I've been struggling mightily.
This time of year just pushes all my grief buttons. I miss my grandparents. I miss my mother. I keep dreaming of my childhood home. Memories of holiday dinners.
All the adults who sat around that table are dead now.
"Stuffing down" or "stuffing it down" are terms used in weight management programs to describe the desire to avoid unpleasant feelings by eating. Painful feelings come up, and eating acts as an emotional distraction and a physical sedative that lets you zone out from feelings those emotions for as long as the food lasts. But of course it creates a vicious circle--hard emotions lead to over indulging which leads to feeling worse and eating even more. Where does it stop?
Welcome, fellow travelers on the grief journey
and a special welcome to anyone new to The Grieving Room.
We meet every Monday evening.
Whether your loss is recent, or many years ago;
whether you've lost a person, or a pet;
or even if the person you're "mourning" is still alive,
("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time),
you can come to this diary and say whatever you need to say.
We can't solve each other's problems,
but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
Unlike a private journal
here, you know: your words are read by people who
have been through their own hell.
There's no need to pretty it up or tone it down..
It just is.
I wrote elsewhere about missing my mother's holiday cookies and fudge. I bought everything to make the cookies but haven't tried to bake them yet. I'm torn between feeling a compulsion to recreate that taste of past love and presence and wanting to stay on my eating plan. Holding on to those healthy habits is an act of self-love that takes more psychic energy than I can muster right now. Emotionally I am just wrung out like a dish rag.
So I can't tell whether the cookies would be a pleasant experience or would just add to my blue funk as I worry about the calories. I have spent years trying to separate eating from emotional states like grief that cannot be resolved by eating. But I am feeling so bereft these days I just want something, anything, to be soothing. For even a little while. It certainly does not help that at this time of year there are so many holiday treats around. And so I eat and feel even more defeated and lost.
I hope to wake up tomorrow with a better attitude, and set aside the horrible memories of the New Year's Eve right before my mother died, when a "mean nurse" accused me (!) of causing the bedsores mom acquired in her first 48 hours at that horrible facility. That memory is almost harder than the memory of the day she died, because at least the day she died she found peace and an end to her pain and suffering.
Until I can feel the crush of grief and loneliness and anger and not respond with eating I will never get any better, because there is always some grief anniversary or other trigger ready to be used as an excuse to self-medicate.
But I can't today. I just can't. Forgive me. I am too weak to fight.