On December 19th, I threw my remaining three cigarettes down the toilet in our cozy little bathroom. Then, I burst into tears. It was the scariest thing I’ve done, but this weekend marked my two-month mark.
Which brings me to another terrifying benchmark – today.
Today, I started an entry about about I cannot bear that I cringe when I look in the mirror. I started to write about how I sometimes squint to avoid the parts of myself I don’t like, how the gorgeous happy girl that I see in my mind’s eye doesn’t usually translate to the girl I hate facing in the mirror. I tried to write about this problem that’s been pestering me for so long – about how if my dissatisfaction with my reflection is 80% mysterious self-loathing and only 20% actual legitimate weight gain, how do I go about shifting my perception?
I wanted to write about how this, too, can be a disorder – this inability to see things for what they are, instead morphing them into a huge hairy deal that requires breaking down into tears every time another pair of pants doesn’t fit.
About how quitting smoking makes you gain weight, about how living a happy comfortable wintery life with your love makes you gain weight, about how I try so hard to really listen when the people who love me tell me how beautiful they think I am because it’s difficult, see, to separate the impression you make on other people from the impression you make on yourself. And it’s a tough lesson to learn that, ultimately, it’s your own that counts.
So instead of writing about how sick I am of my reflection, of these extra twenty or thirty pounds that have invited themselves to stay on my tummy and hips, instead of writing how terrified I am to open myself up to the reality of feeling overweight, I decided to do something about it.
Actually, make that a “we”. Stuart, for his own reasons as well as for reasons of being heartbroken every time he sees me break down in front of the mirror, has decided to join Weight Watchers with me. And looking back at Deb’s first step, and her honesty that inspired me, I know that this could be a very good thing.
And good things, good decisions, I’m starting to learn, are a little terrifying. I’m terrified about being really open and honest with Stuart (and the, uh, internet) about my body image, because I’ve got this immature notion that talking about feeling overweight will lead to other people seeing me that way. I’m terrified that what seems to work for everyone else will categorically not work for me. I’m terrified to admit that I’m unhappy about something, to suddenly get branded as someone “fixing” something about themselves, rather than the carefree, happy-go-lucky Krissa that other people so often see. Mostly, I’m terrified of my historical lack of strong willpower, that’s lead me into everything from bad-choice relationships to that last bar at 3 AM. I’m terrified of admitting there’s a problem and standing up to fix it.
But when I told Stuart, on a whim on a lazy Sunday morning, that I couldn’t believe I was this afraid of quitting smoking, that I couldn’t believe I’d just said, “maybe I’m not strong enough for this”, well, there was no turning back. Once I’d admitted being that scared, there was nothing to do but try it, but face it, but DEAL with it.
So, here I am, dealing with it. I figure, everything else about life has gotten easier, more manageable, with Stuart at my side. Why not this? I figure, this is the rest of my life I’m looking at. And while it’s a little exhausting to imagine dieting for the rest of my life, it’s just as exhausting to imagine avoiding reflective surfaces and cringing at photographs.
And mostly, I figure spending two and a half months learning how to eat smaller healthier portions seriously beats the ever loving FUCK out of crying in front of the mirror from now into eternity.

Last night was amazing in the way that nights like last night are amazing if you’ve lived in New York long enough (because if you’ve lived in New York long enough, you’ve had weeknights that end at 3:30 AM when you finally leave the tenth bar of the night and pour yourself and your stilettos into a cab and you seriously keep it together in the swerving dodging car and drunkenly text people and by people I mean exboyfriends and you’re so drunk and exhausted when you get home that you barely notice your roommate has that weird stinky guy over and even though you hear him ANSWER HIS CELLPHONE while he’s having sex with her, you just don’t care because you’re stumbling to the bathroom to throw up roughly seven cosmopolitans and in the morning, you realize that there’s a slow trail of your clothes and belongings from the front door to your bed and WHAT, you’ve never had that night?!)
So last night was amazing in the way that can only really been amazing if you’ve been in that bar/cab/bedroom. Because Stuart met me at the subway station at 6:30, after my post-work coffee with Kate, and we walked to Key Food where, for some reason, I wasn’t in my usual run-around-by-stuff-Type-A sort of mood. We wandered up and down the aisle, we danced around in the deli line, I squealed when I found my favourite pickles, and after 20 minutes, we left with everything we needed for BLTs.
That’s right – we went home and made bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches on baguettes. Only mine had cheddar and mustard and his had salad cream. I drank two glasses of a mediocre bottle of medoc, and Stuart experimented with some boutique IPA. While he cooked the bacon, I did half the crossword in New York Magazine, and then while I cleaned up, he did the other half. Which means our cooking-cleaning conversations, from kitchen to dining room table, went something like this:
K: “Dude, I can’t get this one. Blowgun missile, D something something something?”
S: “Uh, dart.”
K: “That was obvious, huh.”
S: “Yeah.”
S: “Oscar winner, ’76, ’84, ’98? It’s something, A, C, K, something, I..”
K: “something, ACKI, something..?”
S: “Oh, Jack Nicholson?”
K: “Yeah, for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Terms of Endearment, and As Good as it Gets.”
S: “Whoa.”
K: “Kruschev’s first name?”
S: “No idea.”
K: “Nikola?”
S: “Doesn’t work.”
K: “NIIII-CO-LAAAAA.”
S: “It’s not Nikola.”
K: “OH, NIKITA.”
S: “You sure that’s not his wife?”
K: “Shut up.”
After dinner, we watched Alias and during the commercials, I talked his ear off about last season’s cohesive plotline that’s FINALLY come back to roost (can I get a what-what for Sark reappearing? WHAT-WHAT.) and told him all about the Rimbaldi plotline and why Sloane is such a bad-ass turncoat. I watch Alias not just because it’s a decently good show and Michael Vartan is HOT and I love the daddy-daughter plotlines, but also because I have lost Buffy and my soul deeply misses the sight of girls kicking serious ass so Alias is all I have left to hold on to, damnit.
So the thing about making BLTs for dinner and watching Alias and doing the crossword is, it’s the kind of thing you can do in any city which begs the question, if you live in New York City and stay home on winter nights to eat BLTs and watch Alias, do you really deserve to live in the city? And what I’m saying is, I need to be able to shun the drunken bright lights and stay at home with my baby and eat BLTs and watch Alias and do the crossword, because I know that if 2 AM rolls around and I need to throw down, I can go to a club. Or, you know, order Thai. Whatever.
So that’s what was amazing about last night.
Plus, homemade BLTs rock my face right the hell off.

Yellow Rose of Texas is what my Texan grandparents called me when I was little. That was my song, they said. Even finding out that it was probably about Santa Ana’s kept woman hasn’t diminished how much I love hearing it, because it makes me think of Poppa and Deedee, and my real Texan roots.
Maybe this is the point where I should introduce my Texan grandparents. No, not my Belgian/Irish grandparents or my Greek grandparents. They, sadly, have all passed away. These are my Texan grandparents, and they shall henceforth be known as Poppa and Deedee. As you can tell if you know elemental genetics and/or math, Poppa and Deedee aren’t my real grandparents. Maybe not everyone is lucky enough to get a third set. I am.
Poppa and Deedee have known my parents since right before I was born. Sixth generation Texans, and fourth generation Aggies. Poppa got a Purple Heart at Normandy. Deedee bore him four sons, a couple years apart each. Their sons started having sons. So when my parents met them in Argentina, in 1980, and my mother had a baby girl, Poppa and Deedee went nuts over me. When my mother took to the hospital five months later, Poppa and Deedee helped look after me. And since both Dad and Poppa worked for Exxon, our lives intersected in Texas. They called me their “only” granddaughter. I soaked it UP.
My whole life, then, Poppa and Deedee have considered me one of their grandkids. Every year, no matter where we were living abroad, they sent me a birthday care package with colorful fun clothes, great little accessories (my grandmother understood the value of a good purse to a ten year old) and candy. When I stayed with them, in College Station, they’d take me to nearby attractions (tiny ponies!), Poppa would walk me to the playground. When I needed help on a WWII project in the eighth grade, Poppa generously offered to be the subject of my biography. They gave me a “Texan Passport” that I still have, with an option to check “Aggie” or “Longhorn”. They checked “Aggie”. They sent me a sweatshirt, once, that said “FUTURE AGGIE” on it, and joked that I was going to marry their grandson, Jason. I totally wanted to, too, when I was eight and he could walk backwards and I was pretty sure that he was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.
I never knew my real grandparents, either side, very well. But I knew Poppa and Deedee. And for someone with an already dwindled number of frequently-seen family members, they were the best fake grandparents I could have asked for. They’re getting older, these days. Poppa isn’t moving around a lot and Deedee is having surgery soon. But when I call to update them on life, to chat, to see how they’re doing, they still exclaim happily to hear from me, still call me “Christina” with that beautiful Texan twang, still tell me they love me, and still call me their first granddaughter, even though now they’ve got two real granddaughters and a GREAT granddaughter.
So, while I’m looking forward to our trip to Texas for a variety of other reasons – showing Stuart around my teenaged stomping grounds, introducing him to some of my best friends in the world, the better weather and the big highways and the great IHOPs and everything – what I’m looking forward to the most is seeing Poppa and Deedee again. Introducing them to my wonderful husband, hugging them a lot, helping my grandma in the kitchen and listening to Poppa’s old stories about Texas A&M.
I’m looking forward to being their grown-up first granddaughter. Even though she didn’t go to A&M and she didn’t marry Jason, I know they’ll be pretty happy to see how she’s turned out.

Now that it’s no longer Valentine’s Day and that sappy banner has been taken down, I’m free to tell you about our night (HA LOOPHOLE GREG HA).
But before I do, I should say that my last three valentine’s days were spent
2002: with a tumultuous (read: crazy) ex boyfriend
2003: watching a guy (that had 24 hours prior told me how VERY much he liked me) hook right the fuck up with his ex-girlfriend who’d dumped him a month before
2004: having a lovely dinner with Biscuit but returning home to sit on the couch, nurse my bloody feet (stilettos + february = BAD), eat popcorn and watch the Princess Diaries on TV because all of my nearest and dearest were getting wooed and laid
so it’s not entirely surprising that I’m dubious of the value of such a holiday that encourages people to wear stilettos in winter or go out with exactly the wrong guy or hang out with exes and put yourself in the risk field for Pity Sex.
That said, this year was rather different, and even though that takes away my oh-so-trendy cynical edge for complaining, I am clinging to the fact that Stuart and I did very little differently from any other romantic night in, and we didn’t buy each other expensive gifts or enormous flowers. We cooked four different amuse-bouche type dishes for each other, spending two happy and messy hours in the kitchen, trading bits of each other’s meals and making up new delicious ways to eat bread and olive oil.
Then we settled onto the living room floor to drink champagne and eat our treats, and we spent several happy hours lounging around, listening to Ella and talking about love.
I think my favourite moment of the night, though, was when Stuart came out of the bedroom looking very dapper in a button-down, tie, and slacks, and then immediately tied on the “I Don’t Do Dishes!” apron and got cooking. That was pretty much the hottest moment of 2005 so far.

To illustrate a point (and just in case you think that I think that I’m made of solid gold), here are ten things I’ve done in the past 24.5 years that I’m really not proud of.
1. When I was six or so, I threw my only public tantrum in a Macy’s in New Jersey, because I was desperate for their Christmas Snoopy. The problem was, my mother had already bought it for me and put it under the tree, so she had to say no. I sat down and cried. My mother, as I recall, used the “start to walk away” tactic, which worked suprisingly well.
2. Every couple of years, we got a new dog. Every couple of years later, the dog passed away. Every time we got a NEW one for me, the deal was I’d take care of it. I’d feed it, I’d wash it, I’d walk it, I’d be its owner. And every time, my parents found themselves taking care of a dog because all I ever wanted to do with it was play. I now know that my parents aren’t even really dog people, and they only got them time after time because I loved dogs so much.
3. My brother Luiz, to my memory, has shown displeasure with me exactly one time in the history of ever. I must have been about 10 or 12, during one of our summer visits, and I was bugging him to take me to McDonald’s on our way to something important. He turned and said, “CHRISTINA. Stop it. We’ll go later.” He doesn’t even remember it, that’s how tiny the moment was. And the only reason it sticks in MY memory is because that was it. Just that once. If that doesn’t deserve sainthood, I don’t know what does.
4. In the eighth grade, I lost my english textbook. Later that day, I found another one underneath a lunch table, so, knowing that Mrs. Lacy was going to check books that afternoon, I took it and wrote both my and her names on the front inside cover. That was construed as forgery. I was sentenced to two days in In-House Detention (CDC, they called it in Texas) among the common class-skipping dope-smoking car-scratching criminals of my middle school. I was terrified when my dad found out from the principal. He reacted with surprising cool and even took me a long soul-searching walk along the bayou, trying to figure out why I’d done it instead of just telling them I’d lost the book and asking for the money for a replacement. My only explanation was that I didn’t want to get in trouble, which seemed ironic in retrospect.
5. My main chores, when we lived in the US, were to clean the surface of the pool, feed and pick up after the dog, keep my room clean, and empty the dishwasher. I complained incessantly about every single one of these tasks, and could frequently be found hiding in my room reading a book instead of doing them. I don’t know how my parents put up with me as a teenager, actually. All I ever did was flirt with boys, read, and complain.
6. My parents were constantly bargaining with me for the good grades they knew me capable of. One weekend at the boy-crazed age of sixteen, I was under our family’s version of “academic probation”… I would only be allowed to see my boyfriend if my math teacher signed a note saying I’d done well that week. So on Friday, knowing that Mr. Wilson would do no such thing, my friend Marnix forged the note. On the following MONDAY morning, my mother handed me the note over breakfast, correctly pointing out that Marnix had forged that, and that while she’d let it slide for my free weekend because, “clearly you were SO desperate that you’d do something this obvious,” but that I’d have to tell my father all on my own and face the consequences. Faced with a trembling confession from his daughter, my dad went surprisingly light on me and told me not to lie again. Unfortunately, I’m sure I didn’t learn. Yet.
7. In college, I ran out of my semester’s allowance two months early, and had to ask for a loan. I paid it back with the money I earned from being a mother’s helper that summer, and I think it was the first instance of me actually paying BACK the money I had to ask for to cover yet another fiscal irresponsibility.
8. I got a speeding ticket in Virginia in 2000, and didn’t want to tell my parents because then I’d have to pay it and our insurance would go up. A year later, my father found the ticket shoved in the back of the Honda’s glove compartment. Boy, THAT was a fun conversation. Y’know, to match all the other phone calls that started with, “Krissa? We just got another Bronxville PARKING TICKET NOTICE IN THE MAIL.” Feigning innocence wasn’t even an option anymore.
9. While at a friend’s house in Providence, before my parents moved there, I found out I had a function to attend and needed a formal dress. I had about 200 bucks in cash on me for the entirety of my visit, on a Friday, and Mom told me to run to the mall, open a charge account, and buy something inexpensive. Well, after three hours of feeling ugly in absolutely everything I tried on, I found a chiffon black cocktail dress at Bebe that looked stunning. I didn’t even care about the 178 dollar price tag. I didn’t care that they didn’t have charge accounts. I was so desperate to not hate myself in the mirror anymore that I bought it. And it meant that my mother spent three hours on a Friday, frantically running around Houston, trying to get that huge sum of money back into my hands so that I wouldn’t be broke for the rest of the trip, on a dress she hadn’t approved and would NEVER have spent as much on for some stranger’s graduation. When I was stable enough to accept the criticism, she LIT INTO ME for that little stunt. The good news is, I got about three years’ worth of mileage out of that beautiful dress.
10. I maxed out a credit card by 2002 and when the collectors came around a full year later, I was ready to strike a payment deal with them for the full amount – just over a thousand dollars. My mother knew about it because they’d called Rhode Island looking for me, and when I crafted the deal, I consulted her, asking that she not tell Dad because “he’ll just get mad” and I knew I had to handle this myself. That evening, my father called and said, “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” She’d told him, and he offered to pay it off and then take checks-in-advance from me, to be cashed every month on a specific day until the debt was paid. I humbly accepted, and just finished paying him off in September.
The interesting thing I’ve gathered by writing these stories down is, my parents were both incredibly patient and incredibly fair to me, no matter what I did, which was considerable. These are just the surface sins, the petty annoyances, the stories I can remember, the stories we all laugh about now. I also spent a large chunk of the past decade being snarky, snappy, unavailable, and ungrateful. But if you ask them, and even if you DON’T, I’m the greatest person in the history of civilization. I’m their baby, the apple of their eye, and I’m not even sure I deserve their love half the time. And that’s the thing about parents and love.
It’s often how much they love you at your absolute worst, at your absolute most mistaken, misjudged, misbehaved. How much they repeat the same valuable lessons over and over again, and how much they don’t go crazy when it takes you ten years to start exhibiting signs of having been listening.
The past few years, I think I’ve finally started to understand and appreciate the enormity of my family’s love for me. I’ve started thinking of the right way to give it back, starting thanking them for their help, started accepting my share of the chores, started to participate as an adult in my family. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I can start making up for all the time I spent being stupid and making mistakes that broke their hearts and drove them nuts.
But the cool thing about family is, it’s not really about those things. The amazing thing about family is, they really mean it when they say “I love you no matter what.”
Even if the “what” in question is all the dogs, the speeding tickets, the laundry I never did, the dishwasher I never emptied, the phone calls I never returned and the chores I willfully ignored, the bounced checks and maxed-out cards, and who could forget the FORGERY?