and a very happy christmas to you

It is Christmas Eve, and I wake up in a cold sweat.

My mother died. She was dead. She died in my dream, and I was sad.

I am alone in our bed. The Mr. is at work until noon. I sit up and try to orient myself. It is Christmas Eve. The Mr. is at work. My mother is not dead.

I am groggy as I stumble down the stairs and into the shower. Under the hot water, I stare numbly at the tile for too long, and when I finally get out and look at a clock, I swear. I don't have time to find my heaviest outfit. I'm already running late.

It's Christmas Eve and Christmas music is playing cheerily on the radio in my car as I drive. I pull into the coffee shop drive through and order a soy latte, two splendas. Then I cross the road and park.

The office building is deserted, but Christmas lights twinkle behind closed blinds. I push the elevator button because no one is around to see me, and I don't mind waiting. I hear the gears rumbling around for what seems like ages before the doors finally open. A rail thin teenage boy emerges and pushes abruptly past me. He doesn't look back.

The back wall of the elevator is one giant mirror. As usual, I scrutinize my legs and wonder why on earth a treatment center for eating disorders would have such a mirror in the elevator.

The waiting room is full of various couches surrounding coffee tables covered in puzzle pieces. I sit down at the Van Gogh puzzle and try to find a missing piece of yellow sky. I try a hundred pieces, but I can't find the right one. I can't stop thinking about how my dream self fell apart when my mother died.

My dietitian calls me in, and I try not to look guilty. It's been, what? Three weeks?

"How are you?" She says.

"Great!" I say with fake cheerfulness.

"I talked to Molly. I hear you tried pasta?"

I have a second of panic. Did Molly tell her that I ate pasta so she wouldn't know how much I really weighed? Did I tell Molly that? I can't remember. My mind is foggy with lingering grief from a dream.

"Oh yeah..." I manage lamely.

"And how was that? How did you feel about it?"

I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

It's Christmas Eve, and I sit in my dietitian's office and talk about how I felt eating pasta. Then I have to talk about how I felt about eating pizza last night. She asks how many pieces I ate.

"One." I say.

I ate four.

"They were square cut." I add quickly. I'm not sure if I'm trying to justify my decisions to her or myself.

She nods and scribbles on her notepad, and I think for the millionth time that this is ridiculous.

She asks if I ate anything else afterwards.

"No." I say.

I ate candy afterwards.

I don't know why I'm lying.

Yes I do. It's shame.

She takes my weight. I step off the scale and put my boots back in, watching as she silently writes the numbers down where I can't see.

"What was my weight?" I finally ask, irritated.

She hesitates, her disapproval obvious. "107. So it's down."

I try to look repentant, but I walk out smiling.

...

It's Christmas Day, and I wake up in the early hours of the morning. I haven't been this excited about Christmas in a very long time. I lay awake, giddy, until I finally wake the Mr. up at a semi-reasonable time. We spend the morning opening gifts, drinking coffee, and eating the cinnamon roll pancakes I made. I told the dietitian I'd only eat one.

I eat two.

We Skype with my family to open our gifts from them. My mother bought me a navy blue peacoat I wanted. I put it on, and it fits perfectly. I model it for them, and I am pleased at how thin I look. I hope my mother notices. I hope she sees.

The Mr. and I brave the snowy outside world to go for a walk. Everything is quiet. The kind of muffled, subdued quiet that snow brings. The only noise is the monotonous scraping of a neighbor shoveling his sidewalk. We are quiet too, both lost in our thoughts of home. I know he's homesick before he says it. He misses his family every day, but holidays are the hardest. I miss them too, but they live fifteen minutes from my family. And my sanity is already fragile.

By the time we get back, my cheeks are burning with cold and my legs are numb, but I feel good. I feel alive. I feel free to eat Christmas candy, and so I do.

For dinner we have an assortment of fancy cheese and wine. It is two glasses of wine later that I end up sitting completely clothed in the dry bathtub and crying.

The Mr. finds me and simply climbs right in next to me. There is a myriad of explanations I could give. I ate so much food today. I miss being with his family. I hate myself because I'm so horribly fat. I dreamed that my mother died, and I was sobbing...

Instead I tell him that I looked up information on adopting a child and how I found out that they check your mental health records. 

Which makes perfect sense. They don't want mentally unstable people adopting a child. 

Mentally unstable people like me.

So I sit in the bathtub and cry because I can't adopt a little girl from Thailand and save her from being sold into prostitution and I probably wouldn't be a good mother anyways because I'd probably turn into my mother and I'm getting old and I don't want to be an old mother and I keep finding myself picturing a baby with the Mr.'s blue eyes and curly hair and I'm afraid I'll never get to meet that baby...

The Mr. just rubs my back and calmly says all the right things. This is not the first time I've had a breakdown in the bathtub, and we both know it probably won't be the last.

...

It's just past midnight. Christmas is officially over, but I am still awake. There were too many words in my head for sleep. 

There are five days left in 2013. I have eleven days left to be twenty-six. 

I started this blog in January of this year, and it became a chronicle of my spiral down, down, down. I'm not sure if I've hit rock bottom or if I have further to fall. Am I moving upwards or downwards still? I don't know. 

All I know is that I can not wait to leave this year behind.

So Merry Christmas one hour too late, and thank you. Some of you know me and most of you don't. But all of you have helped me struggle through the worst year of my life. And I could never thank you enough for that. 

It's the day after Christmas, and I am still alive.