My mother has been here for the past 8 days. The arrangement with the house is that she’s here roughly one week a month. Except for this month. She’ll be here for a month. Well 27 days to be precise.

I can honestly say I’m over most of my issues with my mother and I’m generally enjoying having her here. She bugs me sometimes, but who doesn’t? It’s normal. It’s fine.

Best of all my eating has been normal while she’s been here.

Then this morning I noticed something that gave me a moment of pause. Then it made me chuckle.

There’s a fridge in the garage of our new house. I haven’t used it at all in the first two months of living here.

This morning, after the third trip to grocery store in as many days, I realized that the extra fridge is now full.

It’s stocked with extra gallons of milk, cheese sticks, diet sodas, extra dozens of eggs, and plain Greek yogurt.

There’s nothing in it that is not allowed on my food plan (except for the beer which I don’t drink anyway!). But, there’s no real need to have all that much. I’ve been telling myself that I’ve been stocking up because it keeps snowing and I don’t want to have to go out to store if it’s snowy.

But I realize that’s not true.

I’m stocking up because my mother is here.

I’m not overeating. I’m not going off plan. I’m just stocking up on safe on-plan foods like I’m some sort of off-the-grid survivalist!

It gives me pause because it’s an indication that maybe I’m not as over 100% of my food/mother issues as I thought. But it makes me chuckle because it shows a lot of progress on my part. I’m not hiding cake under my bed like I did as a teenager. This time I’m stocking up on non-fat plain yogurt and doing it in the open!

Is it perfection?

No, it’s not.

But I’d take this coping skill over the alternative any day of the week.