Grounded

Thanks to the snow in London, I am grounded in DC at least until Sunday – the earliest flight on which I could be rebooked.

I guess there are worse places to be grounded. I love my grandmother, but I think I might have gone crazy at the prospect of another four days in Miami. (I was en route from Miami to London, but via DC.) She's unhappy and in pain, and I understand that, but I still had a low tolerance for what felt like constant picking: on my (lack of) job (or what my grandmother considers to be one), my (lack of) relationship – even how long I cooked blintzes for dinner (blintzes she wasn't even eating, I might add – she was having something else.)

***

I don't feel grounded at the moment so much as suspended in midair. After two spectacular binges (one on Christmas and one on New Year's Eve – the one on New Year's Eve being the absolute worst in at least 3.5 years) and quite a lot of travel, by last night I was itching to get back to my routine. But it's not to be – not yet.

I'm still sifting through the pieces of the New Year's binge, trying to figure out where it came from. I'm not sure I can blame it on BN2, although he did text multiple times. (I should fish them out so you can see what I'm dealing with, but I honestly don't want to read them again right now.) But the binge was so bad that I was physically sick on New Year's Day. Just hearing my pregnant-and-suffering-from-morning-sickness sister offer to drag herself out of bed and get me some Coke so I could feel better made me feel pathetic – and made me want to hand my life over for a trade with the nearest passerby.

"Are you bulimic?" asked my sister, looking worried as I came out of the bathroom.

Well, technically that was my diagnosis 18 months ago, but that's because of my tendency to make myself want to "pay" for overeating with undereating. I have never made myself throw up – despite at times being so full I wished I could.

"I thought you were getting better," she said mournfully, looking at me in horror as I lay crumpled and shaking on the bed on New Year's Day.

"It's not usually like this," I told her – and in fact it isn't. I am better, although she happens to have witnessed a string of binges in the past month. As I tried desperately to convince my sister I was OK, I said: "I think my body just isn't quite used to this sort of thing any more, and it's wondering what I'm doing."

"Yeah," said my sister. "You were constantly eating but it didn't seem like quite as much as you used to do. Unless maybe I didn't see all of it." (She didn't.) Then she got up and went to the bathroom. "Hey, there's candy wrappers in the bathroom garbage."

Um, no points for guessing who put those there. Thanks, sis.

I made a face.

"I thought you gave me all the food you had to hide," she said. (I had bought some snack food that I'd told her to hide because I sensed earlier in the evening I was vulnerable to a binge. But I had forgotten – truly forgotten – to give her all of it, and found some in my suitcase in a desperate hunt.)

I resumed trying to convince her – and probably myself – that I was better, despite all evidence to the contrary. "And unlike years ago, when I do binge I don't worry any more that I'm never going to be able to stop."

Progress, I guess. I'll take it where I can get it.