Happy AND Sad

Last year, when Matthew was gaining so much weight, I began to be very concerned about what was in store for him socially. Middle school can be brutal anyway, but for an overweight child...it can be unbearable.

He only recently let on that he is being teased these days: on the bus, in the halls at school, at swim practice. Good god. When I let myself feel it, it hurts so bad. But I have to let myself feel it, cry even, if I'm going to get the emotional energy and clarity I need to do something about it.

I believe that you have to feel all the emotional impact of something that has impacted you. Your energy gets extremely restrained if, for instance, you've been hit by a train and you go around pretending that you haven't been hit by a train. And if you're upset about something that's happening to your child, and you don't acknowledge how it makes you feel, it can make you very tense and anxious around your child, which adds to his own stress. I have to have the courage to feel, and teach my children to do the same.

And the teasing - it makes him want to eat more. Now that I'm extremely sad, let me back up to explain the one bit of happy news.

When Matthew was 7, the week before his first swim team practice, we went swimming and I showed him what "freestyle" swimming was, and had him try a few strokes. Two weeks later, he got his first blue ribbon in a swim meet. The kid can swim fast. He's had success during all these summer swim seasons, even as he's gained weight.

So this fall, we decided to enroll him in year-round competitive swimming. He goes to practice three times a week, and each practice is nearly three hours long and involves dryland cardio and weight lifting as well. He's liked it, but not as much as I thought. Then he finally admitted the other kids on the team tease him. Swim meets are optional in the age group he's in, but Bob and I decided to push him and have him swim in the meet Saturday. He didn't want to. But he did it and he came in first place in his heat in the 100-yard butterfly and second in the 100-yard freestyle. We were thrilled. He was thrilled.

His coach shook his hand and said, "It's good to see you smile for once."

Talk about happy and sad. I was so happy to see how happy he was. And so sad to realize that Matthew, the kid most known (until he hit 12) for his huge smile, was not smiling lately.

I pray that we can build on the swimming.

It sounds like two really fortunate things happened in your family, Jan: Sadie choosing to join swim team and Callie being asked to keep a food journal. If naturally-thin Callie is the one who's been assigned to do that, and the whole family participates in some fashion, then Sadie doesn't have to feel singled out at all if she's asked to participate.

I've been thinking about a scene from a movie we saw (part of) last week. The parents are recently divorced, there are two girls - 8 and 6 I think, and the mom is seeing someone new. The new boyfriend is a fitness nut, and he's trying to help the 8 year-old, a little chubby, with her diet and exercise. The dad comes over and has a righteous fit about it. To paraphrase his reaction, it's something like this: How dare you make her self conscious about this!? She's only 8!

Emotionally I was totally on his side. His anger came from genuine love and concern for her feelings. So it's complicated, because on this blog I'm advocating for taking conscious steps if a child is heading for obesity. And I'm advocating for that because in our household the problem got away from us, and by 11/12 years old our son was very overweight and the effects on his life were making him really unhappy.

I guess the middle ground is for the parent, who like the father in the movie is motivated by unconditional love and a desire to protect the child's sense of self, to help the child out. And what I've learned is that to be conscious about it and actually talk about it doesn't damage the child like I thought it would. Like it would have for me as a child because any parental "help" that came my way was more...rejecting.

Which leads me to how we're doing around here. I've noticed in the last week, as the weather's getting a little cooler, that I've wanted to pig out in a way I haven't since I started this new way of eating in July. But I haven't gained any weight because I've been eating, for instance, nearly a whole bag of fat-free pretzels at a time. While watching Project Runway or something.

So I'm going to address what's going on for me that's making me do that, but it's not a huge problem because of the food I've been pigging out with. I've noticed that Matthew, too, loves to eat and eat. He's always been a cereal afficionado. But now he eats Special K with fat free milk. My dilemma has been whether I need to say something if I see him eating bowl after bowl. It's so hard for me to stop the policing, but I have to. He put on a few pounds over the last few weeks, but now he's taking control again. I'll tell more about how he's done that and how I've tried to stop myself from policing and replaced those kinds of messages with supportive cues that help him with his own goals in my next post.

How is Sadie liking swimming? Matthew's swim practice is two hours long, includes "dry land" training (usually running) as well as swimming, and he comes home totally wiped out but with a sense of achievement. It's been very good.