Hortus Deliciarum

To expand on my last comment in the last post, there are some major differences to me between intuitive eating and calorie restriction. Again, this is all my own point of view – polite debate in comments is more than welcome. Emphasis on the “polite” – my blog is on the Notes feed and I abide by the no-dieting rule (that’s my rule too) but I don’t mind hearing an alternate perspective, as long as you express where you differ with respect. I delete where necessary.

As a result, comments may prove triggering if I do get debate – Caveat Lector.

As I see it, the problem with saying that intuitive eating is calorie-restrictive is that I absolutely see calorie restriction as dieting. Dieting is calorie restriction. One’s diet may not be “dieting” – you can eat diabetes-friendly diet without eating any fewer calories.

May one eat less if they’re intuitively eating? Of course…but one may also eat *more* and gain weight while doing so. HAES is not a promise that one will lose weight and neither is intuitive eating. Personally, I don’t think caloric restriction IS a good thing. I think that the ideal is when one learns to eat when hungry, eat what one is hungry for (i.e., what the body is craving), and eat until full and preferably not until uncomfortable, unless one has made the intentional decision to do so, such as at a special meal where food is the centerpiece and it is especially emotionally satisfying to eat everything possible. I do not see eating-to-discomfort every day as an ideal situation for anyone but your mileage may vary.

Intuitive eating, as I describe it above, may or may not mean eating less than you previously ate and even if it does mean that, it’s entirely irrelevant. Not listening to your body’s signals is the problem, not the actual quantity of food eaten. For some people, intuitive eating means eating MORE than you previously ate – certainly that is true for those who have done extensive dieting and are relearning how to listen to their bodies.

The path to intuitive eating for those people, as it has been for me, may be in eating past the point of full time and time again until my subconscious recognizes that I will not deprive or starve my body ever again. It’s a long, slow process and has, if anything, meant calorie overloading…eating two coconut cream pies in two weeks, or bacon every morning for breakfast for a year, may not be the most healthy eating option, and almost certainly is calorie overloading, but it serves a long-term function. I no longer need to eat more than two pieces of bacon in a sitting…and, sometimes, can just eat one and want no more. I can go to a nice breakfast restaurant and choose granola, yogurt, and a side-order of sausage, instead of cinnamon roll French toast, or waffles, and be entirely and utterly satisfied with only half of it.

I think the problem is that discussing caloric restriction absolutely does equal diet for most women out there. Even the choice of words made in using the term “restriction” implies a lack of freedom, a lack of choice, and a lack of free will. For me, that is triggering. It is far more peaceful to set it within a frame of “eating what my body tells me that I should eat”. If I truly want one of the two doughnuts sitting on my desk (one for me, one for my mom & son when they get here), I’ll eat it. But, as it is right now, I smell the sweetness and think “ugh, SO not what I want! Give me a salad or a Chipotle fajita burrito with lots of veggies!” My body is sending me very clear signals.

The burrito may or may not be fewer calories than the doughnut – I neither know nor care. What I do know is that one will be meeting a nutritional need because my body is telling me so. Because I don’t see the doughnut as forbidden, my body is free to let me know what I need, regardless of how many calories are in a given food.

FYI, I deleted a comment from Staci to my last post. Staci, that sentence about “I neither know nor care” whether Chipotle burritos have more calories than a Krispy Kreme doughnut? It means that I don’t want links to Chipotle’s nutrition information. I. Don’t. Care. No doubt you meant this kindly (or perhaps not) but I could search for both restaurants’ websites if I wanted to know. I’m a librarian-in-training. I know how to use the internet. I just don’t care to know because it means nothing at all to me.

In the end, half that fajita burrito was exactly what my body wanted. I also had a tiny scoop each of pistachio and lemon ice creams from Gelatiamo, our local Italian gelateria. I wouldn’t normally have done (I have sweet snacks in my desk that are free) but it sounded good and was a special treat for my mom and son. Half that burrito is waiting for later, if I want it. The doughnut is still on my desk, uneaten. I’ll probably take it home with me and offer it to my husband instead.

That is intuitive eating. I may eat more or less on a given day, depending on my body’s signals. Sometimes I need to swim back to my safety-log of overeating to make it through a day, because I’m not yet ready to swim all the way to the shore of recovery, but I never, ever calorie restrict. That way lies madness.

Very frank discussion of the emotions triggered in me by the word “dieting” – may be triggering to others as well.

Over on Silentbeep’s ‘Dieting is Dieting’ post, there’s an interesting discussion in comments, which I’ve seen elsewhere on what the word “dieting” actually means. My husband, and Atchka, both claim that the word “dieting” is not, by necessity, “calorie restriction” but can just mean healthier eating habits. I know my husband also has tried to convince me that even if it IS about calorie restriction, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.

Now, I have to point out that my husband has been a great supporter in my FA journey, or rather, in my self-acceptance journey. He’s always thought I was beautiful and brings great joy to my life. So, don’t pick on him ;p

However, I think he and Shannon/Atchka are wrong about the idea that dieting, at least in American culture, doesn’t have to be about calorie restriction. Perhaps some of this has to do with being male – men still are, to a greater extent than women (in my experience, anyway), insulated from diet culture. I know that instances of eating disorders among young boys are up and that men are flocking more and more to the weight loss banner but I don’t think that dieting-as-calorie-restriction has become endemic among men. I could be wrong.

All that aside, my point is this: in American society, when you are a woman, dieting is about calorie restriction. Dieting never, ever means that you are eating healthily because of an existing health condition OTHER than something you perceive as being weight-related. If you reduce sugar because you have PCOS, you are not “dieting.” You’re just eating less sugar. If you reduce sugar so that you are eating fewer calories and losing weight because you think it will help your PCOS, then you are dieting, because that weight loss effort requires calorie restriction.

I can tell you what dieting means to me, as a semi-typical, if eating-disorder-recovering American woman and I think my experience is pretty universal. Dieting means that now, in this moment, you are no longer eating all the foods that scream your name the loudest, because if you do, you are a failure and no one will love you. Yesterday, if you knew you were starting your diet today, you probably ate a LOT of these foods, because today you would diet. (Remember that delightful sentiment trumpeted by so many country kitsch magnets and pillows: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow YOU WILL DIET!).

Yes, dieting is a mini-death, because suddenly your world gets a little tasty and a lot more restrictive. You swear to yourself that chocolate, potato chips, and Cheetos will no longer inhabit your kitchen shelves. You dust off the diet scale (you already have one in your cupboard from the last diet) and put it up on the counter. You pull out your measuring cups, which instead of being exciting tools to create delicious meals become fixed, immovable sentinels guarding your food intake. You hunt down your flat-backed butter knife and tell yourself that the one with the curved back, that doesn’t level that measuring cup exactly right is still okay, because it’s only a couple calories extra. When you empty ingredients into the bowl, you scrape every last morsel of food from the cup, desperate not to cheat yourself of even one tiny calorie of goodness.

You will probably already have gone through your cookbook and meticulously converted from cups to ounces to get point/calorie values on your favorite recipes. You may round off slightly…2.4 points isn’t QUITE 3 points, so count it as two! Or, if you’re feeling virtuous, you will count it as three and realize that you can only have one two-inch cookie, but surely that will be enough. And, if you walk for an hour, maybe you can have TWO cookies!

And you will feel in control. You will be powerful, successful, and lose weight! You will be sexy, beautiful, and no one will be able to keep their eyes off you! You will walk into a room and people will listen to you because you are gorgeous and have fantastic clothing sense, the sort of clothing sense with which one is magically endowed as a thin person.

All this because you weigh and measure every bit of food that you eat and meticulously track it in a little food journal that you carry around everywhere. When you lose that first pound or two, you will feel like a superwoman. When you start dipping your fork into salad dressing before taking a bite of bare lettuce, to cut back on calories consumed from dressing, or just eliminate salad dressing altogether and dump vinegar all over your lettuce, you will feel virtuous, beautiful, light, and clean.

Dieting sucks you in and takes over your entire world. You can no longer enter a restaurant without craving soda, because you know you can’t have it. You can no longer ever have soup as your starter instead of salad, especially if it’s a creamy soup, because it has too many calories. Everything has to be “on the side, please” or “vegetables steamed, no butter, please” because no food choice goes unwatched. If you succumb to temptation (or to a friend’s “sabotage”) and have dessert at your ladies’ lunch, you will hate yourself for your weakness as you eat 0-point vegetable soup (without even 1-point low-fat turkey kielbasa to give it flavor) for the rest of the day.

And the whole time you’re doing it, the whole time you’re counting and cutting candy bars in half, and weighing every bit of food you consume, you will feel like you are a star. When you fail, backslide, or give in to your hunger and actually eat something that tastes good but goes beyond your calorie limit, you will loathe yourself and know that you are the ugliest, fattest failure ever to set foot on this planet.

So why, why, why would I ever use the term “dieting” to refer to what I do now, intuitive eating and HAES? When I listen to my body’s hunger signals and understand that I was probably craving red meat all last week (and the better part of this week) not because I’m a fat slob but because I’m recovering from a pretty nasty cold and my body must need more nutrients, I love my body. I respect its wisdom.

Do I necessarily always love myself in the mirror? No. But I do know, deeply and fundamentally, that a woman my age who developed anorexia when I developed compulsive overeating would probably be far unhealthier than I am. She might even be dead. My weight may have some implications for my health, although my still-sedentary lifestyle is a far greater factor, but my overeating means that my body has done its best to sustain me in times when food was the only answer.

Why would I ever call the loving process of listening to my body and recognizing that I feel better when I have more protein and less carbohydrate, thanks to PCOS, dieting when that word means the ultimate rejection of my bodily signals?

Most American women, I hope, have healthier attitudes toward food than I have had. I don’t claim that my kneejerk reaction to the word “dieting” is the same for everyone…but I think most women do recognize the mingled beauty and despair of that word. And, I suspect, the vast majority of us would never think of “dieting” as anything other than calorie restriction, whether or not we would consider that calorie restriction to be healthy in some way (I do not).

Don’t play the semantics card. Understand that dieting, for many of us who are fat, is a word with baggage. It is not a neutral, accepting word. Use it yourself if you will…but understand that those of us who have suffered thanks to calorie-restriction will not see it from your perspective, because for us there is nothing positive in the word.

This is me.

That’s a head-shot of me taken by a colleague of mine because I needed something semi-official looking to put in all of my profiles for the iSchool (and for various other purposes).  It’s a decent shot, although, as with all photos of myself EVAR, I look at it and think “omg uglyfathorrible”.  Well, I think so at this size, anyway, despite logic telling me that when I look at photos of myself at a lighter weight, I generally think far more positively of the way I looked then, even though I hated myself in photos when I was that weight too.

Obviously the conclusion is that it’s all subjective.

Now, on Facebook there’s a meme going around about your “celebrity doppelganger.”  Quite a few of my friends have had fun with this but it hit me (and thusly I posted) that I do not have a celebrity doppelganger, at least not in the present day, because celebrity women are not allowed to be my weight, at least not on the whole.  There are a few exceptions but not enough that I can point at one and say “oh, hai, I look like HER” except insofar as we might have similar body shapes.

I might have more luck if I’d been born back in the Baroque era, where it was sexy and entirely acceptable to be fat.  One of my friends suggested Saskia, the first wife of Rembrandt van Rijn, as a possible doppelganger (I found this quite entertaining, really, as my husband is something like one link away from proving that my mother’s side of the family was related to Rembrandt, although we’re not direct descendants.

Anyway, one of the joys of being married to a Baroque painter was getting used as a model.

What do you think? Are we doppelgangers, or even just slight lookalikes? Anybody else who IS a better doppelganger for me?

At least our body shape is similar. Except, that is, for my prodigious cleavage.

Who’s your doppelganger? How far back in history do you have to look to find somebody famous (and not for their size) who looks anything at all like you?

Tags: art history

I’ve seen the story about the Bellevue couple that starved their baby mentioned all over the place. My first reaction? Well, folks, that’s what happens when you have a weight-obsessed society that prioritizes thinness over health.

My second reaction? There but for the grace of God/Goddess go I…

Six weeks before my son was born, a tremendously mean, and probably fatphobic, ultrasound tech told me at a scan that he was already six pounds and that I’d “better hope he stopped growing.” She clearly believed that I was horrendously unhealthy and that I was dooming my son to a life of fatness. Although I knew better than to stop eating, you’d better believe that I was terrified that I’d end up with an enormous baby.

He weighed six pounds, nine ounces. He was around the 25th percentile for newborns in the UK and, although he was a skinny little thing and I knew the stats for bigger babies being healthier, I was pathetically grateful that he was small. I wanted a small baby because then, at least, nobody could blame the DEATHFAT! mother for having a DEATHFAT! baby. Bear in mind that all of these thoughts were *after* having started the process toward intuitive eating and eating disorder recovery, though I hadn’t yet seen any professionals about that process.

When he shot up to nearly the 50th percentile by 12 months, I was panicking. Brittainy Labberton’s words about her own baby, when she hit the 50th percentile mark, that “my husband has a weight problem and we didn’t want our daughters to be fat” could well have been mine, except that I would have said that I’m fat, have been fat all of my adult life, and I don’t want my child to suffer the pain that comes from being fat in Western society. I was deathly scared that because he’d changed percentiles upward, they were going to blame me. It was going to be my fault that I was turning my baby into a fatty.

Something, perhaps the three years that I’d spent working on intuitive eating and getting away from my self-hatred, made me realize at that point that I really, really needed help. Although I didn’t find the courage to seek out a nutritionist and a therapist until a couple of years later, realizing that the thoughts I had were really and truly unhealthy, both for me and for my son. Because I have a loving husband and family, I was in a place where I could realize how scary and screwed up my fatphobia was…and I let my son eat. He still hovers around the 50th percentile in weight, and the 50th-75th percentile in height, and I sometimes still have to bite back worries that he is eating too much, or eating too little, but I can let him be the size he is.

But…and there is a but…I’m grateful that he’s not fat. I recognize that for the unhealthy thought it is and can steer myself toward healthier attitudes, but the fear still lingers.

So, for Brittainy Labberton, at least, I have sympathy. News stories generally state that she is anorexic and that she may well have dieted during pregnancy (ironically enough, putting her baby at a higher risk of being fat in later life as a result). Her husband may be abusive. Her family may well not be supportive or loving (I don’t know). While, as an adult, the onus was on Mrs. Labberton to seek out help for her own disordered eating and CARE for her children instead of starving them, I know that my thoughts are not so far from hers. I may have made wiser choices but I suspect I also had more help in making them, thanks to the people who care about me and my son.

Those who look at her story in light of the rampant fatphobia in our society, claiming not to understand how she could do it, are lying to themselves. What she and her husband did is absolutely, terribly wrong. I would never do what she did. But…and there is a but…I understand why she did it.

Tags: news stories

There’s a great grocery store about ten minutes away that has a truly remarkable deli section. A month or so back I discovered that on Saturdays they serve prime rib. That visit I chatted with the guy at the counter and found out that his mom was from England. He and Graham then talked a bit about the UK. When we got home, the serving of prime rib was a great size and it was absolutely delicious, so this week I was having a hankering for more and, figuring my little carnivore child would be amenable to the idea, we went back to the store to pick up a couple of prime rib dinners.

I knew right away that the guy last time must have been very nice to us, because the servings this time were about half the size. When we got home, though, was the true disappointment.

I like my meat juicy. A bit of fat (yes, I’m one of those people who like it, but I try not to eat as much as I could, although it’s tasty, because I get paranoid that I’ll drop dead of a heart attack). A nice, flavorful crust on the outside and meltingly tender meat on the inside, preferably medium-rare. My dad likes his meat dry. By dry, I mean sawdust-overdone DRY and my entire childhood/young adulthood I thought chicken breast was foul…only to discover that no, when it’s cooked to done but not too done, it’s not as good as dark meat but tastes okay.

This prime rib, that I paid $12.99 for and was looking forward to? Dry. Dry as a dry, dry bone. So dry I couldn’t eat it. Jus is NOT supposed to be there to add moisture to the meat. Flavor, yes, and a bit of additional juiciness, but good prime rib should be delicious even without the jus, so I never order it (I drip it all over myself and don’t see the point).

This was not good prime rib. Even Graham, who will eat well-done meat (I’ve converted him to medium from the days when he’d only eat well-done), thought this stuff was overcooked. He had a piece from the center and it was still brown all the way through. Not even a hint of pink. The POINT of prime rib is that you don’t cook it past medium unless you’re a cretin. For the entire thing to be brown means the ends, which should be delicious, crusty, salty bits of heaven were hard and dry. Moisture-suckingly dry.

So now I’ve totally missed out on a meal I was anticipating with some delight and am feeling let down. I’ve got plenty of other food in the fridge but what I really, really wanted was prime rib, dammit. Good prime rib.

Do I write a letter that will probably have no effect whatsoever? I don’t know. I do know that I’m sorely, sorely disappointed that

Tags: bad food, cravings

I’ve been alone in bed the last couple of nights because my husband has a cold and is in the guest bedroom, so it’s just me and the baby monitor. Last night around 1:15 I heard Ciaran shuffling around in his bed, a few thumps, and nothing more. I needed a trip to the loo anyway, so got up and went, then headed into his bedroom to make sure that he’d settled back down (he’s had a cold too, poor guy). Initial pat around the pillow = no Ciaran

My sleep-dazed mind took a moment to assimilate this and then thought, quite logically, Oh, right, he’s probably gone into my bed while I was in the bathroom. I went back in to check in my bed. No Ciaran.

A little more worried but hey, Graham’s in the guest bedroom, so clearly Ciaran’s gone there. I go in and look. No Ciaran.

Panic.

My brain was still too sleepy to make much sense of this but I tried to find a flashlight for a couple of minutes, so that I wouldn’t wake him up when I found him. I hadn’t checked the foot of his bed, so maybe he was there. Was he on the sofa? My sister helped me clean this weekend and a few things (like, apparently, flashlights) weren’t where I remembered them being. Finally fear won out and I just turned on all the lights and hurried from bedroom to bedroom. No Ciaran.

Graham didn’t wake up the first time I shouted at him that Ciaran was NOT in his bed. He did the second time and was up like a shot. We were both panicking as I tried my last resort, going upstairs to see if he’d somehow blundered up to my parents’ space. I think my voice was calm as I called for him.

My dad answered. “He’s with us. He’s asleep.”

I couldn’t sleep for an hour afterward, thanks to the adrenaline and pounding heart. He’s never gone upstairs like that in the night, so for a long couple of minutes I thought he could be gone. I went from sleep-haziness to the sudden shock of gritty, terrible, very real fear almost instantly. LogicalMe knew that I still needed to check upstairs but underneath the frantic, screaming MotherBeast was ready to tear the house apart to find my child. A scared voice that’s watched too many crime programs was also whispering in the back of my head They’re going to blame you! They always look at the mother first!

If something were to happen to my child, I’m quite sure it would be MotherBeast who won, and not LogicalMe. I have never been so scared in my life, except in those very first few moments when his body was finally outside of my own, they were giving him oxygen, and I thought he might die. Even that, though, was nothing in comparison with the gut-wrenching terror at the thought of losing the little boy that, even on his worst days, fills my heart with joy. I cannot imagine life without him and even now that I know he’s safe and happy (he was quite pleased with his accomplishment – “I woke up and I went upstairs and I went to Noni and Baba’s bed! It was a treat for my! It was my treat!”), little frissons of remembered fear keep gripping me.

I hate going to doctors.

That conversation yesterday, that I thought I could brush off fairly easily, has lingered. I found myself desperately wanting to EAT EAT EAT! yesterday afternoon, partly because I forgot my high-protein snacks, a mistake rectified today, but also because there was that deep emotional despair that always seems to bubble up around anything medical.

My current GP isn’t that bad. I think she wants very badly to have the Weight Loss Chat with me but hasn’t and I respect that. Her website is very positive and I think that overall, she’s a good doctor. I just hate seeing her. I hate seeing any doctor. I wish I could figure out exactly why…I end up putting off visiting until I’ve got so much stuff going on that I take up too much time (a no-no, I know) but I just don’t want to go. I hate having my blood pressure taken, hate sitting down on that chair/bed and feeling like suddenly I’m a Subject To Be Studied [tm]. I hate every single part of it.

Maybe she doesn’t want to have the weight loss talk with me. Maybe it’s just my perception. I feel like I talk too much or don’t talk enough…like I never manage to say the right thing at the right time. I feel stupid, undereducated, and lumpish.

I had to go to a gynecologist a couple of months back and the nurse took my blood pressure – she managed to get the right size cuff but didn’t support my arm at all, so I think I ended up something like 140/90. “Have you ever had problems with high blood pressure?” she asked me.

What was I supposed to say? That every time I’ve ever had an electronic machine take my BP, it refuses to read it and gets so tight on my arm that it causes me physical pain, so it’s hardly surprising that they get no reading or a high one? That most offices don’t bother to follow correct BP procedures and therefore I do read high…but when they DO follow correct procedures (once or twice in the last four years), it’s normal? That despite all this, no doctor has ever suggested treating me for high BP or discussed it at all? Why? If high BP is so bad, why don’t they follow up if they think mine might be high?

Every time I go to a new practice, I feel like I have to defend myself…and then I have to admit that I don’t currently exercise, that I AM a disordered eater who is working hard at recovery but not there yet…that oh, yes, I have depression, and hypothyroidism, and PCOS, and the laundry list of things that make me SOUND sick but that I don’t feel unhealthy. I’ve had some great GP recommendations from the LJ Fatshionistas but the last thing I want to do is call up a new doctor.

The last thing I want to do is leave work early to take the damn bus to my current doctor, then catch another bus back to where I’ve parked my car, and all because she needs to see me, presumably to tell me to get another thyroid blood test, which will require more hassle and time.

Did I mention the phlebotomist last time who acted like it was my fault that I have tricky veins? I should have had more water the day before. “If I can’t get it in three tries, I have to give up.”

And it all makes me feel fat, unhealthy, ugly, and fundamentally worthless…when that starts, the hypochondria sets in. I’m sure I’m going to drop dead of cancer, or heart disease, or something else that will keep me from seeing my son grow up. I won’t ever go see a doctor about it, mind you, because that would involve, you know, SEEING A DOCTOR but I worry. I get scared. I wake up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, wondering when I’m going to die, wondering what’s going to kill me when it all finally catches up with me.

Wondering if maybe my son wouldn’t be better off without the fat mom who has to play not-scared all the time when inside she’s absolutely terrified.

I don’t hate doctors. I just hate ever having to see one and be reminded of how worthless and small I really am, even though I’m huge.

I’ve been searching for a size-friendly physician in the Seattle area for some time now. My GP has been nice enough but I know that, deep down, she’s desperate to tell me to lose weight. I could deal with that but her assistant has gotten very bad about returning calls (I have asthma and am fat, two risk factors for H1N1, and they never returned my call about getting on the waiting list – no worries, got it through work last week, but still…a doctor should return calls!).

So, last summer I had asked my nutritionist for HAES-friendly docs. She said that many of the doctors that they work with tend to be full but suggested calling a nurse practitioner who works close to my area (North Seattle). I finally got around to calling her today, because of this persistent not-answering issue from my current doctor. “Oh, let me see if she’s accepting new patients,” said the receptionist. I was then transferred through to someone else (office manager?), who said that said nurse practitioner did have appointments available and what was I needing to be seen about?

A thyroid check, replied I, and mentioned that I’d been referred to her by my nutritionist. She asked my nutritionist’s name and then asked if she could ask me a “personal question.” Of course, I told her (doesn’t mean I have to answer, right?”

Did I have an eating disorder?

Yes.

Nurse Practitioner In Question is not accepting new ED patients.

But…that’s not what I want to see her about! Doesn’t that matter?!

She’s not accepting new ED patients.

Even if I’m in recovery and NOT intending to discuss those issues with her?

She is not accepting new ED patients.

BUTBUT!

Yeah.

Well, gee. I don’t think I’ve ever been turned down by a “family practice” doctor because of a specific health issue. What a bloody slap in the face. I’m actually quite shaky now and almost on the verge of tears – this woman offered no other referrals, no reasoning behind the refusal to accept new ED patients, and no sympathy whatsoever.

Even if I could, I wouldn’t see the NP in question.

I also e-mailed my nutritionist to let her know, because I’m doing pretty well in recovery from compulsive eating, all told, and well along my path to intuitive eating. Imagine what hearing THAT could do to someone who wasn’t anywhere near the point I am now, if it’s making me this upset.

And people wonder why fat people don’t go see the bloody doctor more often. Maybe because even if we’re TRYING to get better (those of us who are emotional eaters), we still get slapped in the face.

I don’t talk much about my garden, for this being a journal that looks like it should BE about gardening. It’s becoming appallingly clear, however, that I am a compulsive plant-buyer. I can resist clothes (it’s easy when you’re at the top range of even plus-size stores and 95% of other clothing stores don’t sell your size at all), shoes (wide feet, need I say more?), books (I’ve become extremely picky about my reading material and the library is free!), and even cross-stitch supplies. What I can’t resist are plants…

My sister and I went to one of my favorite local nurseries this weekend. She wanted to buy a plant for my mom. I’ve been looking at the same three plants in my office for a couple of months now and “needed” a trailing plant to set on top of my tallest filing cabinet. Of course, I had to have a look around the main greenhouse and was sorely tempted by any number of other plants. I suppose the nice thing about my gardening situation is that I’m stuck with a deck that gets some morning sunshine (one corner gets afternoon sunshine, but that’s it), so I can’t do plants that need full sun. A lot of flowers are therefore out (I pine for dahlias and roses).

I really miss my balcony garden in Manchester. It was south-facing and I could grow just about ANYTHING.

That’s the veggie end (see the lettuce?)

Flower end, in early spring before the real summer show.

So, for a partial-sun to shade garden, what can one do? Primroses, and Sky had a gorgeous selection that they were setting out. I crave plants like other people crave shoes, or clothes, or makeup. Digging in the dirt and seeing something grow may just be the most remarkable thing in the world. Last spring I intentionally bought quite a few insta-bulbs (bulbs started in plastic pots for replanting in larger containers or the ground) because I wanted my spring planters to come out in color again this year and look the way they did last year, when I first planted them, so:

This has succeeded pretty well, except that my primroses are only just starting to come out and the ones in the store are so PRETTY and BIG and COLORFUL whereas all that’s showing in my pots are little poky bulb shoots about half an inch high and some battered primrose foliage. Also, in one pot they died off completely, thanks to last summer’s heat, during which I was in Syracuse and couldn’t water them. As a result, I feel that I NEED to get more beautiful primroses to plant in those planters anyway. Oh, and let’s not forget the window boxes, which have other bulbs planted that won’t even flower until early summer. They look so bleak…MUST get violas and primroses to plant so that they look nice NOW!

Oh, and they had insta-bulbs on sale! TULIPS!!! Really, tulips like full sun, so they may fail miserably, but FLOWERS!! PLANTS!! NEED!! First-world problems, I have them. Still, plants (and planting) make me feel peaceful. If I only had a couple of really nice, bright windows I’d have orchids, and begonias, and and and…

It’s just as well I don’t have a huge, sunny yard or I’d never have any money ever again.

If you’re looking for donation options for the earthquake in Haiti, Huffington Post has a list of possibilities.

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