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s i ever am no matter what my most recent meal consisted of and you re still you you re still my friend or my family member or my weird long time internet acquaintance who i ve never actually met in person no matter what you choose to eat or what activities you do or do not enjoy or how you dress or whether you are careful or reckless with your health that s what fat acceptance means for me and what it means for my relationship with you whoever you happen to be may 7 2009 at 9 36 am 10 comments trapped in brain send help that s the message all my various ideas would send if y know they suddenly had the ability to communicate without my assistance of course if they could communicate without my assistance then they wouldn t be trapped they would be free to get out into the world without me no i am not high i m just kind of in some weird headspace right now nothing bad particularly just weird i get all these ideas in my head some of them inspired by things i ve seen or read or done and i want to get them out there see what other people think but then i don t have the time or energy to do any of these ideas the justice they deserve and so i wind up with this accelerating maelstrom of ideas swirling through my mind which in some ways is kind of interesting because sometimes idea a and idea c bump into each other and i realize they inter relate in some way and now i ve got idea j in there too and i m the sort who can t help but find new ideas exciting even if i don t really have the mental space to contain them so at least for now i m going to kind of put some summaries out there and maybe some of y all can tell me what you think among the ideas i recently joined facebook and have discovered a whole new challenge to my personal journey of acceptance because suddenly i have reconnected with people i knew in high school and college and many of them i m very happy to be in touch with again but i m looking at people s photos and realizing that while most of us have gained a bit of weight as we ve aged everyone else seems to have gained 10 40 pounds i ve gained like 100 and suddenly i find myself feeling self conscious about my body again when i hadn t for a very long time my kids received wall e on dvd for christmas it got lost for a while but they recently rediscovered it so it s been on maximum rotation here at chez thornacious and once again i am reminded of the post i started about the movie s treatement of fat people back when the fatosphere was buzzing about it but never finished and the follow up post to that one about the sexism and rape culture y icky aspects of the movie and then i was visiting a friend who has a couple of grade school age kids who were watching the movie and suddenly i had a whole new perspective on the movie s treatment of fat people and so i want to write about that now too sigh oh and also there s the sidebar comparing wall e to another popular movie from a few years ago which i would love to write about at length as well as a mother of multiples and particularly as a mother of multiples who spent some time on food stamps and wic i e welfare i ve been deeply troubled by the coverage of the woman in california who recently gave birth to octuplets thankfully melissa over at shakesville summed up my initial thoughts pretty adequately however as the media uproar has continued i am just more and more appalled by how nadya suleman is being treated and what it says about how all women are treated in this culture the very idea that anyone can be shocked that this poor woman is now receiving death threats after our liberal media gleefully printed stories like this one from the associated press taxpayers may have to cover octuplet mom s costs is absurd to me i don t have to think another woman s decisions are right or even smart to recognize that it s not my place to dictate or judge her life i have been sorely disappointed to hear so many other people including a great many feminists who apparently disagree further i find it alarming how many people in particular people who tend to be anti abortion feel no compunctions about suggesting we throw these children under the bus simply because they don t like the decisions the children s mother has made which has led me to other thoughts on the order of how our culture speaking of the u s though i know many other cultures are similar thinks the notion of imprisoning a child for the crimes of his or her father is barbaric yet too many don t even flinch at the idea of children in our own country being denied a decent way of life fresh healthy foods safe places to play a good education because of the social crimes of their mother poverty single parenthood being the wrong race religion ethnicity etc i recently discovered some old emails and in re reading them i was surprised to find proof that i really have made more progress in my self acceptance journey than i had previously thought well my whole new facebook related issues aside of course there brain i hope this clears a bit of space for you and you can stop getting all freaky whenever i try to lie down and get some damn sleep readers i hope you find this interesting even if only in a strange glimpse into how thorn s brain works kinda way as a final note it s valentine s day which as far as i m concerned is just an excuse to eat red and pink frosted cookies heart shape optional however if you ve a mind to go out and do something to celebrate the day please consider supporting what i like to call the pink chaddi campaign by going to a local pub and raising a glass to women s freedom everywhere february 14 2009 at 2 33 pm 4 comments misadventures in shopping so i had this hilariously stupid moment the other day i was out with mr thornacious and the kids shopping some of the crazy ass post christmas sales with our gifts from the treasury santa and so we were at the lands end inlet nearby and there were a ton of just great sweaters on sale and i found a bunch in my size and scurried off to the changing room to try them on and realized while they all fit they also all looked like crap on me sigh it s a weird thing for me for all that i feel like i m doing fairly well at the whole accepting my body and coming to peace with it i ve never had a real sense of what my body actually looks like and so every so often it s like i get all stupid and forget important little details like i have no neck no really i have big tits broad shoulders and no freakin neck to speak of i look like a really short bosomy linebacker and i m cool with that generally speaking and over the past few years i ve kind of figured out what works on me and what doesn t but every so often i get all stupid and decide to try on three sweaters in a row with turtlenecks or mock turtlenecks and then i wonder why these sweaters that fit nicely and are in my colors and were totally discounted look like crap on me shockingly it turns out my neck hasn t grown a couple inches in the past few years so now i m wondering does everyone sometimes just get all lost in the excitement of a good sale and cute stuff in their size and forget that look abc or style xyz just does not work on them really i m asking here because unlike a lot of parents my mom spent a lot of my teen years trying to convince me to wear makeup and trying to convince me to do more with my hair and so because of course i had to rebel i went the other way no makeup hair that got combed out of the shower and ignored and a wardrobe made up of four shades of black and not cool gothy black either that was after my time so now i m a 35 year old woman who is still figuring out how to dress herself and i just want to know is it like this for everyone else or is it just me january 2 2009 at 2 45 am 12 comments success vs failure so it s christmas and i just had an odd sort of moment when a lot of little things all came together into something bigger i m sure there s a word for that but i m a little too wacked out on decongestants and scary antibiotics to think of it right now please forgive me anyway so the day has ended with both my 4 year old boys weeping themselves to sleep one of them after melting down like something out of a 70s disaster movie and as i cuddled young mr chernobyl letting him sob into my shirt and trying to reassure him that everything would be fine i had a strange sort of thought it went like this i bet a lot of parents out there would see christmas day ending in a flood of tears and call the day a failure certainly i can recall christmases from my childhood when my sister or i would flip out under the pressure of all that excitement and my parents would seem well not just frustrated but actually hurt by our outbursts and looking back i sure understand why they d worked their butts off finding all the right presents keeping them hidden wrapping them up getting the tree up baking the cookies and all those other christmas traditions and chances are money had been tight or relationships had been strained or work hadn t been going well which can make those traditions seem more like obligations sometimes so they d worked their butts off all in the hopes of achieving this picture perfect christmas day children smiling and well behaved and nicely dressed everyone thrilled to pieces with their gifts all the food delicious and perfectly cooked baked served the tree gorgeous etc etc and to have a kid melt down in the middle of it wailing about something dumb like a cookie falling on the floor and never mind the plate full of perfectly good cookies just like it it was the last one with green and red sugar on it and that made it special well i m sure it must have felt like a kick in the teeth to my folks so i thought of this as i held my weeping son and realized that despite the weeping i was calling the day a success both boys loved the presents santa had brought them both boys loved the gifts grandpa had shipped to us they played with their new toys all day mr thorn cooked a delicious simple dinner and everything had worked out just fine had the boys fought like weasels in a sack over one of the toys we d thought they would be able to share well yep they sure had and had they screamed blue murder when we told them it was time to eat dinner yep they sure did but i still call the day a success and i realized that just like fat acceptance it all comes down to realistic expectations would it have been nice if my kids hadn t fought once today would it have been nice if i hadn t been hang dog sick for two days before christmas would it have been nice if the day had not ended in young boys sobbing over nothing sure but actually expecting all that that s like the parenting equivalent of the fantasy of being thin and just like the fobt those kinds of unrealistic expectations make us unable to see the successes in our lives when they do occur instead of seeing the wonderful things in our lives as wonderful the fobt creates this idea that nothing we do can be counted as a success until we are thin how many times have we fatties downplayed our accomplishments because we didn t want attention for them until we were thin the fobt says it s not enough just to win an award or earn a degree or whatever you have to do it and look like a supermodel at the awards ceremony otherwise it just doesn t count i remember back before my kids came along and made me a sahm for a few years that the question i used to hate the absolute most in job interviews was what do you think is your greatest accomplishment y all i never had an answer never once i actually told an interviewer that my greatest accomplishment to that point was surviving to the ripe old age of 24 i wish i was kidding now having discarded my old fobt i look back on my life to that point and see lots of great things i d done i wrote an article for my local newspaper while in high school i d spent several summers as a counselor at a girl scout camp where my duties included facing off with raccoons gnawing on campers luggage i d canoed down rivers small slow ones but rivers just the same i d been the chief copy editor of my college newspaper i d competed in a slew of outdoorsy things and won a few of them y all i had cooked bacon in a shovel over an open fire and not only were there no catastrophes but that bacon was goooood but i d never been thin doing any of those things and so those accomplishments they just never seemed to count and so interviewers would ask me what achievement i was most proud of and i d just gape at them and feel like the world s biggest failure because the fobt told me that until i was thin i could never succeed at anything even things that should have been unequivocal successes until i was thin they fell onto the failure side of my tally sheet so tonight as i counted my not perfect christmas day as a success i realized that it comes down to the same thing having realistic expectations it s about deciding that good enough is actually y know good enough i had a good christmas regardless of the imperfections and i learned some things about my kids and myself and mr thorn and i talked about what we might like to try to make next year even more enjoyable note not better in some freaky competitive christmasing kind of way but actually more relaxed and y know enjoyable and i found another reason to be glad that i ve learned to make peace with myself and another reason to be grateful for fa and the fa community i lurk even if i don t comment much which kind of makes it a pretty great christmas all in all whether you celebrate christmas or not i hope everyone had a good enough day today cheers y all december 25 2008 at 11 09 pm 5 comments brief update hey y all i know i haven t updated in forever life has been complicated basically i m dealing with my twins starting preschool and being given an educational label of autism which is not the same thing as an autism diagnosis from say a medical professional however there is a strong correlation between the two at the very least we re dealing with pervasive developmental delay pdd and i have evaluations for them scheduled to see if they really do fall on the autism spectrum and if so where and what do we do with that information whatever it may be the kiddos are going to preschool on alternate days right now which seems to be working out well for them and well for the school staff and pretty much great for everyone but the mom that d be me who was kind of counting on preschool representing little patches of me time on a regular basis for the first time in four years granted i m pleased as punch at the boys progress and am glad as anything that they seem to be finally settling in well at their preschool and i m getting to know their special ed teacher and their occupational therapist and their speech therapist and they all are seeming to be good people with a lot of creativity and knowledge to bring forth on behalf of my kiddos so that is an unmitigated good but dudes i am more exhausted than i ha...
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