Perspective

As a human being, I think I've spent more time on the earth thinking about food or eating food or trying to impact the effects of food than any other activities combined. If I had channeled that energy into virtually any other endeavor, I probably could have come up with a solution to global warming by now. Well, at least discovered a new hobby, one that doesn't include anything edible.

At Weight Watchers, which I've been a member of for about 9 years, the talk is about thinking and motivation and planning. What do you want to achieve by losing weight? Is that a realistic goal? Are your intentions strong enough to make your goal come true? My reason right now, well, one of them, is to lose weight for my kids.

Conventional wisdom says that goals that are about transitory events or centered on others rather than doing something for yourself are doomed to failure. I know that. But my reason is more than just "for my kids," it encompasses a lot of other things. Let me explain.

I recently found a bunch of photos on disc from my old computer and imported them into iPhoto. I found tons of pictures of my husband, my daughter, my cats, and even my old house, but not a lot of me. The ones with me in them show me mugging for the camera (if you suspect you will look horrible, why not purposely look horrible??) There are virtually no pictures of me during my pregnancy. Considering that is a time when I was most at peace with my body, that's fairly ironic. But more to the point, the lack of pictures of me and my kids, besides pointing out that I usually take the pictures in my family, makes it harder for me to be included in the family. What will my children's memories of me be when I am represented by a bunch of mugging, goofy faced pictures, or me hiding under or behind something?

My son was adopted from Nepal (hence my handle, Kath'Aama), and one of the requirements of the Nepali government is an annual report, with pictures, on his life here with us. I have tons of pictures of him, tons with his adoring older sister, and many with both kids and their daddy. With me? Not so many. So every year I really work hard to find even one of me with the kids. Sometimes I have to have one taken on the spot for inclusion (talk about "spontaneous picture"...) Pretty much that is the time when all my shenanigans hiding from the camera or making the worst faces I can totally backfires on me. Is that how I want to be remembered by my kids?

The other interesting thing about my recent introspection is noticing how I looked in the past versus what I am certain I was feeling. Pictures that I once thought cringe-worthy were actually quite nice. Pictures I thought representative of a huge me turn out to be not so chubby. And conversely, times when I thought myself so clever at hiding my girth were not as successful as I thought.

So I think that the goal of feeling comfortable and confident enough to be photographed in order to provide a visual history of my life for my kids is a good goal for me. Just confine the pictures to my face and upper torso...