excuse me, but could we kill the projector?

DISCLAIMER: though I am loathe to use premenstrual syndrome as an excuse for overly wrought, emotionally hyperbolic behavior, I feel a need to say here that the following words should probably be taken with a rock of salt, because any moment now my uterus is gonna shed its lining and in the meantime, I feel like Chicken Little.

That said...

I keep finding little signs of midnight/1 a.m. eating on the part of my wife. I am always in bed earlier than she and usually up earlier, and when I pad into the kitchen in search of the french press and jar of coffee beans, the day too is just waking. I have a ritual: make coffee, straighten kitchen, get paper, read paper, etc. The night before last, I found an opened jar of Bubbies pickles on the counter. This, in itself, bugs me, because my wife has an unnerving habit of leaving things out when they need to be refrigerated. So I won't be feasting on any of those pickles now, because I am convinced that during their stint on the counter, they grew bacteria that my gut will wholeheartedly reject. I also found an opened bag of cheese nips on the coffee table. Then this morning, I noticed a bowl that looked like it once contained cottage cheese.

None of this signals the end of the world, I know. It's HER deal if she wants to eat at midnight and then go directly to bed. But.

My family always ate late. My fathers M.O. was come home from work, concoct a martini (or two) that could inebriate a horse, hide behind the newspaper and drink until dinner. After consuming a meal that could have fed four people (minimum three huge servings), he would plop back down into his permanent indentation on the couch and channel surf while finishing the rest of the martini that he'd put in the freezer to keep cold while he ate. Maybe an hour later he'd go to bed. It was about 9 p.m., or closer to 10.

Have I mentioned before that my dad tips the scales at 300+ pounds? Have I whispered that my greatest fear is that my fate will be the same as his? That I have no control over it? That genetics will dictate my life and thus I too will grow to a hulking mass of flesh whose only true comfort is a pan of mac-n-cheese, smear after smear of goose liver pate on crusty french bread, glass after glass of cabernet to wash it all down with.

I try to eat my last meal of the day no later than 7:30. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Work, life, phone calls, dog walking, exercise...it all can get in the way. I know it's better for me to eat earlier. It's better for everyone, really. My wife, on the other hand, is all about responding to the earliest pangs of hunger. Or eating when bored. Or eating without thought to what is going into her mouth, like those times I would catch her with a bag of chips, watching t.v., her hand reaching into said bag without looking, one after another after another going into her mouth. She doesn't do it much anymore. We talked about it once, and she admitted that it wasn't the best thing. Now I think she reserves her little forays with food for when I'm in dreamland. (There was a time, when she was still eating a fair amount of fast food, when she would bury the evidence--logo-stamped bags--at the bottom of the trash so that I wouldn't know she's macked on a double cheeseburger and onion rings earlier that day.)

When I mentioned this morning that I saw her bowl of cottage cheese crustiness, she looked guilty. "It was just cottage cheese," she whimpered. "You really shouldn't eat so late, honey," I countered, trying not to sound annoyed. "But I was hungry," she said.

There. I want to scream SO WAS I!! I went to bed hungry. I do that sometimes. It's the nature of the beast, and what happens when your body is trying to adjust to less calories. I've been woken up in the middle of the night by a stomach that is twisted and growling from emptiness. I would eat a piece of bread and go back to bed. S., on the other hand, gets a little crazy when she's hungry. We still don't know the source of this issue, but it can really escalate quickly. Hence her leaving things out when they should be put back in the fridge. She is so frantic to stave off the hunger that nothing else matters. Truth be told, it annoys the hell out of me. What is a few more seconds to put the lid on the jar and put it back where it came from?

When it came right down to it, I was doing my little projection dance again. I've been stressed at work, my body feels run down, and yesterday I ate two pieces of pizza in about 5 minutes. My entire family, critical eyes and all, will soon descend on my home and I will have to work like a dog to keep myself from becoming unhinged. My wife is overweight. I am overweight. My fat is a badge of shame. I look at the love of my life and she reflects that shame right back.

And so it goes.