Is it 5:00 PM yet?

I hate working on days like this where I just want the clock to speed up so I can hurry and get on with things.  My office-mate is already off for HER holidays (and she's coming back the day after me too-not that I'm keeping track or anything).  How can it only be 10:30 AM?  Ugh!

I really love Christmas, but I think it might be making me a little crazy.  How's that, you ask?  Well, here's the deal.  In my mind the Christmas season has come and gone and I haven't had the chance to enjoy it yet.  I've been too busy working.  I wanted to take it easy, but work got busier and busier.  Yes, I've done some Christmas stuff, but it doesn't really feel like Christmas when I'm sitting in my office.  So it will all be over in just a few hours and I feel like I haven't had a chance to enjoy it yet.  It hasn't even happened and I think I've already missed it.

See!  I told you.  Crazy.

I wonder how many other things in life I do this with.  I know it happens every time I take a vacation.  I spend the whole week thinking that I wish I had more time, that I don't want to go back to work, that I have so much I should be doing and that I need more free time.  How much of my life do I treat as if it has already happened because I'm afraid of missing it?

Part of my complaint is legitimate.  I do work a lot.  I know I'm lucky to have a job (two of them actually).  Although my kids' dad is in the picture, I am the one who does the lion's share of the childcare.  My fella, their dad, is working quite sporadically right now.  His employment has been tenuous for a long time.  He didn't work at all in 2010.  At one point this year he had three jobs, but was still only working about 25 hours a week and that only lasted a month or so.  It drives me crazy to go off to work day after day when I know that my "partner" isn't putting in the same effort.  Right now he is teaching himself to make cheese.  Fucking cheese!  I don't have enough free time to pluck my eyebrows and he's making CHEESE!

I didn't intend this post to turn into a rant about that.  Ignore the previous paragraph.  All I wanted to say was that I am somewhat justified in feeling a little resentful about spending all my waking hours working, but that doesn't explain why I am already feeling the post-holiday melancholia set in on December 23rd!

Is it because I know that nothing ever really lives up to the hype?  Christmas, no matter how wonderful, is still just a day like any other.

And you want to know what else?  Losing all the weight is the same thing.

Do you fantasize about how life will be when you finally lose the weight?  I know I sure did.  Of course I knew intellectually that losing weight wouldn't make life perfect, but I didn't really think about how difficult it would sometimes be to maintain the weight loss.  I should have since I have lost weight before and always gained it back and then some, but I guess I thought it would be easier after surgery.

And the fact is that it is easier sometimes, but sometimes it is quite hard and I just want to throw up my hands and eat peppermint bark and sugar cookies like I used to.  I used to be able to eat and I wouldn't even think.  Eating was a way of tuning out all the thoughts.  For the few minutes that I spent putting food in my mouth, I could permit myself to have as much as I wanted.  I could pretend there were no consequences.  I sometimes still overeat unplanned things, but it just isn't the same.

I feel fat.   I thought those days were over.  A couple of weeks ago I looked at myself in the mirror and I like what I saw.  Now I feel like my pants are cutting into my skin.  I gained two pounds.  I have been careful with my food since I saw the two pound gain on the scale.  I weighed myself again and I was up another pound!  I think it is because I am ovulating, but what if I really gained even more?  Ugh!  I hoped to never see 170 on the scale again and there it was.  In truth I deserved the two pound gain.  I was eating between meals and not being careful with food choices at all, but I thought after a week of carefully logging my food, I'd see a loss.  Probably not the whole two pounds, but some of it.  So I feel fat and suddenly I'm afraid of re-gaining all the weight.  I feel like it isn't within my control at all, which of course is absurd, but there you go.

Did I really think that once I hit goal I would effortlessly maintain the loss for the rest of my life?  Worse, did I think I'd then be able to eat whatever I wanted without worrying about re-gaining the weight?

I don't know.

So I'm watching the clock.  It is 11:05 AM now.  I'm wishing to be somewhere else, wishing I wasn't working.   I'll be on vacation next week.  I will have to work a bit, but I hope to get some R&R time too.  I wanted to have some R&R time with food, I guess.  I didn't want to feel all freaked out about food going into the holiday.  I wanted to feel confident and self-assured like I normally do so I can make good food choices and have a little guilt-free splurge here and there.