Welcome to this week's Wednesdays with Wendy!
Wednesdays With Wendy: Being a Mom With Eating Issues
by Wendy Bradford
This week I wrote on my own blog
about needing to put down my phone and step away from my laptop—because
my kids have begun telling me to do so. I knew I needed to make some
painful changes. Over the 24 hours that I had decided to remove my phone
from my face, and not run to the laptop the minute we walked in the
door from the playground, I got a taste of how difficult this will be—my
hand kept moving to my phone in my pocket; I was anxious not be able to
check social media having posted something earlier that day; a peak at
the time became a scroll through Facebook that I didn’t intend. It is
clear to me I have a problem seeking distraction from my thoughts and
feelings—and importantly, I’ve had the time to think about why this is
so.
In my twenties and thirties, I spent time in treatment and recovery for eating disorders, which I’ve also written about here.
I have a long history of obsessive compulsive disordered behavior
around other issues as well. It is all related, I believe strongly, to a
painful need for control and a profound fear of all that we cannot.
There is a saying among addicts that we have trouble with “life on
life’s terms.”
This is because life’s terms are often awful. Or
at best, are unpredictable. Peaceful living, meditative living,
conscious living all happen “in the moment.” That, we learn, is the key
to being happy. And I agree. But we are not built to live in the
moment—we plan our lives as if we have many moments ahead of us, don’t
we? If we believed our happinesses, our marriages, our families had
numbers on their days we wouldn’t bother with the hard work of it all.
Yet they have invisible stamps. We cannot stop it, know it, control or
change any of it. And this, for people like me—prone to distraction and
addiction, in need of relief from the anxiety of living—is the hardest
business of life.
Sitting with my children at a local restaurant
for dinner last night, a time I would have been checking my phone, or
posting cute pictures to Instagram, I felt the intensity of our
family—the sharing of French fries, the coloring of underwater scenes on
the white paper covering the table, the exhaustive giggling over making
bubbles in water. That too is life’s terms. I have trouble with the
good parts too. Walking to school with my five-year-old twins, being
peppered with questions from my son about how cement is made, where
water comes from, how construction workers get all the dirt, is life’s
terms. Returning from that walk to read of another mother burying her three year old, is life’s terms.
I
don’t know why social media or the numbing action of switching among
websites help to keep my thoughts—the hard thoughts—far enough away, but
they do momentarily. And as I go through other people’s pictures and
comments on my phone, and my kids are asking me to play games or “who is
that?” or “can I have something to eat?” I get angry with them for
piercing my numbness. I push back at not only all the things that have
to get done—dishes, dinner, homework help—but at having deal with life’s
terms that, while captured at a safe distance in friends’ online posts
and photographs, are waiting in my children’s impatient faces.
Not
everyone has to put down his or her phone; I don’t think parents should
never look at their phones while they are with their kids. I am seeing
though, that I need to put some tough rules into place: I have a
difficult time enjoying life because of my anxiety—and my phone is too
easy and too cheap a way out of that anxiety, and away from my children
in front of me.
