Hiatus and Mothers' Day woes

I am a silly fool at times.  I have a measure of success and then become complacent and forget what I was doing to achieve that measure of success and start allowing little extras to creep back in.  I've done it before and now it has happened again. I managed a stay the same last week after a weekend of indulgences and a week of too little deprivation.  Even that was lucky to be honest.  So I started this week keen to stop that rot but now my pesky body has chosen to retain water.

I woke up this morning, stepped on the scales to see an unhelpful number so gave myself a shake and a metaphorical slap round the chops and vowed to do better for the rest of the week and give myself a chance for a drop come Thursday.

Accordingly, I have been pretty good today.  I took the dogs for a run mid morning and felt quite chipper and we had dancing this evening too (that jive is not for the faint-hearted) and I'm presently resisting the lure of toast or biscuits.  So, I have hope that my lapse in concentration from last week can be put behind me and I can make some progress before we head off to Malaysia in May.  I know I'm not going to be slim but even a few more lbs off will make a difference.

It's strange: you try and comfort others by saying stuff like "it doesn't matter how slowly it comes off" and "you can't fail as long as you don't give up" but somehow you don't apply those phrases to yourself.  This thought hit me yesterday morning when I woke early and was mulling over various things in that crack of dawn way one does.  There IS no deadline.  I haven't "failed".  I will have a good time whatever weight I am and I have all year, all next year if I like, to get this sorted.  It was a quite liberating thought so I happily fell back to sleep for a nice Sunday lie-in.

Yesterday, Mothers' Day, was a pretty tough day to be honest. Facebook was full of heartfelt, loving wishes to mums and thanks from mums for lovely gifts and treats and several sad but stoical RIPs too.  But I feel quite left out.  I'm not a mum myself and my own mum, while alive and healthy which is a blessing, barely knows me and certainly doesn't know that she is a mother.  I felt guilty because I wasn't there but then realised that she has no idea that it was Mothers'Day and no idea that her children should be there.  Then I felt guilty for taking advantage of her dementia to alleviate my guilt.  It seemed as though I was cheating and short changing her.  But mum was/is the last woman to worry about that sort of thing.  She was/is a practical sort of woman who knew she was/is loved and didn't need us to dance attendance on her to prove it.

It's a horrible illness, taking your mum away but leaving her there as a reminder of what you don't have any more.  I got quite teary several times yesterday probably because I made the mistake of reading some blogs written by women in similar situations.  I suppose I don't find it very upsetting often, and tend to worry more about my father and what he has to cope with so, when I do think about my poor old mum, it tends to hit hard.  Richard had a fair bit of cuddling to do yesterday!!

I don't think I'm particularly upset about not having children myself, although I suppose that could have been part of it.  I've always thought that I'd have been a decent mother and it was something I wanted to be in the past but I'm pleased that I didn't do it for the wrong reasons with Diarmuid. Rich and I talked about it when we first got together but it seemed as though we would have been rushing into it too early in our relationship and putting too much pressure on too quickly just because we were at "that age".

And now I FEEL too old (and Richard well and truly agrees) and we are happy with our life.  I know that some people would go for it at 44 but it's not for us.  We're just not desperate enough for children to take on that amount of risk, upheaval and effort. That doesn't mean that I don't have the odd pang - the odd wondering whether I'll regret not have children when we get old (and it's too late).  But, I do know that we have made the right decision for us.  So it took me a little by surprise that Mother's Day was tough.  I'm sure that most of it was sadness for my mum but a little part of it was saying goodbye to the possibility of me being a mum one day.  It has been creeping up on me over the last year so I suspect I'll be coming back to the subject from time to time. (Sorry.)