Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (16 page)

What Angela was talking about, and what I agreed with, was a sense of being real. I obviously don’t believe in staying in a marriage that is miserable for one or both of the parties. I don’t believe in staying together just for the kids, either, though for children to have two parents who love each other is preferable to having only one parent in their lives. On the other hand, having one loving parent is better than having two parents who are hateful.

But Angela described her parents in ways that sounded an awful lot like mine. At their core are simple values that I admire, like honesty, trust, hard work, love, and a sense, as Tom has said, of busting your ass to get the most out of life.

Mr. Vitale had retired from B.F. Goodrich, where he made tires for forty-two years. Every few years he had been laid off or the union had gone on strike, Angela remembered, but he was willing to do any sort of work to provide for his family. He usually worked as a butcher; in fact, he often did that at night in addition to his day job. Plus he was an astute investor, a skill he taught himself, which enabled the family to live comfortably beyond his factory-worker salary.

Mrs. Vitale stayed at home and cared for her five children, her
top priority. Angela recalled coming home from school and being greeted first by the thick, wonderful smells of pasta sauce simmering on the stove, and then by her mother.

“She canned her own tomatoes and made her own jam,” she said. “She even made her own potato chips.”

My mouth watered.

“And the house was always spotless,” she said. “The woman is phenomenal. We thought everyone lived that way.”

They weren’t perfect, she emphasized. They had gone through their share of ups and downs as a couple. But they had maintained their commitment to family and that always seemed to be enough to renew their commitment to each other. They shared a feeling of responsibility, she said. And they never worried during lean times because they had always given to other people, always found time to extend a helping hand or show up with a meal, and they were confident that that would come back to them if they hit a rough patch.

“My dad never walked past anyone,” she said. “Whether it was money, time, or something else, he gave.”

“Amazing,” I said.

“What’s truly amazing?” she said “They always felt blessed.”

Although I was grateful for Angela’s company and conversation, all the talking about the importance of family made me feel guilty for not being home with Wolfie. My primary job was being his mother, yet I was two thousand miles away with Tom’s family. The disappointment I felt in myself brought one unexpected realization. In trying to satisfy everyone, I may have been failing myself.

As soon as it was convenient, I checked in with Wolfie. I got his voicemail and left a message. I asked if he had taken enough pictures of Tony’s prom, which I had asked him to do. A little while
later he texted me back: “At Dad’s. Took pix. Having fun. Don’t worry.”

Early the next morning, Tom and I met Angela for breakfast. I was feeling guilty about not being home; Tom was, too. I hated being out of sync and opened up a bit to Angela, who listened like an older sister and recalled how she had gone through a rough patch herself a few years earlier. In telling the story, she said something that really piqued my interest. She said that she had felt as if God had abandoned her in a time of need.

She got angry all over again as she remembered getting out of bed one night and driving to her church, looking for someone with whom she could speak, and hoping to commune with God in His house. But the door was locked.

“I was, like, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “I cried all the way home.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I went to bed and I prayed this really nasty prayer,” she said. “It was more like a challenge. All my life I’d been told that God would be there for me when I needed Him. In fact, I was told, He was there all the time. Then I went to His House and I couldn’t get in. What was that about? And so I said, I need to believe in you more than ever. So let me know if you are there. Or else.”

“Or else what?” I asked.

“It was going to be or else I need to re-evaluate,” she said. “As it turned out, I woke up in the morning and went, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I was different. And I’ve been different ever since.”

“Different?” I asked. “How so?”

“I went to bed thinking I wasn’t loved,” she said. “I woke up knowing that wasn’t true.”

“Just like that?” I asked.

“Just like that.”

I thought, B.S. I was too cynical right then to think that God would enter my life with the suddenness of a light switching on. For the past week or so, I had been going through my own mini-crisis of faith. After months of successful maintenance, I wasn’t feeling great about myself. This trip and the previous one to Chicago had brought that into focus. I had been trying to figure out what had changed, what might be missing, if I was coasting or doing something wrong.

I had tried listening to my inner voice, but it wasn’t talking to me. Or if it was, I couldn’t hear it. Unlike Angela, I didn’t think answers came overnight. I was wrong.

A few days after we returned home, I went out to get the mail and got set to toss out the stuff I consider junk when something in the stack caught my eye. I pulled out the piece of paper and found myself staring at text from I Corinthians 13:4–7:

Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast.
It is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered.
It keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

I read it several times, looking for an advertisement from a church or a charity, a shelter or someplace. I couldn’t find anything. It was just the message printed on a piece of paper with a
lovely graphic of a flower. It was a beautiful thing to get in the mail and to think about as I went on with my day, which was what I did.

I set the paper on the counter with the rest of the mail. Later on, after I read through the mail, I stuck the paper in the fruit bowl. I found it again that night as I cleaned up from dinner. For the next few days, the paper seemed to follow me around the house. I would read it, move it, rediscover it, re-read it, and so on. Several days went by before I remembered to show Tom, who immediately remembered our talk with Angela and asked if I thought it might be a sign.

“Could be,” I said with a shrug. “Anything could be. If I struggle to open a bag of chips, I take that as a sign from God that I’m not supposed to have them. It depends how much you’re willing to read into something.”

Tom didn’t like my response. So I quickly added that it was a wonderful message to receive for no apparent reason.

A few days later, without any explanation, I woke up feeling differently about the paper. I don’t even know why it popped into my head. It struck me as funny the way that sometimes happens. It might have been because somehow it got wet when one of the boys was doing the dishes, and I put it on the counter to dry in the sun. I already knew the obvious, namely that God wasn’t going to help in the countless tasks I had to do and decisions I had to make every day to stay the course that would produce the best me. That was up to me.

On the other hand, He was just going to love me as much as I wanted and as much as I needed and as much as I let Him—even on those days I didn’t love myself.

As far as the choreography went, it was simple: one step up, glance down at the number, then step off, turn, and smile. The moves were so practiced, precise, and quick, I could have been performing a dance. Instead, I was weighing myself. But there was a slight change this time. The smile that was usually there at the end was replaced by a frown. Make that a grimace.

“What the… ? ”

After more than a year of the numbers going down or staying the same when I stepped on the scale, I was shocked to see them take a turn in the opposite, and wrong, direction. We were just back from Ohio, where I knew that I had eaten more than I should have, and the things I had eaten belonged to a food group best described as Italian. Which meant too much cream sauce, cheese, butter, and starch.

No one would have blamed me if I had panicked, but I stayed
calm and kept my wits about me. I told Tom that I had just had my “Holy shit” moment, my long-awaited and feared reminder that I wasn’t immune to any of the slips and setbacks that plagued millions of other people on maintenance and on diets. I talked it through with Tom, who was a wonderfully patient listener. Just because the numbers had gone up this one time didn’t mean I had fallen off track permanently or even temporarily. No, it meant that I had partied a little too hard over one long weekend and I had to get back on the program.

It also meant that I had to accept that even though I had been a size fantastic for months, I wasn’t perfect. I was as fallible as anyone else. I felt like this backslide was inevitable. Things had been good for too long. In the back of my head, I had been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Tom frowned at that theory. He suggested taking responsibility for simply having eaten too much, as he had done, too. He was right. The mistake I had made when I’d been on previous diets was to let one bad day turn into two or three, then set a date the following week when I would put a stake in the ground and turn things around again. If I were to do that, though, before I knew it, I’d have been 10 or 15 pounds heavier, depressed, and in a bad frame of mind that really would have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy of gaining more weight.

Now, I knew better, and the stakes were too high. It wasn’t just the threat of public humiliation if I gained back my weight. It was the disappointment I would feel in myself. I called Kathy, my personal consultant, and told her what was going on. I also got back on a strict eating and exercise regimen. And I slowed down. I cancelled all but the most essential meetings: I regrouped and reprioritized.

Within a week, my weight was back where I wanted it. I realized that I do have the tools to keep myself from falling back into the dark, self-destructive behavior that had been the ruin of so many diets. I didn’t get depressed or binge. I felt like I came to terms with the frailties and fallibilities of being human. It didn’t make me any less good than before. It just made me wake up and see me.

The timing couldn’t have been better. With Wolfie done with the tour and all of my serious travel finished, I was able to finally stay home. Mornings began at the kitchen table without an agenda, without cameras or microphones in my face, without anything to do but enjoy my cup of coffee, the crossword puzzle, and my cat Dexter lying nearby. It wasn’t necessarily quiet, though. Issues arose. I spoke to Wolfie about his spending, and in a lecture that would be familiar to many parents, told him that a credit card was not a free pass.

Then there was my house itself. The numerous places that had been in serious need of repair six months earlier still needed to be repaired.

And finally there was me. While my managers, Jack and Marc, fielded offers and sorted the good from the bad as well as the viable from the waste of time, I took a long look in the mirror. I had spent months talking to the press about what I had done to lose 40 pounds. But I sensed I hadn’t spent enough time figuring out what else I needed to do to keep evolving.