Organization

I'm not an especially organized person. I like for things to be accessible, easy to get at and clean. I like to know 'I need this thing and it's right here' put my hand 'there' and grab that thing.

But I don't get bent out of shape if it isn't there - unless it's my car keys as I'm headed out the door for work.

So it's rather odd that I would have spent the last 3 days moving and organizing my craft supplies. I now have nice boxes labelled things like 'Ribbons' and 'Paint' and by god if I need a pink ribbon and a bottle of green paint I know where to find them. It feels good - oddly enough.

I say that because I was always the kid who shoved all of her stuff under the bed and into the closet on the day my mother decreed as 'room cleaning day'. Where my brother would grab the vacuum, a pile of rags, the Pledge and an empty garbage pail and spend all day cleaning, I would shove as much stuff as I could out of sight, run over the flat surfaces with the tail of my shirt and run for the door. How's that for role reversal? Aren't the girls supposed to be the tidy ones? That's what my parents always thought.

But I've always been out-of-the-box in some way or another. Back in my Wondering post (or more appropriately 'Wandering' LOL) I wondered how I got to be a 300 pound woman. Now I wonder if that out-of-the-box-ness of mine wasn't a contributing factor. What came first - the weight or the eccentricity? Was it cause and effect? Or did they develop independently of each other?

I love that my crafting area is now uber organized, it just doesn't look like it belongs in my house, or to this person. Great Goddess - could there be a 'normal' person lurking inside me? Crying to get out? Could this be her way of seeking to exert dominance? At some point in my early life was there just a nice, normal JAD - and I (the evil twin part of my nature) ate her? Is that how I got to be 300 pounds? Is that who's now living out my life?

I wonder...

Now I don't expect this post to resonate with anyone in particular - I just need to write it.

My little purple journal is starting to reveal more to me that merely the food that I put into my body. Even though that's all it contains - my daily list of foods eaten with their carb counts and on the back of some page or other the list of the the counts in the recipes I've made for the week - just the very act of writing this is making me aware of things that I never really thought about before.

I come from a very unusual family - father from a well-to-do (maybe - not really sure) German immigrant family. He fought in WWII, was overweight from the time he left the service, was a handsome, charming, selfish man who really didn't want to have kids. He could be fun : dancing around the living room and singing to Mitch Miller; he could be cold: 'you can't have a cookie - you're too fat' - and I never understood why he didn't love me. He said exactly once that he was proud of me - when I lost 160 pounds. Not one other time - ever.

My mother was from a poor Polish immigrant family. Gramma used to take in boarders to make ends meet. Mom was energetic, sometimes frenetic, loving to the point of possessiveness and I still believe bi-polar (never diagnosed). At a time when most women stayed home to take care of house and kids my mother worked 2 jobs. We're talking the 50's and 60's here folks - Boom Time. But there was no keeping my mother home - she had to go out.

My parents divorced - bitterly - when I was 12. 32 years of marriage.

And as I write in my little purple journal my list of foods that I've eaten that day I find myself reflecting on them and my life growing up. How did I get to this point? How did I go from a four-year-old that everyone thought was too skinny and was forced to eat to a 300 lb woman of 53?

Let's think about this a moment: 300 pounds. Actually now 285 - not bad considering that when I started I was 348... How does a baby who weighed 5 lb. 3 oz. at birth get to be such a size? My left leg weighs more than 5 pounds! How did it happen? What was the chain of events? What was the beginning... was there even a discrete beginning? If so how do I find it? How do I fix it?

I wonder....