Friday, March 16, 2007

new mantra?

i'm not formally participating in this month's habitude, because i sucked at keeping last month's and right now i don't seem to need one more thing to do that i suck at. so this is my yearly focus anyway - and i'm feeling pretty lost with it. i never realized how much i truly want to avoid my center.

rachelle posted today that jen b (new to me blog alert - possible water) recommended this as a mantra:

i love my body as i love a child.

hope and i were talking months ago about my need to mother and she asked me a deep question i had never thought about before, and have spent a lot of time thinking about since - "what would it look like to mother yourself?" - i think this might be one of the ways.

i love my body as i love a child.

i love my body as i love a child.

poor child. i love my children - but this strange random child is in for some damage. right now i want to pack my body so full of food that i can hardly breathe. i am struggling harder than i have in ages with my food. i know it is tied deeply into my body image, feeling sensual and female. and i am so weary of it all. so weary i can't even enjoy food anymore. i feel guilty and am so frustrated. the other people in my face to face group are doing so well, i am riding their recovery right now - because i have so very little of my own.

i know it is the last dregs of winter that keep putting me back into this place, i'm so tired of the indoors and being cold - and the forecast for this weekend is ugly. come on spring, mamma needs some walkin' shoes.

3 comments:

Erin said...

How do you do that if you don't know how to mother?

Anonymous said...

Mothering myself is something that Jack (the priest I spent a lot of time with after rehab) talked a lot about. I'm still working on it. It's hard...very hard. I have no problem mothering (parenting) my children but I seldom see myself as worthy of being cared for. I'm getting there but it's been a very slow process.

I hear you about the weather. It was 70 degrees here on Tuesday. Yesterday we received almost a foot of snow. YUCK!!!!!

I love you bobbie and I'm praying for you.

Hope said...

I don't remember if I shared this with you during that particular phone call but maybe what prompted me to ask you that was that Father Charlie, in one of my sessions, asked me what it was that I wished I had received from my mom and I said "nurturing". I spent the first three months of my life in an incubator in a time where parents weren't allowed to touch babies in such a fragile state. So I was three months old before I knew my mother's touch. I wonder how that affected me and if that, coupled with the childhood abuse has had a double whammy on my not being a toucher as an adult.

Thank you for the new mantra. I love my body as I love a child. It's food for thought (thankfully not literal food - I hear you on that score as well).