Yesterday was day 3 of my return to BLE and it was rough. Not rough because it was Labor Day, although it was. I’d prepared for Labor Day and had a plan.
Day 3 was rough because the cravings hit hardest for me around day 3 — and a whallop of stress hit too.
I don’t handle stress very well. It tends to wind me up and then knock me out, leaving me exhausted but also jittery and unable to sleep.
This time, it was because of dogs. Two adorable little black flat-faced pugs. My husband and I lost our beloved pug, Katie, in March. Although she was old and suffering in bad health, it was a huge blow when she suffered cardiac arrest after minor surgery (she’d gotten into garbage and ate things that got stuck in her intestines, heart-breaking). It took us (well, mostly me) months to process the grief.
On Saturday, we got a call that two pugs in St. Louis that we had applied to adopt had had their chosen adopters fall through. Were we still interested? Yes, yes, and yes! I cried, barely able to contain my excitement.
We were thrilled. There aren’t a lot of pugs who come up for adoption and always lots of families want to adopt them. We’d been hunting for an adoptable pug for a month and now here were two in need of a warm, loving home!
We pulled out the dog beds and washed them. Showed photos of the two darlings to our friends and happily received their congratulations. Got the water bowls out. Told my mother we might have to cancel dinner Sunday night. We might need to drive to St. Louis (4.5-hours away) to get our new darling additions to the family.
And then ... nothing. No phone calls from the foster parents asking when we come pick them up. No email updates on the status. I expected to hear something Saturday night (too early, I know). I expected to hear something Sunday afternoon (oddly, nothing). I texted our contact at the pug rescue group (no response). I waited all day Monday for a phone call, a text, an email. Nothing.
This morning, I have no idea what’s going on. Are we still in the running? Did they just take Labor Day weekend off? Or has another family swooped in and taken “our” babies? Did the rescue group find out something about us? I have no idea what — we’ve always spoiled and pampered our dogs but maybe it’s because we have no children of our own, or because we don’t have a backyard?
We heard nothing so my mind was free to invent all sorts of reasons why they hadn’t contacted us. Most of them not good.
I couldn’t relax. I tried reading, but couldn’t concentrate. Tried working, but couldn’t get anything done. Tried watching a movie but ended up ruminating instead. Tried napping but couldn’t stay asleep.
And the whole time, all I could think about was food. How long until lunch? Should I go out for lunch or eat leftovers as planned? What if leftovers didn’t satisfy me and I then couldn’t eat again for hours and hours? I spent all kinds of time planning my dinner. It took too long to arrive and was over too quickly, leaving me with hours until bedtime.
Here I’d made all these plans for a super September, and all I could think about was how easy it would be to just break them for tonight and start over. I just desperately wanted to eat. Something, anything. I didn’t want to take a walk or take a bath or clean something out. Those things weren’t likely to work. Not in the fast, dependable way that sugar and flour do. I didn’t want to drink either — that would just give me a headache and probably make the food cravings worse.
In the end, I broke my quantities lines, eating an extra bowl of blueberries and some shredded what and some popcorn. Not a huge excess of food but enough to calm me down.
It was a compromise, I know. But I’m trying to think of it as a baby step. I could have gone back to the sugar-y snacks. I could have had something made from heaps of flour. I didn’t do either of those. And I eat the extra with my evening meal, so I was too physically full to eat anything else.
I went to bed early, and had terrible dreams, which ended up with me waking up at 5 a.m. with a raging headache.
Here’s what I reminding myself today. For the thousand-th time. There will ALWAYS be stresses. There will ALWAYS be a part of brain that thinks eating sugar and flour to deal with stress is a good idea.
It isn’t. It never is. The cravings never go away. The stress is just part of life.
And eating sugar and flour as a way to deal with stress just doens’t work. Not in the long term and not effectively. The only way to deal with stress is to go through it.
So for today I’m working on feeling the feelings. Of course, I feel stressed that I haven’t heard anything and don’t know where things stand at the moment. That would make anyone who deeply wants a dog and thinks they are in the running for two ideal dogs feel stressed. That’s human and natural and I’m a human.
The best way to deal with the stress is to feel it and then to try all kinds of things to cope with it until I hit upon something that works.
Feel the feelings, try different things and wait for time to heal the wounds. There’s no easy way and it’s the only way through.
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