Peek-a-Boo

I've always loved a game of peek-a-boo with a baby.  They are so adorable. How they really believe that when your eyes are hidden by your tricky, face-stealing hands that you have actually disappeared. And the  look of pure joy on their faces when you suddenly reappear.  As if in those two seconds when your eyes were covered, you were completely lost and the baby is so happy to see you again.  This human-to-human acknowledgment--this I-can-see-you--is such a powerful force.  In a peek-a-boo game with a baby, you would never rob them of your reappearance by keeping your eyes hidden.  You know that this would cause distress and distrust.

There are compartments of my life with which I often play an adult game of peek-a-boo.  In these games, rather than covering my eyes and then uncovering them, I remain frozen in some sort of stop-motion.  My hands covering my eyes.  My eyes, even though shielded by my hands, squeezed tightly shut to totally block out these sometimes painful realities.

One compartment I shielded myself from for years was my weight.  Up until about three years ago, I was a five-times-a-day weigher.  I weighed myself first thing in the morning, naked.  Then again after I put my clothes on to see how many pounds clothing added.  Then after I ate breakfast to see how much I gained by eating a meal.  Then again when I got home from work.  And again before bed...  And after I went to the bathroom (yes, number two.). My obsession with my weight a proverbial albatross hung around my neck.  It determined the day's fate.  Whether it would be happy or it would be cursed.

After years of living this way, I decided enough was enough and I threw away my scale, a both liberating and terrifying move. I tried to trust  my body and be kind to it, all the while fearing food, and, more than that, fearing that the tightening of my waistband was indeed because of a rising of the number on the scale that I no longer owned.

I fooled myself into thinking that this liberation from the daily check-in was a liberation from an obsession with weight.  But this wasn't true.  I still worried.  A lot.  Any time I went to the doctor's office, the only place I had to step on a scale, I turned around. Although my clothes kept getting tighter, as long I stayed in blissful ignorance about the actual number, I believed that it was within a moderate range of what it used to be.  Until last February.  I had my annual physical and the physician's assistant, who has the tact of a wart hog, walked in and said, "Well, your weight's up to #@$" (insert whatever number you consider astronomical.).  I couldn't believe it.  In my peek-a-boo, eyes-closed reality, I had gained around five pounds.  In this new, eye-opened reality, I had gained over twenty.

My mentor often says, "Too see is to be free."

In this moment, I felt anything but free.  I felt terrified.  Disgusting.  Unlovable.

I didn't rush out and buy a scale.  Nor do I now believe in weighing myself once a week or even once a month.  But I do believe in being honest with myself and my body.  It and I are one, after all, and I can tell when it is unhappy.

I recently took a nutrition course that changed my life and my relationship with food.  This class taught me how eating whole foods acts like medicine.  Now, I focus not on how much my body weighs but on how it feels after I eat certain foods.  The partnership between my body and me will last a lifetime and I'm entering it eyes-wide-open.

Another area where I've often frozen in the eyes-covered phase of peek-a-boo is my finances.  I've spent years diving in and clawing my way out of credit card debt, as most Americans have.  This vicious cycle exhausts me.  A few years ago, I wracked up trouble not by purchasing anything huge but by making a string of seemingly insignificant purchases of $20-$30.  'Tis amazing how quickly a few $20 purchases can add up to a thousand bucks.  Part of the reason those small purchases piled up for  me so quickly is that I rarely looked at my statement, simply paying a couple hundred dollars on the card each month but never really knowing exactly how much the balance was.

It was as if I believed that if I closed my eyes to it, it didn't exist.  Or that some Magic Money Fairy was going to wave his magic debt-forgiving wand if I turned the other way.  Although I still struggle in this money cycle, tracking my purchases and looking at the sometimes painful reality of the number on the statements has proven the only way to clear my debt.  To see is to be free.  To see the reality of the debt.  To absorb it.  To be frustrated about it.  This reality, eyes-open check is the only way to understand the patterns that got me there in the first place and begin to live in a way that breaks those bonds.  To free myself of those debts.

In the days of Sex in the City, I read a lot of how-to dating books, many of which taught school-marmy type rules about what a woman should or should not do in order to snag a man.  One of the most popular, and the one that pissed me off the most, was He's Just Not That Into You, by Greg Behrendt.  In this book, as many of you know, Mr. Behrendt, aka Mr. Painful Soothsayer, claims that if a man is not calling, setting up dates, committing, etc., then he's just not that into you.  This truth hurt.  And so, as I did in many other parts of my life, I decided to blind myself to it.  In fact, one might say I was hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, and speak-no-evil all in one when it came to my dating life.  An ostrich with her head in the sand, if you will.  As if, if I just ignored the signs and pretended that all was hunky-dory with these non-committal men, then they would suddenly come around and be Mr. Perfect.

Recently, I've realized that this truth applies to my current love-life situation.  Oh, man.  Has my head been in the sand on this one for a long time.  Years, people.  Years.  My affections aren't totally unwarranted, but my belief that this man and I would some day be together--that he is somehow my destiny--has been perhaps the biggest peek-a-boo game of my life.  Not the peek-a-boo where you take your hands away from your eyes and see what's before you. The freeze-framed, eyes covered and squeezed shut one.  The one that, in one's imagination, makes the unwanted situation disappear, but in reality actually allows it to fester.

Just two days ago, I had an epiphany.  It went something like this: Ooooh.  I get it.  If he's not following through as if he wants more with me, he must not want more with me.  Duh.  

And almost just like that, the curtain came down.  I see the truth.  And although it stings (let's be honest, a lot), I do feel a little freer.  A little more excited about the possibility of beginning a relationship with my eyes wide open rather than covered and shut.

And I'm no longer mad at Greg Behrendt. I realize that he just wanted to set me and all the other peek-a-boo-playing women free.