Category Archives: Family

Health, Diet, Life: A New Road to Thin

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Many of us have issues with our bodies. Either that keeps us fit or causes us to slip off the diet deep end. I’ve struggled with my weight and eating all my life, even more than my money issues. They seem to be heavily connected.

For starters, I was raised with the notion that it’s the worst thing in the world to not finish all the food on your plate. Leftovers are ok, but my family always overate so leaving any food on the plate just seemed odd. So I grew up somehow assuming that restaurant portion sizes (and parental portion sizes) were what I should be eating. Of course I know better now, but it’s hard to change that mindset.

After spending a week at home with my father calling me fat about 20 times, it continued to upset me when he’d also comment on how I should have “half” of his dessert when we went out to eat. My father, morbidly obese throughout his adult life and now dying of cancer among other things, surely had good intentions — he doesn’t want me to be fat like him. But the way it comes out of his mouth always feels like an awkward jab, not to mention his constant oohing and ahhing over how “good” my sister’s figure looks (girl isn’t exactly healthy but she eats one meal a day, so she’s much thinner than I am.)

What hurts me the most is growing up with no idea why I was gaining so much weight – especially around my mid-section. Whether the PCOS caused my fat or my fat caused the PCOS is a chicken or egg discussion that’s null. The fact of hte matter is my father took me out every week for McDonald’s where he’d let me get two cheeseburgers, supersized fries and a supersized coke, he wouldn’t push me to exercise (“we just aren’t an athletic family”) and then he’d constantly make comments about my weight. It’s sad to think that although I knew my candy and fast-food eating ways weren’t the healthiest, I had no idea HOW unhealthy they were, or that a certain number of calories would make you gain weight. I don’t want to think about how many calories I was eating when I was 6-11 years old, the years I ate those supersized meals.

Regardless of all that, my challenge is facing my eating issues (just as I’ve faced my money issues) without letting my parent’s voices get in my head. Even if it feels like I’ll be losing the weight for them, it’s really for myself — I’m the one who, long after their gone, will be struggling with tons of health problems from all this built up, artery clogging visceral fat. This is really a change in my lifestyle that I needed to make years ago, but I think as I approach 28 (and the curves on my body start looking like they belong on The Biggest Loser) the change is not an option.

Luckily, my boyfriend – also overweight – is committed to getting healthy as well. He’s not going to play any games about it. If I ask him to run with me, he runs (unless it’s in the morning!) I also met a new workout buddy through Craigslist who is getting married in a year, which is great motivation for us to stick to our workouts (I have less than 4 months to lose 40lbs for my high school reunion.)

My commitment for the next month is as follows:

  • Walk/Run *at least* 2 miles 6 days a week
  • Aim for 4-6 miles a day 3 days / week
  • Basic muscle toning workouts 2-3 days / week
  • at any given meal, eat half what i’d normally eat. leftovers are my friend.
  • minimize gluten intake and cut out all sugars except limited whole grains
  • try to eat 5-6 small meals per day (really small)
  • drink 3-6 glasses of water per day

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When Parents are Dying: Coping & Planning

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Death is never a pleasant experience. As I watch my father slip slowly away, I try to come to terms with reality, but since no one in my family has ever learned how to cope with the cruel nature of life, so goes our lack of outward empathy in death. I’ve never had anyone close to me die, and all that’s going to change — whether in a year or five years, I don’t know, but my father’s cancer is back with a vengeance, and regardless of how much I avoid acknowledging reality, the day will come when I won’t see him alive again.

In the meantime, there are arrangements to be made. Uncomfortable arrangements. Who wants to discuss plans for after they part with the world? My mother and I had a brief conversation today about what her plans are in retirement — selfish as she is, with everything always about her, her sadness only formed in confusion over next steps in her life without the normal next steps for a husband and wife approaching retirement.

The question of what happens to her after he’s gone is one I’ve avoided getting deeply involved in. I told her that I don’t want to be the person to help her decide what to do with her finances because I would not feel comfortable telling her to spend or save money that may have some effect on a one-day inheritance for myself or my sister. I’d rather she discuss this with my father, and make her own decisions, or at least with the help of a trustworthy financial adviser.

Meanwhile, at lunch today, she managed to make me feel terrible, though not on purpose, about previously asking whether she’d be willing to contribute some future financial support for the various fertility treatments I’ll likely have to go through one day in order to have children. As my mother has made numerous comments about wanting grandchildren, I don’t expect her to help me financially with treatments, but if she could help when the time comes, it would be appreciated. But today, in front of company, she made some comment about how I said that she “has to help me” with affording having children, which was a very uncomfortable moment, that took its time to set in before later making me extremely upset. She claims she didn’t mean it that way at all, but it was her friend that responded that she really didn’t seem like she wanted to help me in this situation.

But anyway, I digress. The point here is that these things that will come up in the future are my own costs; but it is up to my mother if she wants to help out ever. I don’t want to be the person to ask her or tell her what to do. I apparently shouldn’t even mention these things, as just vaguely mentioning that I’d appreciate her help if it turns out I’ll need costly fertility treatments turns into a huge deal where she clearly doesn’t want to help, she just feels like she has to. I don’t want her help unless she wants to give it. And she never will.

And, at the same time, I deep down do want to “help” my father at this point — even though he’s often cruel to me — and I can’t. It’s always walking on eggshells around him. His reactions are never something you can guess, and with his illness he’s become, justifiably, even more moody. But I question my own motives for wanting to help — perhaps my motives are inherently flawed and narcissistic, after all I’m still just a little girl seeking her father’s approval. Wanting him to feel comfortable confiding in her about his feelings, without actually being emotionally prepared or strong enough to survive what that actually means. For better or worse, he doesn’t want to talk about it. He wants to mope and be depressed on his own, then get angry over little things that don’t matter, to criticize his family, to avoid his own complete lack of control, his life slowly slipping from his hands as his health manages to fail for all his many medical problems unrelated to the cancer, leaving his last years of life filled with discomfort up to pain. I’m a sick person for at some level wanting him to suffer — but not to die, not to suffer and then learn a lesson in taking your depression and issues out on everyone else — and then to go on with life a new person, a nicer person, one who has learned how to care about other people in a way that doesn’t involve control and manipulation. That’s a story that will never play out. The reality is his suffering only going to get worse. I may be here to see it, I may be home on the other coast, hearing detailed stories from a woman who will complain about having to waste her days helping him, feeling guilty for not being here, feeling guilty for not feeling guilty for not being here, and so on.

The practical questions of what will happen to my mother after my father passes away are ones I haven’t been able to ask, for I can’t bring myself to talking to my father about death. I’m even angry at him because had he gone to the doctor regularly they could have probably caught his cancer early, and with prostate cancer it’s usually curable if caught early. But he didn’t want to go to the doctor because of his weight, which also likely increased his risk of getting the cancer.

Here I am at 27, having finally almost come to accept my own future death, but I am not prepared to watch either of my parents go. Not even my father, who was destined to die early with his morbid obesity, diabetes, and other health issues, even before the cancer.

Life is so short, and it’s passing by so quickly. I was miserable throughout my childhood, yet I’m nostalgic for the few moments of happiness, or even boredom, wasting away lazy summer days, with all the time in the world, all the life in the world. And now, it slips, with ends looming behind every corner.

 

 

 

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My Parents Spent $300k to Add On to a $400k House

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After I left home 10 years ago, my parents decided to build a add-on to our house, and redo the entire kitchen. The add on was not decided on to add to the value of the house — it was purely because my parents wanted more space. They wanted a family room which would be open to the kitchen, making the entire area more open and inviting.

Today my dad told me that during the years he was making the most money, was also the years he lost the most wealth. Why? The $150k add on for the house ended up costing somewhere around $300k (he isn’t really sure how much it cost) and then spending elsewhere also added up. He was making $200k + per year, but losing even more than that.

He constantly talks about how he wants to re-do the other rooms in the house. He has grand plans for remaking the master bedroom to have a walk-in closet that would reduce the space in the room, and breaking down the walls of two bathrooms to make one master bath. I asked him if he thinks that would add to the value of the house and he doesn’t care. He just wants to make it look the way he wants. Even though, with only about a million left in the bank, the value of the house should play into some consideration when making changes.

Not that he cares, or should care — as I’ve mentioned before, he’s sick with terminal cancer, and all he wants to do is spend money on the house — on expensive constructive changes, and less expensive decorative costs that still add up. Meanwhile, my mother, who has no concept of the value of money, is likely going to run out of money some point down the line.

I asked my dad — why didn’t you just move to a larger house, if you were going to spend $300k on the addition? You could have sold this house and moved to a $700k house, which in this area gets you a fairly large house. And it would have been probably worth more later because it would have been a newer construction. Not that I’d want them to sell my childhood home, but still, financially that might have made more sense.

That sort of logic doesn’t matter to them, though. It’s not really any of my business, except for worrying about my mother running out of money later in life, and given that my sister is going into a lower-paying field than I am, I’ll likely be footing that bill. I would, of course, help her out if she needs it — but I’d rather help her make smart financial decisions NOW so it doesn’t have to come to that. It’s too bad neither her or my father would ever take any of my advice on these matters.

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A Post About Life, Death, and “Stuff”

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My father worked his entire life taking a train into the city and home, five days a week, with an hour-and-some-odd-long commute and long hours. He earned good money, enough to support an upper middle class life for myself, my sister, and my stay-at-home mom.

He retired early because he was overweight and couldn’t take the commute anymore. A few years later, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The recession hit and his 401k, once nearing $2 Million, was down to below $1M — still a respectable amount for retirement, but not necessarily enough to support his lifestyle, illness treatment, and my mom’s high-maintenance lifestyle.

Three years ago, my father was told he has two years to live. I’m glad he’s outlived that doctor prediction, but the reality is that it’s unlikely he’s going to live for many more years. He doesn’t want to think about that, or believe that, understandably, so while he complains about his slowly depleting bank account, he’s been spending the last year obsessively purchasing stuff to put in our NJ home. It’s actually really sad, as he’s spending lots of money to fast redecorate the entire home, and completely refurnish rooms, because to him, stuff is important, or at the very least a distraction from reality.

He purchased a $3,000 rug for the dining room, he’s bought paintings for thousands of dollars that have questionable value, but he liked them. He wants the house to look like a museum, now that he has time to shop for art. He complains that building on to the family room cost too much money, yet continues to spend. It’s not my place to say anything about his purchases, but the other reality is I’m going to be the one left to deal with my mother when she runs out of money later in life. And I’ll deal with it when the time comes, but all I want to do is teach my parents how to be responsible with money. It’s not a conversation I can have with my father — he’s worked his whole life while barely living and if acquiring “art,” movies and books makes him happy, then he should be able to do this… even if it means my mother is going to have to learn how to live on less or, more likely, run out of money when she’s 80.

I really hope I can live a life where I never get to the end and feel like I need to rush to spend my money buying stuff to fill the emptiness that extends beyond a few white walls. For now, I’ll continue to be surprised by the latest addition to my family “museum” every trip I take home.

 

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We Were Immigrants, We Are American

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As much as my father has a talent for upsetting me, one of the parts of our relationship that I enjoy the most is hearing about our family’s past. I know bits and pieces of both sides of my family, but every time I see my dad a new piece of the story is revealed.

What is incredible about my father’s family of 6 – five brothers and one sister, with my father being the oldest, is that the entire family was filled with successful engineers and mathematicians, despite their parents, both from immigrant families, never having finished high school.

My grandfather was a typical hot-headed Italian, the son of a Slavic Catholic woman who spoke broken English, and an Italian man who disappeared after he was born for unknown reasons. He married my Grandmother when she was very young. My Grandmother, whose parents were Jewish Hungarian and Jewish Polish (I think?) grew up in slightly better circumstances — her parents stayed together, and they lived in the Bronx in a nice apartment, until my father was born and they moved to the suburbs of New Jersey to raise the family.

The story goes, they never had a lot of money, but had many children, likely by accident after the first few. My father came first, then three more sons, a daughter, and one final son. My grandfather worked in a factory building pocketbooks, at some point my grandmother worked as as secretary. My grandmother, always my role model as a very level headed, intelligent woman, put up with a lot from my grandfather — his temper was just one of the issues — there were others, some I know about, some I don’t — and one big gambling problem that almost tore the family apart.

Regardless, the kids went on to varying levels of success. My father was valedictorian of his high school, studied physics for undergrad on scholarship. His brothers and sister became computer engineers, computer scientists, and accountants. He isn’t sure how that happened, as his parents, again, both without high school degrees, certainly didn’t push the kids to do well in school in the same way, say, an Asian Tiger Mom would. These kids figured it out for themselves that in order to have a better life, they needed to take charge of their futures. Perhaps part of it was the baby boomer midset, that the American Dream is possible, and at the time it was. At least for the kids of immigrant families.

The stories of each of the siblings didn’t all turn out perfect. Notably one, the risk taker of the bunch, made his millions and lost them through a variety of business decisions that left him divorced and nearly bankrupt. Others have their own struggles, but I don’t know the half of the stories. Most live in nice houses on the east coast throughout the tri-state area, and have been able to put their children through college.

My mother’s family is a different story, but they also grew up in the lower middle class. I’ll write about her family some other time. It’s my father’s family that fascinates me the most, however, because they were a true immigrant family (well, children of the children of immigrants) — a mix of working class backgrounds — Italian-Slavic Catholic meets Eastern European Jew. In other words, our family were true Americans of that time, representative of those in New York and New Jersey building a better life for themselves.

What do you know about your family’s history? Were they working class, middle class or upper class? If you’re American, when did they come over to the states?

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