And apparently we need to lose some weight.

I finally saw one of the Queen Latifah commercials for Jenny Craig. I’d been bracing myself for them, because I have really mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I was tempted to jump out of my seat and shout, “TRAITOR BITCH!” at the television and then shove a forkful of cheesecake in my mouth in a really pissed-off way for emphasis. She is The Queen. The final word on living large and looking good while doing it. She’s smart, funny, articulate, down-to-earth and dripping with glamour. It would be hard to watch her turn skinny on us. Our heroine, melting away. If our leader of the fat girls is bailing, then who do we have left? Mo’Nique? I’m sorry but she’s the anti-model for the overweight. She doesn’t make you stop and say, “Hell yeah, I’ll have another margarita.” She makes you kind of want to go purge the margarita you’ve already drunk and then go jog around the block. Not really the picture of health to me. So, who then? Emme? She’s too QVC to take seriously. So, it’s back to The Queen.

When she told us that it was OK to embrace our curves and be who we are, we listened and applauded and stuffed our breasts into her Curvation Limited Edition bras for the cure. Now she’s telling us we need to lose some weight and get healthy and I for one am skeptical of her method, but listening to the message.

Her commercials have a different slant (as I’m sure you’ve heard), touting a healthy lifestyle rather than the aesthetics of weight loss. I’m all for that. But, when I did Jenny Craig after the birth of my second child, their food was loaded with preservatives and artificial sweeteners. Back then, cooking wasn’t an option on the JC program. You bought their pre-packaged food and ate it at their intervals (supplementing with your own salad greens and their dressing) or you drank their meal replacement shakes and supplemented with your salad greens (and their dressing). Then when you met your goal, they smiled, handed you a cookbook and sent you home to fend for yourself. If I were doing Jenny Craig commercials, it would have worked to sell people on a different weight loss program. Now here I am cooking this delicious meal of baked salmon, butter and herb couscous, and tossed salad with home-made vinaigrette for my family, and lookie! I get to eat something called “Cookout Style Chicken & Beans” that I just pop into the microwave. In other words, I didn’t find Jenny Craig to be compatible with the life I was leading. I did lose weight on it, though, I cannot deny that.

The truth is, I’ve been plotting my own lifestyle changes. This has been a scheme underway for quite some time. I just needed the right time to commit to it, and that time was approaching quickly anyway.

In the past three or so years I: got pregnant, had a c-section, found out my belly was torn to shreds by that baby and left me with THREE abdominal hernias, had them repaired, ripped the mesh out of one of them, had that repaired, and then was on paxil for two months after my mother died which led to another 7 pound weight gain added onto that pregnancy weight I never lost to begin with. I am coming up on one year after that last operation. The one year mark is really important because it means I am 100% healed. I plan on seeing my doctor the first week in April before I proceed with my plans, just to make completely sure that everything is healed.

If I get the green light, then I will be enrolling back in tae kwon do. That’s my exercise goal. Go to tae kwon do and work through the belts. Lots of short-term goals in there, but my long-term goal will be that coveted belt noir that I almost earned seven years ago, but then had to move. If I can’t do tae kwon do, then I will need to find another exercise outlet. Maybe yoga. Maybe Curves. I don’t know yet.

My first weight loss goal is to get down to my pre-paxil weight. My second will be to get to my pre-pregnancy weight. That’s a total of 15 pounds. I’ll reassess after that. Keep in mind that I’m not The Queen. There will be no truth or honesty here. Don’t expect any real numbers or photos posted to document my progress. I’m not planning on keeping you all updated on this, unless some funny or shocking stories happen along the way. I’m just a chicken-shit with a pasty white blubber belly behind a Powerbook, after all. I do not want to be a MILF, but rather a “Mother I’d Like to Ride a Bike With,” or maybe a “Mother I’m Not Embarrassed to Be Seen at the Beach With.”

So, Your Majesty, you asked us in the fatty bourgeois to follow you in your quest for better health and a lower BMI and I will. If you’ve determined it’s the time to put down the fork and lace up our walking shoes, then I’m with you. But, I’m doing it differently, because, slap me for saying this, I think the whole Jenny Craig thing is a gimmick, one that will eventually come back to bite you in your shrinking ass later on. A year down the road, we’ll be graced with unflattering photos of you across the tabloids, with captions screaming of your OUT OF CONTROL WEIGHT GAIN! And asking what happened. You’ve kept the media at bay about your weight all this time with your self-confidence and unwavering talent, but once you let them in they’ll never leave. This, Your Highness, is opening the castle doors wide, bridging the moat and rolling out the red carpet for them. This is a mistake you’ll only recognize later.

I’m staging my own better health revolution and the masses consist of only me. I will meet my goals, but without aspartame-laden beverages and desserts. Without $10 chicken and noodle casseroles that somehow don’t need refrigeration and contain nary a recognizable ingredient on the side of the box (Eeew! On what planet exactly is that healthy?), and I will start right after Easter.

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I always said the hardest part of being a parent was disciplining. It’s so much easier to just say, “Yes” to whatever they ask and pretend that whatever they did wrong will be just the single event. They won’t do that again, I don’t need to get worked up about it. It takes real courage and strength as a parent to get your hands dirty and be the bad guy. But, you know that they’re better off in the long run for it, no matter how much they seem to hate you in the moment.

But, that’s not the hardest part of being a parent. That’s just the first really hard part. That’s just an unfun thing you get an early start on and have to work at for the duration of the whole job. The hardest part of being a parent is watching your children fail. Having three kids who are pretty outgoing in many activities, it always surprises me just how much it fucking hurts when one of them fails at something meaningful.

My initial reaction is to protect my child. Scream outrage and injustice at whatever circumstances surrounded the failure. Point fingers at anyone else available. Thankfully, I’m also an introvert, so this part of it happens pretty much only in my head. I know there are plenty of other parents who do it out loud though.

The next stage for me is to blame myself. I go through my entire history of parenting this child and seek out errors that may have damaged the child in such a way that he or she faltered at this critical time, causing the failure. Maybe I pushed too hard? Maybe I didn’t push hard enough? Maybe if I had been more patient, understanding, engaged throughout his or her life, the kid would have more confidence and would have sailed through this fine. This stage lasts a long time for me. It’s a comfortable place for me, for a lot of reasons, to take the blame for whatever goes wrong. So, I can wallow in and out of this for days, if I don’t force myself to get over it.

The final stage is giving the child due credit. Failure is earned just like success. If the child hadn’t tried, he or she wouldn’t have failed. A failure is one of the two outcomes of taking a risk, and as the saying goes, you can’t win them all. The child took a chance and maybe he or she wasn’t as well prepared as possible (maybe a little bit of Stage 1 or Stage 2 does come into play with that sometimes), or maybe their opponent was just a little better prepared.

I’m sorry to say that getting to that stage of acceptance is still only half the battle. You’ve only convinced yourself of the reality of it all. Next you have to deal with your child. You have to convince the child that there was no conspiracy to cause the failure. You have to assure the child that he is not stupid, or clumsy or that she is not the worst person ever to do this thing. You have to be strong while you listen to your child run through pretty much the same thoughts of self-loathing that you had just prescribed for yourself. Like any other whipping, you’d rather give yourself up for it than your kid, and it’s so much harder hearing your kid to it to himself. You have to console this hurt child and then convince her to risk it all again, to get back on that horse even though she may very well fall again the next time, and that, my friends is the hardest thing ever.

My middle child just turned 9 in January and she’s supposed to be testing for her first degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do on Saturday. She pre-tested last night and failed. She has one more opportunity to pass the pre-test to get approval to test. So, we’re aggressively coaxing this little girl back up on top of the bucking Clydesdale, hoping against hope that she doesn’t fall again, because I don’t know if she can take a take a tumble like that twice without something breaking.

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