I did not personally make the worst of the choices, but I allowed them to happen. I may have been passive and gotten  swept along, but I chose to be that way.

Eventually the bottom fell out. He was arrested, I went to treatment, the younger kids were taken by CPS while my oldest son fell through the legal cracks. I divorced him, I got my kids back, and we all lived happily ever after.

Yeah right ...