When I lived in Chicago, my grandparents died in very close proximity. Collapsed by grief on the airplane home for their funerals, I remember feeling, really feeling, the texture of the seat and being surprised by it. Being comforted by it, by doing just this one thing, feeling the material.

Only in times of extreme grief did I give myself permission to live in the moment, back then.

I have a bad habit of cataloging all the tasks in every area of my life when my body is engaged in manual activities and my mind starts to wander. I've done it since the idea of homework was introduced in elementary school and I was shocked to learn I'd be responsible for something that needed to be done in the future of my own volition. I find it difficult to put off tasks that I know need to be done.

This summer, I'm focusing on feeling the texture of every piece of material. The sound of the wind rattling the leaves and the 17-year cicadas hissing in the treetops. Sunshine on my shoulders and the instant sweat evaporates when the wind picks up on my runs.

When I wake up in the morning (sometimes now drenched in sweat, thanks, perimenopause), I'm taking a least five minutes by my alarm clock to listen to the sounds of the house and find that floating place between sleep and wakefulness one last time.

Instead of listing in my head the tasks I need to accomplish each day, I'm trying to float, to prepare myself to be resilient to whatever might come my way instead of trying to head it off before it even happens.

I've always wanted to be that one zen guy in every trapped-on-a-desert-island movie who lies on the beach while everyone around him is freaking out even though they are all in the exact same situation. Now in my forties I'm realizing there is absolutely no reason why I can't be him.

I just have to make it so.

Yesterday on Twitter, a blogger who had read my Dr. Phil anorexia post tweeted to me. I went over to look at her blog and felt the familiar stomach drop when I read this:

A month ago, in Flagstaff, SB had a Subway sandwich for dinner Friday night and at lunch on Saturday she had a few of the sweet potato fries I'd ordered for the table. Yesterday, when it was suggested she needed to drink Gatorade to combat the recent dehydration that led to her fainting twice and being rehydrated in the E.R. this past Sunday, she cried. And said no.

As a mother, my stomach drops for the blogger. As a recovered anorexic, my stomach drops with muscle memory. 

I'm reading THE MATHEMATICIAN'S SHIVA by Stuart Rojstaczer. In a book within a book, the protagonist's mother writes about going with only a tiny bit of food a day in war-torn Russia. Her description of hunger is spot-on:

I want you to follow my instructions. Take your eyes off this page when I tell you to do. Look at the room around you. Wherever you are, simply open your eyes adn look, listen, smell and think whatever thoughts come your way ... Then imagine all of your awareness disappearing. Your eyes work, yes, but they don't see anything. Your brain won't let you process such information. The smells, they are gone, too. Your ears, they work simply to warn you of danger. Your thoughts, all of them are so uncomplicated and pure ... All is about the numbness inside you ... You are truly in hibernation. Everything has slowed, because any processing, physical or mental, requires energy, and that, if you are truly nutrient-deprived, is precisely what you don't possess.

When I read that, I remembered crying from hunger. And I also remembered crying from fear of what would happen if I ate, because the hunger was easier to tolerate than the fear. The space between those places is anorexia. I wrote about that motivation and that place in my young adult novel, THE OBVIOUS GAME. Writing about it forced me to go back and experience those feelings again, and it was no fun. However, it's important for those of us who are recovered and feeling brave to talk about life after an eating disorder, because when you're in it, you can't imagine life on the other side of it. I keep writing. I'm here. I'm on the other side. It blows my mind that I still get 2-3 emails a week from people who love someone with anorexia. They are desperate. They have no idea what to do with this thing they don't understand at all. They want me to tell them what to do. I can't totally do that. I'm not a psychologist or doctor. All I can do is try to explain how their loved one feels so they can support that person in the best way possible.

My new friend Jenn told me about the March Against ED next week (September 30) in Washington, DC. I wish I would've known about it earlier, because I think I would've tried to go. If it happens again next year, I will be there. There is so much misinformation about mental health in general, and anorexia is one of the few mental disorders you can see on a person, which I think contributes to even further misunderstanding, because you form opinions without knowing the person at all just by looking at them. 

I have a list of ED resources in my Young Adult category up in the masthead. I will be updating that list with some more from Jenn. I was never inpatient anywhere (I threatened to run away and I was 18) and I ended up recovering physically in college and mentally in my thirties. 

They were deep ruts in my brain. Deep, self-loathing ruts. Filling them in was the hardest thing I've ever done, and it's what I want for every disordered eater out there. It can be done.

I'm relieved to hear Jenn's daughter is in recovery. There are many other people whose sons and daughters aren't. I know. They email me. It's best if you catch it early. It's often comorbid with other mental illness and therefore hard to separate or identify. (Is she not eating because she's anxious? Is she counting her calories because she's OCD?) If you think there's a problem, it's better to err on the side of caution, just like you would if your kid suddenly sprouted an unexplained lump in her breast or a persistent ache in her teeth. Please don't assume what you see on television is real. It's not dramatic or romantic or disgusting. It's someone who is hurting really, really bad. Someone hungry in every sense of the word.

When the little angel was a baby, we lived in This Old House. If you're new here, you may not know that This Old House was a beautiful Arts & Crafts with a screened-in porch in the Waldo neighborhood of Kansas City. It was built in 1921. It had push-button light switches that sometimes threw sparks, it was not ducted for air conditioning (making my home office nearly unbearable in the summer) and it had decorative metal grates with holes big enough to pass my fist through, lovely as they were.

While in the throes of postpartum something, I became convinced that snakes could climb up through from the leaky, Silence-of-the-Lambs basement through the ductwork and slither out the very large grate holes into my daughter's bedroom. Every time I looked at those grates, I had to push the thoughts away, but it was hard. It was so hard. These thoughts, I now know, are called intrusive thoughts, and they are closely associated with anxiety disorder, OCD, eating disorders, and psychosis. I still have them from time to time, but they are much lessened after medication and meditation and all manner of my managing-my-anxiety-disorder daily rituals.

I feel a kinship with Stephen King. Here is a man who must suffer, as I do, from intrusive thoughts.

I first read PET SEMETARY in high school, and then I thought it was a horror novel. I've been rereading it this week, and I now understand it is a book about grief. A parent's grief.

I got the ebook copy, and there is a foreward in this version written by King in 2000, in which he admits something very similar to what happened to Gage in the book happened to his own son (almost) when his own son was two. He wrote:

"But a part of my mind has never escaped from that gruesome what if: Suppose I hadn't caught him? Or suppose he had fallen in the middle of the road instead of on the edge of it? I think you can see why I found the book which rose out of these incidents so distressing. I simply took existing elements and threw in that one terrible what if. Put another way, I found myself not just thinking the unthinkable, but writing it down."

What would King have done with my grate snakes?

And what is a parent to do with the fear that comes of losing a child through any manner of preventable horrors? What would we do, what lengths would we be willing to go, if we thought we could (fix them) protect them from everything?

When my girl was two, a co-worker told me about a little girl he knew who swallowed a great deal of water while learning to swim and dry-drowned. I didn't know such a thing existed, and I immediately suffered a solid week of nightmares and became terrified of letting my daughter in the water, even as I was insisting she learn to swim. This week, she's at horse camp learning to walk and trot and canter, even bareback, and each night as I lie in bed next to her as she drifts off to sleep, my mind tries to send pictures of all the awful accidents that happen in barns, even though I myself owned a horse for three years in my childhood and took almost exclusive rights to the hard and personal care of him, picking his hooves and brushing him without tying him up and walking carefully around his back away from the hooves that could go misplaced even though that dear, sweet horse would never hurt anyone intentionally. As much as I loved my horse, and as much as I love to swim, I've never lost a healthy respect for either large animals or water, as my brain easily produces full-on, Scorcese-directed mind movies of all the horrible ways to die dealing with either. 

I've learned at 40 that the best way to deal with intrusive thoughts is to bat them away like horseflies. Letting them rest even a minute allows them to bite and gather until the only way to break free is to flail in the most embarrassing and overwrought way when I can't take it for one more minute. I've had minor breakdowns from my intrusive thoughts probably a dozen times over the course of my life, and it's never been pretty. I'm not proud of how I've turned my fear into anger and stabbed out at those around me. I'm trying to learn to handle them better. My intrusive thoughts are merely the worst possible course of what if, and a life well lived is a life spent in the now, breathing deeply and remembering that no matter what, I can get through it, and it probably won't even happen. I can't worry about the bad thing happening until it does. The ironic thing is that sometimes when the bad thing happens, it's a relief, because there's no more anticipation of the bad thing; there's only dealing with it.

I think that I can make these decisions, because I have to in order to manage my anxiety disorder. The truth, though, is that our subsconscious minds decide things, and then our frontal lobes take credit for them. A study done in 2000 found:

Participants in the study were asked to make a decision about whether they would use their left hand or their right hand to press a lever.  By using fMRI scans of the brain’s activity, the researchers knew the participant’s decision by analysing the activity in the frontopolar cortex of the brain.  This information about the participant’s decision was available up to seven seconds before the participant had “made” a conscious decision.  The researchers used the information from the scans, to predict with success, the 36 participant’s decisions before they had consciously made them!

What does that mean for someone with intrusive thoughts? What is really more frightening than imagining you've lost the ability to control your own mind? In PET SEMETARY, as Louis Creed drives to his son's grave to do you-know-what, he thinks:

"He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None."

Because, of course, subconsciously he'd already decided to hop on the Micmac Indian train and ride it to the end of the line.

Brain research is fascinating, but it also brings into question the moral compass, free will and how easy it would be to slip into distressing thought patterns. I know, in my rational mind, and I'm sure I knew then, that it would be really hard if not impossible for a snake to climb up two stories of slick ductwork, and quite frankly, if a snake wanted to eat my baby, all it would have to do is climb the stairs. Heaven knows the basement door didn't really shut. That my brain conjured this elaborate lie out of turn-of-the-century grates still amazes me.

But then it doesn't.

Writers observe things, details. Details make the story interesting. But they also lead to the what ifs, and sometimes those thoughts are better off dead. 

In preparing to write this post honoring my friend and activist/entrepreneur, Katherine Stone of Postpartum Progress, I searched my gmail, which has also archived my old hotmail account, to see when we first found each other. I dug up an email from Katherine dated April 15, 2009, which would've been a few weeks after my daughter's fifth birthday and about a year after I started getting help and taking medication for my anxiety disorder. Katherine wrote:

This Mother's Day - Sunday, May 10 -- Postpartum Progress will host its first annual Mother's Day Rally for Moms' Mental Health.  Each hour, on the hour, for 24 hours straight I will post a different "Letter to New Moms" written by survivors of and experts on perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.

That email signified just one of Katherine's countless efforts to make moms suffering from mental illness feel more normal. I did write that post, and Katherine and I have written for one another on the subject of maternal mental health again and again, knowing we can prop each other and even strangers up over the miles with our voices. 

The first time I remember clearly having a long conversation with Katherine in person was at Type A Mom in 2010. She was a little intimidating with her long, red hair and tall, lanky self and these totally adorable sparkly heels, which she later said her kids bought her. The kids and the shoes stuck, because it's important to remember even people who present as physically beautiful and loomingly tall and effortlessly stylish are people with insecurities and doubts. It's easy to meet people at blogging conferences and think they are perfect, but nobody is perfect, and everyone has her struggles. Katherine embodies that dichotomy for me.

Here is this person who looks completely pulled together but who is so willing to share her pain in order to make the rest of us sitting around in our yoga pants and flipflops feel human again. For that, Katherine, I salute you.

Last year, while covering the Olympics at BlogHer, I had to come up with a group of bloggers who fought for their dreams, and the very first person I thought of was Katherine, who said:

I always felt I needed to do something meaningful with my life but continually struggled to figure out what it was. Then I was struck with postpartum depression and I had this gut reaction – the kind that nags at you that you can only ignore for so long until you must act – that I needed to help other women. It's hard to imagine something so awful could lead you to your avocation, but it pushed me toward focusing my life on being a voice for suffering pregnant and new mothers.

It's been my great pleasure and honor to watch Katherine over the years blossom and grow and fight to become the owner of the most widely-read blog on PPD in the world. Thank you, Katherine, for all that you do. You are amazing. Congratulations on ten years at Postpartum Progress.

There was a day last week when I thought I might crack in two. Something happened with the girl, something happened with me, and I was so stressed out I found myself in my garage with tears coursing down my face, knowing my husband and my daughter and my neighbors were waiting for me in their SUV, ready to take us out on their boat in a beautiful invitation to frolic on Blue Springs Lake.

I'm trying to pretend I am mentally healthy.

I'm trying to model a mother who knows how to deal.

Earlier that day, my girl dissolved into tears on the way to summer camp, and here I was, dissolving in tears in the garage. I wanted very badly to model self-control.

I forced myself into the neighbors' SUV wearing my sunglasses. Tears still streamed down my face, uncontrollable, but I just assumed no one would see because of my sunglasses. In my experience, most people don't actually pay attention unless you draw their attention to you.

At one point, my neighbor woman asked me a question, and I just nodded, too upset to speak.

I wanted to model someone under control, though, so I just sat there.

It was awkward, I admit.

My neighbors are wonderful human beings. They invited us out on the lake on a Tuesday night, and they had every intention of taking us, despite my obvious awkwardness. We got to the lake and backed the speedboat into the water, and upon seeing the expanse of blue I started to feel the tension ebb, just a bit.

"Rita, all you need is some HYDROTHERAPY," my neighbor man said. And he dropped in the boat.

For three hours, we played. We tubed, the little angel and I knocking against each other in two separate tubes, her face alight with glee. I waterskiied. The little angel and my husband got up on skis gripping the boom, their eyes wide, finally understanding what it feels like to flit like a waterbug across the surface of the water at high speeds. 

It feels like flying.

We swam, and we saw the two parent eagles and the two baby eagles calling SCREE SCREE SCREE across the sky to their nest. 

"Do we have time?" my daughter asked, looking to the water. 

"Yes, it's 8:15. Sunset's at 8:41," said my neighbor lady.

And as we pulled the boat back out of the water, I felt like a new person. "Thank you," I said. "Thank you for letting me shake off my mood. I almost didn't come because I didn't want to subject you to me tonight. Thank you, it worked, the hydrotherapy."

My neighbors grinned. They are happy, wonderful people. They are my parents' age. I want to be them when I grow up, logging their time on the water in a little notebook, telling stories of when they learned to barefoot ski.

I saw the sun set that night over the water. It was summertime, and none of the things I thought were so important mattered.

When we moved to Chateau Travolta in 2008, the housing market was on the verge of tanking. Then it tanked, and the For Sale signs started popping up like dandelions. Some of those houses took years to sell, which made me realize just how stupid it was to take on two mortgages at once when we sold This Old House to move here.

This week there are ladders all over my neighborhood, as the houses built in 1978 have begun to show their age. Shingles pushed well beyond their limits topple from  roofs. The boards on the sides of houses are torn away and replaced. The aluminium ladders sparkle in the May sunshine. 

As I jogged past a pile of boards pocked with bent nails, I started thinking about the kitchen remodel I've not blogged about. It's not that I'm not proud of it -- I am -- it's so pretty -- but I really only feel comfortable blogging home improvements we did with our own little hands, and though the demolition was difficult and Beloved has been moonlighting as a drywall installer, a plumber and an electrician for the past two months while I just took a crowbar and pried off floor tiles and anything else that pissed me off, for some reason, I just didn't want to blog about it because there were so many parts we paid someone else to do, and then for some reason that feels braggy in a way "look at the pocket door Beloved installed" doesn't. This may be justified only in my head. Or worrying about bragging in a Pinterest world may be ridiculous. Or I may be a huge hypocrite because I brag about my writing here (or at least that's what the About Me page feels like, but dude, I'm a professional writer, not a professional kitchen person). I'm conflicted, clearly.

Anyway, I was thinking about all that stuff while jogging by these piles of wood in my neighborhood and feeling so happy my neighbors were fixing up their houses instead of selling them. And feeling happy they had both the money and the desire to maintain their houses so they don't fall apart. And feeling happy and proud that we are taking care of Chateau Travolta and will leave it a better place than we found it. I wrote on BlogHer earlier this week about not toppling your blocks, and ever since then I've been really focused on how important it is to pay attention to your mind and body and environment and address problems right away, before they metastasize into something more. 

Maybe it came from growing up in a house my father built perched on the edge of land my family farmed. I like taking root, propping up and staying on. I'm glad my neighbors do, too. There is beauty in that. 

After my whinefest on Friday afternoon, I ended up falling asleep on the couch Friday night at around nine. But on Saturday, the babysitter came! And she hadn't been here since it was freezing cold! Even though she had hurt her back! And we thanked her and thanked her and toddled off to see Jimmy Buffett in the Power & Light district of Kansas City.

It was a gorgeous night, and the P&L was packed with an older crowd sporting grass skirts and hats shaped like flamingos, and everyone was happy. As Beloved and I sat listening to the cheesier songs by Jimmy, I found myself thinking how much I love him (though I really love his ballads more than Cheeseburger in Paradise).

Why do I love him when he drives so many people crazy?

Because he loves life. This is a guy who made an entire career of pointing out how nice it is to be outside when it's warm. How little you actually need in order to relax. How to live in the moment. When I was anorexic and cold all the time, I became a bit obsessed with Jimmy Buffett music, traveling in my head to a beach free of self-induced pressures and mental anguish and problems. When I was in college, I got a tattoo of a sun on my left foot so even if it wasn't in the sky I could still see it and think about what warmth and light means to me. 

Jimmy Buffett makes me go through my list of tastes and sensations that make me happy, things that are so easy to accomplish it's ridiculous. I love flowers. At Walmart right now, you can get a plant for less than a soda. I love the feeling of wind on the soles of my feet. All you need for that is a warm day. 

I needed old Jimmy so bad this weekend, and hearing all that old music pulled me out of my slump. He reminded me that as an adult, I have been true to my love of sunshine. I didn't wait for someday. I married my also-beach-loving husband in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Even as not-rich, family-in-the-Midwest people, we have managed to get air in our hair. We bought a bank foreclosure near water. We have Vicki, the 1997 Sebring convertible. We have a 1974 AMF Puffer sailboat we bought from my friend's dad for a dollar. We eat outside almost every night in the summertime.

I listened, Jimmy! I am reaching for the sunshine! Onward! (I'm barefoot.)

Hi everyone!

Yesterday I had a post go up on BlogHer about the sources of stress. Not sources of stress like deadlines and traffic jams and being out of orange juice at 7 am, but sources of stress in your brainz. Here's an excerpt:

That said, I've spent most of my stress-fighting career thinking about how tohandle stress rather than what caused it in the first place. Things are rough all over, Ponyboy. And I've blamed myself a lot for not being tougher.

I recently read Stress Less (for Women) by Thea Singer, a book that appeared in the mail for review. One passage struck me in particular -- one that talked about stress research being flipped on its head when researchers stopped thinking about stress or age atrophying parts of the brain and instead studied whether people who stressed more started out less equipped to deal with the stress in the first place:

The vulnerability hypothesis of stress -- that is, that a smaller hypocampus, whether due to genes or early exposure to stress -- can predispose you to the damaging effects of stress, rendering you more vulnerable to age-related memory loss and disorders such as PTSD.

There was good news at the end! Read the rest on BlogHer!

PS: Last night the little angel asked for a drink of water while in the bathtub. I handed her the crappy hot pink water bottle we got with Culver's points. She took one drink and gagged. Then she said, "I don't know why, but yesterday I put Goldfish crackers in here." I opened it and there were bloated Goldfish floating in two inches of tepid tap water. And then I threw up in my mouth. 

The pool opened last weekend. I thought I was ready to go with my new halter swimdress (shut up) and my sunscreen and my baseball hat. Sure, it had been a long, cold winter accompanied by many, many seasoned wedge fries, but last summer I even bared midriff a few times and felt fine about it.

Also, I haven't had a full-length mirror in my bedroom since last summer. And I never go use my daughter's. So I actually don't know what I look like unless I catch my reflection in a store window, which only happens when I am fully clothed.

Imagine my surprise when I went to use the bathroom at the pool and caught sight of my full-frontal while pulling up my swimming suit. The florescent lights bouncing off cinder block highlighted every lump and bump that was not there last year.

My stomach seized up, and I started to feel hot and tingly.

I manage the anxiety that once caused my eating disorder through a combination of medication, previous talk therapy, exercise, sleep and maintaining a certain weight window in which I feel comfortable with myself. I seem to have tipped over the edge of that window this winter, because as I stumbled back toward my seat, I felt shaky.

And that was when I saw her, my new mom friend -- adorable and tiny and right in the path. I stopped to talk to her and knew I was coming off normal, but the entire time I was talking to her I just wanted to wrap my body in a beach blanket and starve until I felt better. I felt like she could see all the flaws and was taking stock, even though she's a delightful person and why would she do that? Of course she wasn't doing that. But I felt it: the shame.

And I haven't felt like that in years. YEARS.

I walked back to my chair and sunk in. The tears started rolling out from under my sunglasses a few minutes later. Beloved said nice things, tried to make me feel better -- but I know he didn't realize how seriously I was melting down at that moment.

I sat there telling myself I'm 37. I don't need to look like a 24-year-old. I'm a perfectly acceptable 37-year-old. And isn't that sort of shallow, anyway? And haven't I been writing a novel about a protagonist overcoming ED and haven't I been crusading about ED and taking issue with NYT ballet critics ALL YEAR? WHAT THE FUCK, BRAIN?

I took deep breaths. I told myself fat isn't a feeling. And I realized it isn't. My feeling was anxiety -- a severe hit of it -- and I was focusing it on my thighs. I was telling myself that I was a lost cause because I didn't stop working out this winter -- in fact I worked out harder than I have in years -- so it was difficult to stop catastrophizing that exercise no longer worked for weight maintenance, and I would just end up growing and growing from here with no hope. (Because that is the fear that my ED brain wants me to believe.)

My rational brain -- the one in charge 99% of the time -- knows that there is no "always" ever in anything in life, and weight management is just another one of those things. You don't always look great, you don't always look bad. Nothing is absolute, and everything about humans is in a constant state of flux, from our glucose levels to our shoe sizes to our hair length to our weight.

But revisiting that feeling, that download of self-hatred, was really upsetting. It made me hot and then cold and shaky and angry and sad. Thankfully the little angel was in the pool and didn't see her mother crying while staring at her hips.

It's since passed. I am aware that one thing that keeps the wolves at bay for me is staying in that five-pound range of normal BMI that has my clothes fitting without panty lines and me passing full-length mirrors without doing a double-take. I've been more careful this week about what I put in my mouth. But I also know that some parts of it -- the gravity parts, the cellulite parts -- may not be fixable by a sensible diet and exercise program. They may be part of 37. They may be part of my genetic code. I may actually not be able to do anything about the redistribution of what used to be higher on my frame. And I'm going to have to accept that, pronto. I am not going to spend the second half of my life being controlled by that feeling the way I spent the first half.

I AM NOT.