My ambivalence towards my body began sixty years ago, though I did not immediately become aware of it.  I spent a long time in the hospital and home recuperating before my second birthday.  At the time, the doctors told my parents that I suffered from “acute bacterial something something”.  The diagnosis prompted them to drain my swollen joints and fill me with Tetracycline two years before the state-of-the-art cut-off date for the class action that would later result from the damage to children given the drug.

Just my luck.  As a consequence of their wild misunderstanding of what ailed me, my teeth suffered irreversible damage along with my bones and my psyche.

For the first eighteen years, I struggled to understand my body’s limits.  When I finally realized that societal acceptance ranked chief among the doors closed to me, I set about to destroy myself with alcohol, imprudent alliances, and fried foods.  I came to my senses nearly too late, but pulled the brakes so that by the time I started law school in 1983, I had regained my slight stature and substituted lawful prescription painkillers for single malt scotch.

I reached my personal peak at 42.  Divorced, with a six-year-old and a thriving law practice, I sashayed around Kansas City like the cat fixing to eat several canaries.  Unbeknownst to me, the virus which had eluded the doctors in 1957 had plans for me, the foreshadowing of which had come a decade earlier when I collapsed in the hallway of the Jackson County Criminal Courts building.  We didn’t know then what we would figure out in 2000 after struggling to make sense of inexplicable symptoms.  The cursed virus had reactivated and would rule my life for eternity.  It refused to sleep.  It had mutated.  It reigned supreme.

So it went for the next fifteen years.  Struggle with pain, up the Percoset, retreat, eat, repeat.  I soared from 105 to 185 between 2001 and 2007.  My artificial knee locked and the doctor rolled his eyes and commanded me to lose forty pounds.  I committed myself to 1200 calories a day, and threw aside my love-hate relationship with my body.  I no longer cared that nobody thought I was worthy of introducing to their guy-friends or that my second husband had left me for someone presumably more fun and maybe even able-bodied.   If I was to live, I had to be thin.

Eventually, I got down to 103.   I felt good about myself.  I let myself eat bread.  Bread.  Hell, I put chocolate back in my diet.  I dared to wear close-fitting dresses.  Then marriage number three came and everything seemed to come up roses.

Until it didn’t anymore.  Suffice it to say that this one hit me even harder.    As with any crisis, I responded to the decampment of my third husband by assuming that everything was my fault.  I apologized to the empty air ad nauseum, and started the yo-yo craziness of feast and famine.  I didn’t eat for six months and then started filling my empty hours with food.  The pounds piled around my belly, thickened my arms, and pulled at my face.  By this time, I had successfully conquered my prescription drug dependence so pain had once again become the lingering guest who flicks his ashes on the floor and plonks his muddy boots on the coffee table.  I skirt around the unwelcome but persistent presence.  My weight climbed to 125.  At five-foot three-and-a-half inches, with wobbly legs and a weak torso, those extra 20 pounds sent me crashing to the floor so many times that my friends started suggesting one of those call buttons that old ladies wear.

Uh, no.

So I put myself back on 1200 calories a day, not because I care how much I weigh but because I care if my son comes to visit someday and discovers me at the foot of the stairs with a broken neck.  This actually happened to someone I know.  Her husband and habitual companion died.  Childless, friendless, she struggled to continue her life in a two-story house with a basement laundry.  A neighbor found her unconscious on the concrete floor two or three days after her last fall.  She never awakened.

I’m down to 114 now.   That weight’s okay; but 110 would put me below “okay” and solidly on safe ground.   I can’t say I feel much better about myself, except a certain underlying smugness that at sixty-one, disabled, and asthmatic, I’m nonetheless able to shed ten pounds with sheer determination.  And 1200 calories a day.  So I’m not complaining.

It’s the fifteenth day of the forty-first month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.