Free The Weight-loss Diaries by Courtney Rubin

to use eating as a delay tactic. As my grandmother would say, I have to eat, don’t I? So as long as I’m eating, I don’t have to do anything else.
    If I don’t have to work—and often, even when I do—I’ll spend hours with the Sunday New York Times . I usually sit in the Xando coffee bar two blocks away and read it, often looking over at the muffin and cake display cases, considering having something and usually wanting everything. I envy the ease with which other people seem to linger over their coffee and cake, apparently forgetting about the cake for entire sections of the paper. I rarely manage to put my fork down unless there’s nothing left.
    Sunday is also my evening for catching up on phone calls, always to my grandmother and then to my parents. Unlike my sister, who is frequently accused of making snap decisions and then regretting them, my parents seem to think I have it all together. Diana often cries when frustrated, now admits she chose her college almost randomly, and has had the more typical twenty-something’s career trajectory—job hopping while she figures out what she really wants to do.
    While in high school, I started working at our hometown newspaper, plugging away at my dream of being a writer. Maybe because I’ve done things
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    my parents might not have chosen for me—gone far away from home to college, then decided against graduate school and instead headed for a decidedly nonlucrative, nonacademic career—I’ve always worked hard to edit my tales of what’s going on. “I know exactly what I’m doing” is the message I’m trying to get across—that and “You don’t understand.” Apparently, I’ve been such a ruthless editor—done such a good job of convincing them—that they rarely question my choices anymore, which makes me feel more like an imposter and more alone than ever. When I venture that I might be floun-dering at any number of things in my life, my parents don’t seem to know what to say. Now they really don’t understand. For them, my problems seem to be a surprise ending for which they’ve had not a hint of foreshadowing.
    They give me the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head and tell me how well I’ve done in the past and that they never worry about me because of that.
    Nice, but not helpful.
    Since my father isn’t often home and rarely answers the phone when he is, mostly it’s my mother I talk to when I call, and maybe that’s why I get so upset. You’d think after all these years I could accept that she’s never going to be the sort of mother you call at least once a day to report on anything and everything, or even the sort of mother you call to ask what you should wear to dinner at so-and-so’s house or what you should write on a condolence card. But I can’t. Since the surgeries, my mother’s attention span has gotten shorter and shorter, to the point where these days conversations with her last ten minutes, maximum. She tells me what she’s watching on television, and I try not to get annoyed and frustrated by her second-by-second update of the latest Danielle-Steele-book-turned-Lifetime-movie. I try desperately to think of something we can talk about for more than thirty seconds, but for the most part my mother doesn’t participate in normal conversational give-and-take. She waits for me to finish speaking, then says something unrelated, or nothing at all. It isn’t that she’s rude—only that she can’t concentrate.
    Still, it’s my instinct to call my mother when something goes horribly wrong or wonderfully right, times when I want my mother—want a mother.
    My pre-call hope that maybe this once I’ll get what I want—what I need—
    from her is what makes these conversations even worse than they might be.
    She won’t be excited, and I’ll feel deflated. Or she won’t be upset or outraged, and I’ll become more so.
    By some bizarre quirk of brain or scalpel, there are a few stories in my