Keeping Secrets From Myself

I have a secret.

I have more than one secret, really, but I can only address one at a time here. That's my rule. One confession at a time. And this secret is getting on my nerves. I am worried it's getting too big to contain. I'm afraid it's time to do something about it.

When I was a child, I would get up in the middle of the night and eat. I'm not sure when I became aware of it but at the time, I believed the incidents were isolated. I'd wake up and discover Twinkie wrappers in my bed and I'd hide them before my parents could see. I never imagined it happened if I didn't wake up with immediate evidence. When I reached my teen years, I would consciously eat before bedtime, hoping it would curtail my nighttime eating. I thought it was an effective way to cope with this "weird thing" I did. My mom has said she was always aware of it but she thought I was doing it on purpose. She thought I was fully conscious and aware. And because I was active and solid and healthy, she thought it wouldn't hurt me.

I wasn't aware. I didn't do it on purpose. I was almost deathly afraid of the dark and was never one to wander around the house at night. Unless I was sleepwalking. I had a tendency to sleepwalk and talk. But my parents were usually still up watching TV when I would show back up in the living room, staring and glassy-eyed, to tell them how much I loved them. Then I would stoop and kiss the tops of their feet. I did this quite frequently. This physical show of affection toward them was unlike me. They have said it was nice so they would let me and then take me back to bed.

I married at eighteen and moved away from home. My ex-husband had his own eating disorder and was bulimic. He ate like no body's business and I fell in behind him. Then I started to feel bad. I started to gain weight. A lot of it. My thyroid stalled and after the appropriate blood tests, I started on medication. I lost weight. I felt better. But life there, with him, was hard. It was stressful. I felt tortured. I still found signs of night-eating in the kitchen but I wasn't sure if it was me or him. I couldn't talk to him about it. I knew he'd use the information to make fun of me. I knew he'd be mean and I refused to fuel his flame.

When we separated, my appetite dropped off. I lost weight easily. I was making a big change! I kept very little refined and prepackaged foods around. I cooked enough for Logan and myself without having leftovers. I did this on purpose. I always ate the easy things such as cookies, cakes, crackers, ice cream and leftovers. You can't eat it if it isn't there, right? My friend, Big Donna, moved in with me to help with the house payment. She had her own troubles but soon told me that my sleep-rambling was making her crazy. We got up one morning to find I'd taken all of the pictures off the walls. Another morning found us searching for a trashcan, any trashcan. We found them lined up across the hearth. It was obvious that my nights were still jam packed with action. Just not the kind I was looking for.

Fast forward to the year I became pregnant with Sam. Joe and I had married and were living our dreams. Really. I was happy and excited and I felt so loved and lucky and thankful to be expecting his child. One morning, Joe confronted me about what he had witnessed the night before. I was in my first trimester and exhausted. I went to bed around 9pm. Joe stayed up, watching TV. He said around midnight, I walked out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. He heard rattling, something being poured into a bowl and then the fridge open and shut. He looked up to see me walking toward the sofa with a large serving bowl tucked into the crook of my arm. I was also wielding a serving spoon. He said I sat down next to him, leaned over my bowl and shovelled cereal and milk into my mouth like I'd never eaten before. He described how I snorted and dribbled milk everywhere and then when I eaten a huge amount, I put the bowl on the coffee table and went back to bed. I never acknowledged his presence or looked up. My eyes were sometimes open, sometimes closed. This left him feeling disturbed and worried but it was the opportunity I needed to tell him about my problem.

Joe has been supportive since then. He tries to help by calling me back to bed if he notices I'm getting up. He puts away the snacks without my knowledge because I operate on auto-pilot in this situation and if I know where it is, I'll eat it. But he's not my keeper and he's a deep sleeper. I still eat at night. Even more now than ever. I'm embarrassed almost every morning by the signs of my nighttime feasts. I will awaken after eating to find myself with indigestion or stomach cramps. I hate it. I feel ashamed and that doesn't help my already horrible body image.

In the past, I've gone on diets that produced up to eighty pounds of weight loss. Only to have the loss stall or the pounds creep back on. I'm sure the night eating is the culprit. This past week, Zoe asked for some juice. I removed the cap from the bottle and noticed something in the bottle as I was about to pour. It was a slice of bread. When I saw it, I had one of those flashes of memory that usually only come after a night of intense binge drinking. I could feel myself eating slices of bread and then I had a sense of being able to feel my fingers poking more bread into something that was not my mouth. Surprise! Ding, ding, ding... I won another prize of shame.

I don't know why I took the picture of the bread floating in the juice. I know it's not pleasant to look at. It's not pleasant to do either. I've known for some time that they were treating a disorder called Nocturnal Sleep-Related Eating Disorder with fairly heavy duty psychotropic medications. I've not been diagnosed because I've never told anyone but Joe, Melody and now, you. I watched this video online last night and cried. It's not cancer, I know. But I suffer with it, you know? It was so moving to watch it and know that I'm not alone and there just may be a way to treat it. It's silly but I've always told myself those medications were bad business and they would ruin not only my sex life but my whole life. But without some kind of treatment, what? I do know what's not going to happen. I'm not going to be able to stop without some sort of intervention.

So, there. Confession confessed and the only thing left to do now is buy more juice and make a doctor's appointment.