My story...

flitabout

I will tell you now it will be a long one...

I was not a fat kid. I wasn't even considered chubby. But the most hurtful thing you can say to a child is to call them fat. My family had two nicknames for me that I still find horrifying to this day bubble butt and thunder thighs. I have no idea why I got called these names. I look at my 5 year old daughter who is my exact replica and I don't know why she is very tiny and petite for her age. She has the cutest dimples on her little tiny baby butt! She is prefect, but so was I. So why did I get called these names?
After enough years of those hideous names I began to believe them. I remember being horrified at 13 because I went for my yearly and had gone from 4'10" and 93 pounds to 5'3" and 96lbs. I had gained 3 whole pounds. Like I said before I wasn't a heavy kid by any means my doctor couldn't understand my being so upset. But after years of other kids and my own family calling me names I thought I was the size of a house.
About that time they built a grocery store about 2 blocks from my house. My brother would talk me in to going and getting him a box of Little Debbie’s telling me he would share them. I would get back and then I was lucky to even get one. This turned into a food issue that I have to this day. So when I would make these nightly runs out of the basement window to get our junk I started buying a box for myself. Sometimes my brother would sneak and eat all of mine too. That's when I started eating them as fast as could to keep my brother from getting them. Now if I buy myself junk and if anybody touches it, I feel the need to buy it in bulk and eat it until the anxiety subsides. All that crap I was eating in very short order added 70lbs to my very petite frame. Now I really was fat just like everybody called me for years. One year at thanksgiving I overheard my grandmother and aunt saying now what are we going to do about Steph's weight. I never ate at a family meal again I am 36 and still can't do it.
I went to diet doctors and that would help but not for long my weight would go right back up. Until I found horses and Hayley. I would have laid down my very life for him. He saved me from my own inner hurt so many times. I would go into his stall at night and he would lay his head on my lap. But like any 18-19yr old I was broke and couldn't afford his board. So In the winter of 95-96 I found a stable to keep him at that would allow me to work for his board and boy did I !!! I lost 60lbs in 2 months! I would go to my actual job at 5:00am working in a restaurant till around 12-3pm and then run to the barn right after work. That was wow hard work. I got all of the worst jobs I had to carry and bash ice out of 2 frozen buckets carried about 100 feet or so. Refill with water and then carry them back x51 horses that all had 2 buckets. Then the race began. I had to run the wheel barrels while everybody else cleaned the stalls and for some of you, you might think that was the worst job. No I would have much rather done that it was way easier!!!! I had to keep up with 4 people I would run the wheel barrel out the back door across the drive and about 20’ up the s**t heap, run to the fresh sawdust. Fill that and get the barrel back. So maybe I could stand still for few seconds. That went on until around 10-11pm. I was so tired I had the choice of eat or sleep and sleep always won out. So it's no wonder I lost so fast I ate like a pig while I was at work. I started drinking sugar pop just trying to slow it down. But the more I ate the faster it came off. For the first time I was thin but I was massively fit. You couldn’t call me skinny I was solid muscle. But I quit my job and started working at Pizza Hut. I was getting paid much better and so I could afford to pay for Hayley’s board and I missed my friends at my old barn. I had also had an altercation with to owner of the barn I worked at. Boy did that guy scare the piss out of me. So I decided to move Hayley back to my original barn. But I was still so active not only did I keep the weight of I lost more over a much slower time frame! I was a finally not the fat girl in the family. I had never been so happy. Mainly because nobody ever mentioned my weight it was no longer an issue.
It went on like that for a few years until I started working with a dressage trainer. He wanted me to work with one of his studs. The problem was that every time I hit that time of the month I couldn’t hardly get him out of his stall. I had heard that the depo shot would get rid of my period so I made an appointment with my doctor to get it. Not a good idea for me! It made me bleed constantly so really couldn’t mess with him then , and I gained 30lbs in 3 weeks. I made another appointment with my doctor to get the shot that would counter act the depo. I went in to the office she looked at my chart and the weight gain and told me that I didn’t need the estrogen shot, I needed to put the fork down. I felt like I was a little kid again being call thunder thighs. I started crying when I went to see her I hadn’t eaten in 3 days I had pretty much stopped eating because I was gaining so much weight so fast. She told me that the depo doesn’t have that much weight gain associated with it. That I must be eating too much. She refused to give me the shot. I never went back to that doctor again. I found out years later that I wasn’t the only one who has had that reaction. But that was way after the fact. It took a full year to get the depo out of my system and to lose most of that weight I managed to get 20lbs of it off. After going through that I was happy just to be down to 135lbs.
It was about that time that I got together with my now husband. We had known each other for 2 years before we started dating. So we didn’t waste any time and within a month I was pregnant with our first baby! At that point I did one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. I had to give up Hayley. I couldn’t afford him and a baby.
My son was born when I was 26 and it took sometime but I lost all that baby weight and very promptly got pregnant again! I gained 45 lbs. with her. And I again lost all the baby weight in just time to get pregnant again. And wow did I gain with her!!!! By the time I delivered her I weighed in at 198. They pumped so much fluid in to me that I left the hospital weighing more than when I got there! 211lbs! After about 4 weeks I finally lost that fluid but was left weighing in at 181 lbs.
Now I want to preface this next segment in my life by saying that I am not vain, but I have always been a pretty girl even at my heaviest I never had an issue getting whatever guy I wanted. So when it came to members of the opposite sex I was confident. I could wrap a man around my little finger, especially when it came to my husband. So what happened to me next changed me in a way that I still haven’t recovered from a probably never will. My husband had an affair. It wasn’t just a 1 night stand. It went on for months. He is an over the road trucker and so him not being here was normal. But this was different. He didn’t come for Christmas. He left out around the middle of December, and I didn’t come home until April. It’s that moment when you just know. That was the worst Christmas of my life. You don’t know the details but you just know. I kept asking him and played deny, deny, deny. He finally came home in April. I got one whole week to enjoy having him home before I knew, I mean really knew. My best friend and sister in-law just couldn’t bite her tongue anymore she had found out all the dirty details about a week before about the time he decided to come home.
He was fixing his truck and didn’t get home till late that night. I was seriously considering just ignoring it, you know trying to pretend it never happened. But the idea of lying in the same bed with him I couldn’t do it and I tried I finally gave up at 4 am. I told him to get up and that we needed to talk. The pain hit me in waves. I loved him so much, but he broke me. I was forever broken. Everything I knew about myself and felt about myself. I felt worthless. When he was gone for all those months I ate to soothe myself. I had been in our home with our 3 children living off of practically no money.
To stay out where his girlfriend was he ran crappy loads so while he got advance money I was forced to live off of WIC and whatever I had in my deep freezer from that summer. We ate dinner every night at a friend’s house. I was breeding cats at the time and the small amount of money that I had squirreled away from the sale of the kittens kept the lights on. The cold weather rule applied so we had heat. But to keep my kids fed, my animals the only thing getting us any money starved. He had left his wife and kids with nothing. I was a thousand miles away from my nearest family. But he was taking his girlfriend and her kids in the truck that had my name on the door to New York, out to dinners, even if it was McDonalds I was leaving my 6 month old daughter in her diapers so long she had diaper rash worse than I have ever seen it because I didn’t have the money to buy her more diapers. Five years later the guilt of that still eats me alive.
Once I actually knew what had happened everything for me changed I started drinking. I drank so much I made myself sick. There is nothing worse than being so drunk and sick sitting in the bathtub crying while your four year old son trying to figure out how to make mommy better again. I wasn’t eating so it really didn’t take too much to get me that way. I didn’t have money for gas so driving wasn’t an issue. And the liquor store isn’t even a block away and that was the only place in town that would still take my checks. Then his girlfriend, she started calling me and telling me things. Things I never wanted to know. Like that he didn’t think the baby was his. Yeah Autumn looked different from the other kids, they looked like him. Autumn my precious baby girl looked just like me. I didn’t even realize it until she was 10 months old. I told him to take all three of the kids and have them DNA tested if he didn’t think any of them weren’t his. I didn’t have anything to hide. I was still trying to hold my marriage together by shear will. I said some really hateful things to my husband. I don’t have guilt about that. I never will. What I do have guilt over is that as much as I tried to keep the kids out of it my son still remembers mommy and daddy fighting. The girls were too little to remember thank God!!!!
I found out other things in that time. Things that I wish I could forget. But it’s a part of me now. She lived in Ohio, which is where we are from. For her this wasn’t good. Before I got married I worked for the prosecutor’s office and I still had friends there. I did something bad and quite frankly illegal. I called one of my best girlfriends and I got her address, social security number those of her family and her children and her ex-husband’s. I informed her that I was trying to put my marriage back together again and that if she didn’t stop trying to contact myself and my husband that all the filthy pictures she had sent to my husband would be blown up and sent to her family, place of employment and her children’s school. After I got done telling her, I had all of this information and reading it to her so she got that I was serious and I wasn’t making it up I hung up and finally never heard from her again.
That left me with dealing with the aftermath of the affair. I had a GPS tracker on my husband’s phone. I knew he had to stay working so that we could eat. For him picking up the phone wasn’t an option. I really didn’t care if he was sleeping. I needed to hear his voice, and to know where he was at, at all times. When you hear that trust is something that has to be earned, you can lose it in a second and it can take lifetime to rebuild. It’s true. But it’s not just the trust you have in your partner it’s the trust you have in yourself that is destroyed. I don’t know if I will ever regain my confidence. It’s like when you try to glue a broken vase back together again. It might look OK but it will always be broken there are still pieces missing. Most days I am good but there are still days like today that those thoughts weasel their way in. It was hard to put the pieces back together again. But we did it and we now have another beautiful baby boy that will be 3 in a month. I still freak over some of the smallest things. He said the reason it happened was because I stopped talking to him. His stupid piece of crap phone, he told me that everybody else could hear him it was just me. Funny part was when the kids would try to talk to him they would look at me and ask me “Why won’t Daddy talk to me?”
It’s hard some days realizing my life got wrecked over a ****ty phone. I flip out if the kids get too loud and I have a hard time hearing him. If I have to ask him to repeat himself to many times and he gets snippy because he thinks I’m not listening, I feel like it’s going to happen all over again. The only people I told were the few that had to pick me up off the floor. Most everybody figures I have moved on from it. I feel ridiculous still feeling this way. But it isn’t something I can control. Not that I have control over anything in my life. I can’t even control my weight hence why I am here.
I don’t find that my opinion matters to anyone. Especially not my husband. I don’t feel like a complete person anymore. I am a body that takes up space and too much space at that. Growing up I was wrong. My dad showed little to no interest in me. My brother was the important one. Well on both sides of my family my brother was the important one. I can’t remember one time in my life where I felt good enough. It’s too much right now.
My husband’s older two sons are living with us now. The one will do something but only on his terms and he really doesn’t try to do the best job it’s the bare minimum. It’s hard having to be the only one that will tell him he needs to go back and do the job the right way. The other one well he could care less about doing anything and what I mean by doing nothing I mean he comes down the stairs goes the bathroom gets food and goes right back up the stairs. His father told him that unless he started putting applications in. He wouldn’t buy him anymore cigarettes. Well he filled them out. His brother had to go and drop them off for him. Sad part is I am the person at the house with the boys and would have to deal with taking away the cigarettes. Since they have been living with us we have been broke and getting broker. Paying out another $300.00 a month in cigarettes, and my grocery bill has gone up around $500.00 a month. I can’t get out of the hole. When I try to bring it up to my husband, he pretty much makes me feel like a ***** for even bringing it up. I think he has guilt for not being in their lives for last 16 years. It’s still his job to say something to them or to take them back down to their mother. So I am the ***** that makes sure everybody has cooked food to eat cigarettes to smoke a clean house, and if I say anything about people being messy I am a *****. Hell yes I am a *****! I spend all day cleaning the house and I wake up to smoke coming down the stairs, people not taking their shoes off and walking mud through the house, my cigarettes missing and whatever treat I made so I could have something yummy at the end of the day gone and the dish in the sink for me to wash. (This makes my afore mentioned food issue flare up so again in bulk more food must be made and consumed.) They boys are messy I am lucky if their dirty clothes make where they supposed to. I am not sure if they are such pigs because they are 19 and 21 or because their mother was a pig and never taught them to clean up after themselves. The stories I have been told about that one just boggles the mind. She is a nice lady but apparently very unmotivated. That was part of the reason my husband left her all those years ago.
My house was tiny with 2 adults and 4 kids but it’s even worse now with 4 adults and 4 kids in a 4 bedroom 1 bath tiny *kitten* house. I have no privacy. I can’t remember the last time I changed my clothes without somebody in the same room or trying to barge in without knocking. Hell I don’t even get to pee alone. My 3 year old is still sleeping in our room because I have nowhere else to put him. Let me tell you how fun it is to try and get in the mood after cleaning and cooking and kids and with filthy people up my *kitten* 24/7 let alone try to actually have sex with a 3 year old in the room!
I don’t feel like I matter. My husband hasn’t taken me out on a date in over a year not that we have the money to do it. That’s okay the time before that was well… It was long enough ago that I can’t even tell you I do remember it, just not when it was. I don’t mind that, I really don’t. What I do mind is having no opinion, well I have an opinion it’s the fact that it doesn’t matter what that opinion is. I am told over and over again that I don’t count. What I want doesn’t count. What matters to me doesn’t count. So when he side steps around the subject and makes jokes like I heard you I just didn’t listen. What he is saying is I don’t count.
So lately the only thing I have control over is food and only the food I put in my own mouth. What works for me at the moment is just not eating. I get it, it isn’t healthy. I no longer care. But it’s the only thing I can control. I get no joy out of life. I sat at my daughter spring concert last night and my gosh was she beautiful. All of the other parents were there laughing, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why.
Trying to untangle the threads of who I am and why I have gotten to this place in my life seems impossible. I got wrapped up in trying be for someone else, for everybody else. I don’t know how to find me again. I have given up everything I loved, to become something I hate. I gave up my horse, I gave up my cats, I gave up my home, I gave up my friends and now I live in a place I hate 40lbs overweight and I am a harpy *****.

So what is your advice to fix that…

CutiePieMarzipan

Wow. I don't think I have any good advice, but you're such a strong person. I'd never be able to go through that.
I'm so sorry about your animals, I couldn't handle if anything happened to my own.
I just realized how useless this reply is, I'm sorry.

kclayton0820

Wow!! First and foremost you must realize that YOU matter and YOU count and until you can start thinking that way how you feel is not going to change. Been there - and it's one of the most difficult things that you can do - believing in yourself. I tell my kids often that you choose how you look at your life. When you wake up....be glad the good Lord gave you another day and put forth the effort to make the best of it. Look for the good rather than focusing on the negative. When something bad happens which it will - stop for a moment and think about something you can be thankful for. I know that sounds cheezy but it really does help change your mindset on only seeing the world around you in a negative light.

And starting here - using MFP is something that you are doing for YOU. Yes - I'm doing it for my family and kids but first and foremost I am doing if for ME!! So is my exercising... my time for me. I control it. They are baby steps on a long journey but it's one I'm happy I started. I have actually gotten my husband involved and he is now being supportive. He will tell me if I am eating too much but he doesn't do it in a negative ugly way which is what I told him I didn't need him to do. I told him I wanted him to encourage me to exercise but not be demanding/ugly about it. Amazingly enough we have started growing closer. In our past 15 years we have had our rocky moments, separation and near divorce fights. But he actually told me the other day that he loved me more now than he did when we married. We now have us a "date night" every now and then which has been great for us. I know we have come a long way. You can find a place that you both enjoy that is not expensive even if you have to split a meal to help with the cost - just make time for the two of you. Time that you can breathe, enjoy each other's company and talk. You would probably be amazed at the difference it will make in your relationship. Not saying it will happen over night but it's a start.

But the biggest thing is that I am starting to feel good about myself. And I think that will in turn change the thought process and actions that I have with my family and friends. Make you a list of short term goals that will make you feel better about you and as you reach them reward yourself with something good for YOU. Only you know inside of you the things that you feel will make you happy if they change. Write them down and go to work on them.

Take the time to google this poem "The Awakening" by Sonny Carroll. Definitely gets you thinking!!

I wish you the best in your journey for happiness and hope you find it soon!