This temptation

Not ten minutes after I wrote that previous post, my very very favorite cake showed up in the staff room. Strawberry, angel food, and whipped cream frosting. Poked my finger into the frosting a bit and had a tiny taste and walked on by. TESTED. PASSED.

This Relapse

So things got hard. I went into foreclosure, got out again. Lost my bear to various types of illness for a while, got her back again. I got sick myself, with a bad cold, still am.  And in the midst of all of that, like so many other addicts, I said Fuck It.  I said everything to myself that I've heard from the other side of my desk a thousand and one times: It was just too much. I couldn't keep it all together and stay straight at the same time.  Etc. I made all the excuses and gave myself all kinds of permissions.  I haven't even bothered to weigh myself in weeks, though I know the damage is likely not as bad as I fear it is.  I'm still in between a size 40 and 42. I can still turn back before I fall further.  I tell my clients that relapse is a part of recovery, that you shouldn't punish yourself for it, you should just learn from it and move forward, move on, let it be part of yesterday rather than today. Just live in today as best you can, and say that just for now, just for this meal, just for today, you'll stay on your program.  My dad never could do that.  He never could forgive himself, for anything really, ever.  If I learned about being hard on myself from anyone, it wasn't just from my mom who drip fed (and drip feeds, current tense, whenever I let her) the ammo, it was from my dad, who fed me the habit of self flagellation through food, all by example.  He didn't mean to, any more than I think my mom means to be, well, mean.  He taught me to be forgiving for everyone, for everything, to a fault even, except when it came down to where the buck stops.  He taught me about responsibility, but never about how to put it down carefully without breaking it or give it to someone else when I was tired.  Responsibility was not something to be proud of or to celebrate, it was something like a hair shirt, but worse than that, because you were supposed to want it, because you deserved it.  As in, thank you sir may I have another kind of deserving.  He had a very Catholic way of looking at responsibility and guilt, see, Jews  usually just live with it in an almost cheerful way, they love their guilt, they cherish it. But dad, he carried it like a big damn cross, always living in effervescent fear that he wouldn't live up to his own expectations or those of his wife or kid.  He did so many things he didn't want to to assuage that fear, and I know he never wanted that for me.  When I felt like I failed at supporting my family, I started punishing myself in the only way I knew how, which brings me to today.  This is not, by the way, a testimony about a diet that'll "start tomorrow and for reals this time."  This is not a promise of abstinence and sobriety forever and ever amen.  This is just an assertion that for now, for the rest of today, I look at what I eat and I count my points. Just for today. As for tomorrow, well, fucked if I know, I'll have to see what I end up writing here then.