Weighty Issues
Some extra baggage to tote around on this ride
Well Hello there and welcome back! I hope spring has sprung wherever you are and you’re enjoying some extra daylight doing your thing.
On my lengthy flight home from vacation, despite planning to use the uninterrupted time to pound out words on my computer and get ahead of the game, I did no such thing. Instead I dove deep into the rabbit hole that is seatback entertainment. Once again, I heeded the siren song of podcasts luring me into the bottomless pit of health related advice. Apparently my rabbit hole of choice is healthy eating.
My rationale for this foray was that the topic of weight and eating is on my Mothership hit list. Like so many women throughout the history of humanity, including myself, my Mom wrestled with eating and weight throughout her life. That baggage came along for the ride in both assisted living and Memory Care.
An Insitutional Hazard
One of the inevitable downsides of care facilities is often weight gain. As noted in Too much Assist, Not Enough Living, Nina gained 20 pounds in a few short months at Sunset. This was the consequence of having no regular exercise (like her daily walks to the post office) and having the sudden availability of three meals a day that required zero effort to procure or prepare (way more food than whatever she got in her infrequent grazing pattern at home.)
Once that weight went on it was nearly impossible to come off. Like in many facilities, there were no destinations to walk to and no daily tasks requiring physical effort. Exercise—other than chair yoga and a few gentle classes—just isn’t baked into the routine. Putting plates of cookies and sugary carbs in front of residents is. This was better at the Grove than it had been at Sunset, but no matter how much we asked for limited sweets or healthy alternatives, the cookies kept coming. Humans don’t do very well with will power anyway, and humans with dementia—who easily forget what they were resisting—even less so.
Weight gain is problematic for many reasons, including all the ways it impairs mobility. The harder it is for you to move, the less motivated you are to move and the more weight you gain, kicking off a vicious cycle of health problems. Worse yet for Nina was what I assumed the weight gain did to her psyche. I assumed this because feelings about her body and her weight were something she had never been able to verbalize, and certainly not now. None of the people putting out plates of cookies could know the complicated relationship Nina had with food and weight, but I sure did.
A Lifelong Love/Hate Struggle
From as early as I could remember Nina was on some wacky diet, often with other relatives who became a support system in this shared love/hate relationship with food. She wasn’t overweight, and her body was strong enough to handle the many challenges of an active life in the mountains; but she wasn’t model-thin, and that was enough to get on board with the madness.
I was too young to be in on the Liquid protein diet, whereby at each meal, Nina imbibed a silver cup of vile fluid. By the time the Cambridge Diet canisters rolled into our kitchen however, and shakes or soups made from a scoop of powder replaced two meals a day, I had joined right in. Dieting seemed to be a teenage right of passage, like holding a pink can of Tab (which I hated, but occasionally drank to look cool). Thinner was always better, however you got there.
At the risk of racing down a whole new rabbit hole (or maybe foreshadowing the next one) I’ll just say that my sister and I each developed our own solid eating disorders during this phase. Only later, through slips from her sister and cousin, did we learn of mom’s own eating disorder in her teenage and early college years.
Super. Helpful.
I never understood why Nina didn’t share her own eating struggles with her teenage daughters, especially while we wrestled mightily with our own. She was the most attentive, loving, thoughtful mom in every way, and yet avoided any conversation related to eating or weight like it was the third rail. To be fair, anything related to sex or boyfriends or reproductive health or really anything uncomfortable got the same treatment, which was none at all.
Nina was at once totally devoted to her kids, and yet unable to share the personal experience that might have helped us thrive. The mismatch nagged at me until very recently, when I heard an interview with Billie Jean King. In it, she matter-of-factly said that every morning, even at age 81, she wakes up and reminds herself she has an eating disorder. King’s own disorder started at age 11, found cover in the obsessiveness of elite athletics (hmmm THAT sounds familiar) and was finally diagnosed at age 51. King’s story was a revelation. For the first time I considered that perhaps Nina hadn’t offered up her own experience because she still hadn’t come to terms with it. Perhaps, she felt bad about it, ashamed, guilty or simply unqualified to help her own daughters sort it out.
At Peace or Under Cover
I never knew for sure, but I assumed Nina’s relationship with food and weight still slid along a spectrum from uneasy to torturous—that no matter how indifferent she seemed about her physical state, the weight gain bugged her. My sister, I recently discovered, had a completely different take. She thought that Alzheimer’s had finally freed Nina from her worry about eating and weight. I never considered that. Maybe, Nina felt some version of the relief I felt when I was visibly pregnant, and for the first time in my adult life didn’t have to suck in my gut, ever.
Whether or not she cared about her weight, on every visit I tried to bring or find her a set of clothes that were comfortable but also neat, so she didn’t have to squeeze into anything but also didn’t have to live in oversized sweats. As her shape changed, that meant many trips to Kohl’s, the one store that existed both in the Bay Area and in the sticks of New Hampshire. Keeping to one store helped us find the brands that worked best and made returns and exchanges easy for us all.
Even in her prime, Nina hadn’t spent a whole lot of mental energy on fashion; but I saw signs that she still cared about it on some level. On one of her increasingly rare trips home (travel was becoming more disruptive and confusing), she pointed out a favorite dress in her closet—one that she would have no occasion to wear and hadn’t fit into in ages. She wanted to bring it back to her small closet at the Grove, and I think I understood why. On one hand it was a sign that the weight battle endured, that she still aspired to a thinner body. But, it might also have meant that she had hope for the future. Maybe she looked at that dress and could not figure out whose it was and why it was there. But maybe she looked at it and thought, “Someday I’m going to put that dress on, hook my arm in Buck’s and sashay out of this place.”
I sure hoped that’s what the dress was saying.
Up Next:
Just when travel seemed totally out of the question, Anne comes up with a brilliant, scary, irresponsible idea. Let’s take this show across the country!