Body Complex
and death. My desire to be an advocate for bereaved parents kicked in and I got involved with the MISS Foundation http://www.misschildren.org and started their Seattle Chapter. We held fundraisers and teddy bear drives. We began publishing the poetry of other bereaved parents and of artists who were using expressive arts therapy to process their own losses. And I discovered the discipline of Poetry Therapy and began to pursue the use of this arts work in my own daily life and in conjunction with the bereavement work I do with other parents who are enduring the death of a child. John Fox's book Poetic Medicine was of great help and comfort to me in this endeavor.
The point is that a year went by so quickly. Before I knew it, I was back at the doctor's office for my annual check up. Now, I have never liked getting on the scale at the doctor's office, but this year I just didn't care. So I got on the scale looking at the numbers, and the nurse pushed the hickey-ma-doos to the right places and then an amazing thing happened. The nurse said, "Almost exactly the same as last year this time." And she noted the number in my chart and started to babble about peeing in a cup or some such thing. She had no idea what had just happened. She was just moving through the course of her day. She was new. I didn't know her. She probably hadn't dug back in my chart to see that years ago I was diagnosed with eating disorder and all that history. She just made an off the cuff comment, "Almost exactly the same as last year this time."
You, too, are probably thinking, "Okay, Kara, so what?" Exactly the same????!!! Did you hear that? I said "exactly the same!!!!" With all the eating disorder problems in my life time, I had never ever never weighed the same weight for more than a month in a row since I was like 10 years old! Maybe not even then!!! The same!!!!???? For an entire year, I had maintained the same weight almost exactly without doing anything! I just lived, grieved, healed, worked, cried, slept, ate-- ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted-- learned to scooter, walked-- not because I had to exercise and lose weight, but because I wanted to learn to scooter and because I liked to
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