I started them first, because the garlic had to roast for awhile, and then peeling the potatoes took an age and a half and also a knuckle. I focused on my potatoes as they came together, almost like magic. Garlic-smelling magic. The boiling, the concentrated mashing, the adding the entire stick of butter and the cream, the careful seasoning, the whipping in the soft, roasted cloves, the careful adjustment of seasoning, the struggle with myself to not put my face in the pot–at every stage it came together so beautifully, I nearly cried.

And at every stage of the garlic mashed potato caper, I had to try them. At first just a nibble, but as they got more delicious and buttery, a spoon, another, a third. Spoons lining up next to the stove because tasting my garlic mashed potatoes was a very serious business I take very seriously. Especially when you are serious like me.

When they were finished and staying warm on the stove, as I started to put together the salad and cook up the steaks, I kept sneaking back to the pot of potatoes for another bite, and another, and another. I finished cooking, plated the food–a big slab of meat and two, a tong of salad and then another, a mound of potatoes, a spoonful for me, a mound of potatoes, a spoonful for me and then another spoonful.

I sat down across from E with our plates.

“You have something on your chin,” he said.

“I was saving that for later,” I said.

There was an entire pot of mashed potatoes for later, and I was so grateful. As I generously splotted the stuff on our plates, I kept a careful eye on the level of potato left behind, and was thankful to see that it was still pretty robust and magnificent. I had a whole plate of steak and salad and mashed potatoes waiting for me, but I was already planning how I would have potatoes with corn for breakfast, and potatoes for lunch and then potatoes tomorrow night. I was not enjoying my present potatoes, because I was already hoarding my future potatoes. “Hoarding My Future Potatoes” is also the name of my forthcoming personal investing memoir/how-to.

It’s also a little bit nuts–I mean, I know garlic mashed potatoes are delicious. They are proof that if God existed, he would love us. But the mashed potatoes had taken over my mind. Mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes. I could not finish my dinner (I barely started it) because I was so full of mashed potatoes. As we snuggled on the couch watching Mad Men, I was thinking about how I’d have mashed potatoes later when I got hungry. As we drifted off to sleep, when I woke up, as I moved through the day, in the back of my head was the countdown to mashed potatoes, and everything was an obstacle to them–no I can’t go fax something for you because that means I am no where near the mashed potatoes if I need them Yes of course, sweetheart, no problem.

I should make a little sling for my container of mashed potatoes. A mashed potato hat. A potato IV. I should inject mashed potatoes subcutaneously. I should become a mashed potato when I grow up. I should consider that I have some kind of problem–a humorous mashed potato problem, which isn’t as hilarious when I consider all the food that has haunted me, made me tap my foot impatiently when I was delayed in getting back to it, made me sigh gratefully when I was reunited with it, made me worry about what would happen when it was gone.

You try being logical–you can make more, you can buy more, this is not the last food that will ever appear in front of you–your mashed potatoes, the box of cookies, the donuts that appear in the break room and they’re not even very good donuts. But that low-level anxiety remains, and you’re torn between the need to devour immediately and hoard forever and either way, you end up with a stomach ache. Or maybe that’s just me.

photo by ohskylab

This is a lifestyle change, and we have been cooking every night since, for a grand total of two nights. I am happy to not be eating fast food every night, even though fast food is fast, and easy, and doesn’t require me to run out of the room sobbing because the big pile of onions is trying to kill me. I am happy that he is trying to take care of his heart and live as long as possible, because I want to keep him for as long as possible. But he is grimly determined not just to improve his cholesterol and make healthy choices–he is on a diet. He is trying to lose weight, a lot of it. He thinks he needs to, and only weight loss will make him happy. I think he is perfect and gorgeous right now, and he does not agree.

Shouldn’t he agree with me? Isn’t my opinion important? Isn’t my opinion, in fact, the important opinion around which all other opinions wither away and die ashamed deaths because they are so much less important? He doesn’t believe me. Or rather, he believes that I believe that he is gorgeous and perfect; he believes that I believe that I love his body, that I find him completely sexy and want to jump him all the time. He believes that I believe he is hot and I like to touch him, but he thinks that probably I am mildly retarded, that I am totally blinded by love and excellent oral sex, that I am completely crazy, that it is adorable, the way I lie to myself.

He doesn’t want to diet. The idea of being on a food plan for the rest of his life, never eating what he wants to eat but what he’s supposed to eat makes him miserable. He is convinced that being on a diet means that he will never be happy, ever again. Then don’t diet, I tell him. You don’t need to diet, I say, continuing to beat my tiny little drum. I have to diet, he says. Well it won’t be miserable forever, right? Because you’ll get into an exercise habit, and then you’ll be able to indulge sometimes, and you don’t have to do it forever. And he says–yes. If I want to stay skinny, I will have to watch what I eat forever, and I hate the idea. I try to argue with him, I tell him to stop, that it isn’t so bad, to cheer up, jeez. And he says, “Honey, why did you get weight-loss surgery?”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you get weight-loss surgery so you wouldn’t have to diet ever again?”

“Well, I have to watch my diet.”

“But you don’t have to be on a diet.”

“But that’s not why I got weight-loss surgery.”

“But that’s one of the reasons. You know it was. You don’t have to diet ever again. I am not going to get weight-loss surgery, so I have to be on a diet.  And it sucks.

I’m quiet for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It does suck. It sucks a lot. You’re right.”

Because I do remember that. It is easy to forget that feeling that everything I put into my mouth was my enemy, that anything I ate could be the possible undoing of all my work to try and lose weight, that feeling of panic that a diet wouldn’t work but had to be strictly, maniacally adhered to or else, that it was an endless cycle of rotten choices, any of which might be my eventual undoing. It was no wonder that diets never worked for me, because I spent the entire time I was on a diet miserable, anxious that I was doing or about to do or had done something wrong and I didn’t even know it. It is one of the great freedoms of this surgery, one of the great beneifts, the happinesses that I couldn’t have predicted but which has changed my life–food doesn’t fill me with fear any more.

As with most of the great benefits, I wish it could have come without the surgery. I wish I could have made peace with my body, my eating habits, with food, all on my own without any outside intervention, but it wasn’t working that way and it might never have.

Maybe E will eventually figure it out, and it will become less dieting and more that healthy lifestyle we keep talking about. Maybe he will find happiness in his body and in food and eating and maybe he will believe that he is gorgeous and perfect and sexy and that I have not hit my head on something or am a compulsive liar. I wish it hard for him, with crossed fingers and a lot of hope, because he is not allowed to get weight-loss surgery.