Page 58 of Canadian Boyfriend

“My inner voice is telling me to keep making out with him.”

She laughed. “OK. You want to talk about this some more, or do you want to move on? I have in my notes from last week that you wanted to turn our sessions more toward food?”

I did. We’d spent our first several sessions talking about my past. Then we’d talked a fair bit about my scaling back the usual Christmas plans. We hadn’t delved into my food issues yet. “I’ve gained two pounds this month. I’ve now put on a total of eleven pounds since the summer.”

“And I would say to you that that’s OK.”

“It doesn’t feel OK.” My inner voice was loud and clear on that topic.

“I know. Andthat’sOK. Let’s start by thinking about food as morally neutral.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no such thing as good food or bad food, and you aren’t good or bad because you did or did not eat certain food.”

I blew out a breath.

“It can be hard to wrap your brain around that if you’ve been at war with food your whole life,” she said gently.

“I was thinking of this time Mike told me that failing at ballet wasn’t a moral failure.”

“That’s a great insight.”

“When he said it, I believed it. All of a sudden, it shifted my thinking. But that’s not happening here, even though I hear what you’re saying. I get that I’m not supposed to be dieting. And I truly want to get over my issues with sugar. But I still want to stay in shape. Is that so bad?”

“Of course not, but I want you to interrogate what you mean by staying in shape. Is that just a less overt way of saying thin?”

“I… don’t know.” It was, but saying so would make me feel shallow.

“I hear you saying that you want to be OK with not being thin. But Ialsohear you saying that you want to be thin because being thin is better than not being thin.”

I started crying.

Holy cow, therapy was a lot of work. It sometimes felt like my brain was simmering away, and then suddenly, with no warning, it would boil over. I guess that meant it was working. We talked some more, and by the time I left I felt lighter—metaphorically speaking.

When I got back to the house, Mike Martin was splitting wood. Drawn by the sound of the ax, I walked around the side of the house. And there he was in his T-shirt, doing his lumberjack thing.

He stopped when he saw me.Click-click-click.“Hey. What are you doing tonight after teaching?”

It was December 27, and it was a Tuesday, so I had my usual run of afternoon classes, though they were liable to be poorly attended. Lots of kids, like Olivia, were out of town.

“Nothing.” Well, I was going to try to eat a full-size slice of pie and truly believe it was a morally neutral activity, but that was all I had on my agenda.

“Are you up for an adventure?”

I so was. “Yes!”

“OK, I’ll pick you up after class.”

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Should I just meet you back here? If you pick me up, we’ll have to leave my car at the studio.”

“That’s all right. We’ll pick it up later.” I made a confused face, and he said, “Come on. My kid’s gone, and I’m on vacation. What else am I going to do? Throw a guy a bone.”

I grinned. “OK.”

---