Me, Kate - KtBlEyes

I want to tell my story. I want to share what I have been through. I hope to come out on the other side someday. For now, I continue onward. I wonder where I will go next. I am floundering and I truly don't know what to do to make it get better. I even went back to a doctor I had gone to for many years thinking she could help me get started. It came down to money again, as it always does with me. I wish I had all of the money I have spent over the years trying to get down to a decent weight. I almost made it several times but gave up and went back up quickly. I sure can put the weight back on well! I wonder if there is a prize for that? I would win it hands down.

I was born in April 1950. My parent were poor. They wanted a better life so they investigated buying a farm in Missouri where land prices were much lower than in Iowa. My parents moved to Missouri when Mom was 8 months pregnant with me. I cannot imagine how tough that was. It had to be a rough time for her. I know she struggled with raising three children in a small home, not much more than a shack really. Dad worked many odd jobs along with trying to farm on a small rocky homestead in a small town no one had ever heard of and many still don't know exists. I can remember playing outside sometimes. I remember not being happy but always putting on a happy face. I pretended to be happy thinking it would make it come true. I have 2 brothers. One is older and one is younger. They are typical brothers who love me very much. I only recently realized how lucky I am to be where I am and to have all I do. I have spent, wasted really, way too much time trying to figure out what to do to make things better. I don't know that money would do it. There is enough money to get by. I have recently been shopping in second hand shops and also started going to garage sales again. My husband and I enjoy going most weekends. We don't know what we are looking for, but we know when we see it. I have to buy books and paper for some reason. Purses too. I can find such wonderful purses for such cheap prices. I have never liked the purses I pay for new as well as the ones I find while on the hunt. I think about people who don't realize how lucky they are. People who can go to a show and pay for the high priced popcorn and pop, and even the boxed candy treats. We did not take our children to the show much when they were growing up for just that reason. It would cost so much to take 3 kids and to get treats. I rarely go to the show. I also was not able to take my kids to the Ice Cream store very often. It could cost ten dollars or more to get something nice for each of us. That plus the fact that I was always on a diet. I did manage to get down to 138.5 lbs once after I had my second child. I then got pregnant with our third and the weight crawled back on after her birth. I actually weighed my least weight after childbirth after having her. It was 168 lbs. I thought that was obese! I would give anything to reach that weight again now. I have a problem staying on any type of eating program for very long. Temptations come along too easily and I cannot say no like I used to over the years. When I was growing up on the farm, we had fun going on the milk route with my dad. He would let us each have a chocolate milk and mom would pack us a lunch that was usually a cheese slice and salad dressing sandwich. I can still remember the smell of those two things. It was a lovely smell. It was the smell of freshly canned milk from our cows. My brother helped with the milking often after dad got another job a long ways away. He helped build several bridges south of where we lived. One was about a hundred feet in the air. I remember mom being alone with us kids a lot. Dad had to be gone and she was strong and carried on taking care of us and the farm too. She did the chores before my brother got big enough to help her out. He was milking mostly by himself by the time he was ten. I can remember him squirting milk to and on the kittens that always seemed to show up every spring. One time dad brought home a puppy and my mom was angry with him. She told him that she did not know how we would find enough food to feed it, we barely had enough for the 5 of us. I don't remember ever going hungry however. We always had enough. It may not have been as balanced as we needed, but it was good, tasty stuff. My grandfather and grandmother lived 8 miles away from us. They had bought a home first, then we bought ours. We all moved to Missouri at the same time. My brother was only 2 when we moved and I was still swimming around in mom's tummy. I still think she was awfully brave. She left her parents and moved over 300 miles away to a small house with only one bedroom downstairs. There was a bedroom upstairs and one room for storage. Not very big. Eventually they would close in the front porch and make it into a nice modern kitchen. Mom was sure happy when that day came. The former kitchen was made into a room for me. It was a pass through room, however, so I never had any privacy. I would sneak over to watch tv too and got tied into bed by mom with a dishtowell  becaise I would not stay in my bed. It was only 8 o'clock and that was when the good shows were on. My older brother was my guardian unless his friends were there. Then he kind of got mean and sneaky. One time they shot bee bees at my feet just to hear me scream. They got into serious trouble when mom found out, trust me. I tattled because I was freaked out scared. My younger brother still teases me to this day. It is his way of loving me. He is a big softie when it comes down to it. We had a lot of fun on that little rock farm during the years we lived there. We ended up moving back up to Iowa to live when Mom could not get a teaching job that paid much after going back for 2 years to complete the degree she had left undone to get married and have us.