my journey to taco time hell and back

in 1994 i had my first baby, kaitlyn. i was 24 years old and thought i was prepared for motherhood. i had, after all, been raised mormon in utah--it was like a birthright. right? we brought our tiny girl home from the hospital and i settled back to live out my little-girl fantasy of playing mother.

that is, until i walked into my closet 5 days post-birth and pulled out a pair of pre-baby jeans. i figured i just had the baby, all the weight would have been pushed out with katie. it just made sense. what didn't make sense was the fact that i couldn't yank the jeans up past my knees. this couldn't be! had someone played a cruel trick on me and replaced my jeans with some that were 5 sizes too small?? surely there was a hidden camera somewhere and ashton was gonna jump out and yell "PUNKED!!" (yes, i know he wasn't around then. it just seems like something that would have been appropriate in this situation--then the camera crew could have caught me curled up in the fetal position in the corner. now THAT would have been great t.v.)

i loved this baby more than life, yet i couldn't seem to feel "normal". i didn't know what was wrong, and i just figured that adjusting to life with a newborn was this rough on EVERYONE. i had to white-knuckle it for a little bit, and then everything would be fine.

i started to watch qvc all the time--those salespeople were so charismatic!! and the jewelry? first class merchandise for bargain prices!! e-z pay became my new best friend. there were many unique pieces like the long gold chain with the little acorn on the end with a clock in it that obvi i should not live without. !! i couldn't possibly live without these baubles. plus jewelry didn't care what size you were and if you were still wearing maternity jeans when your newborn was 3 months old--it loved you unconditionally.
we lived about 5 minutes outside of a little town called hurricane. we had built a small house in a ghetto subdivision and had moved there just six weeks before i had katie. i knew nobody. there were only 3 houses surrounding ours, and two of them were retired couples who had no interest (or so i thought) in being friends with an immature new-mother.

i started loading katie into her carseat, cruising into hurricane and pulling into the taco time drive-thru. i had a penchant for ordering mass quantities of food. a typical order would have been (get ready) a casita burrito, a crisp meat burrito, mexi-fries with cheese and sour cream and a hard-shell taco. then i would order at least 2 drinks so that they wouldn't think all that food was for me. i'd eat it by myself and throw away all the evidence so that nobody would know that i was one degree away from crazy, crazy cat lady.

taco time helped me gain 20 pounds on top of my baby weight. i racked up a big bill on my discover card (hey! there was "diamonique" to purchase!) and hid the bills from russ. i had a big, empty hole inside of me and didn't know how to fill it, so i figured i could buy my way out. au contraire! no dice.

there IS a happy ending to this story--the good news was that i was diagnosed with postpartum depression. the bad news is that it was after i had suffered through it for 2 years and had spent a fortune on mexican fast food and crappy costume jewelry.

i write about it because i can look back and laugh at myself a bit. i was seriously certifiable. but i also type this because i want other women to know that i had a prescription written out for prozac (so old school, i know) before i birthed my 2nd baby. i took it for months after chandler and it saved my life. it didn't make me a size 2 afterwards, but it helped me cope.

so, in the immortal words of kanyne west: "that which doesn't kill you , can only make you stronger". oh, and, "this offer available exclusively on 12 e-z payments of $10.95". how could i possibly pass up a deal like that?

i am a survivor. and a life-time v.i.p. member of the casita burrito club at taco time.