More Backstory

I had a visit from an old neighbor the other night. She is 31 and looks 25. A petite brunette with lovely eyes and a gorgeous smile. We were talking about age, and she said she feels so old now, instead of saying she's 31, she says she's 20-11. Talking about how she felt in her 20s, her face just lit up. She said she felt she could do anything. And I was amazed.

You couldn't pay me enough money to go back and relive my 20s. Sure, there are many milestones and beautiful memories from that decade of my life - that's when I got married and had my three beautiful babies - but what lingers in my heart when I think back to my twenties is just a sense of feeling powerless, invisible, and stuck.

I gained 40 lbs in my first pregnancy. I was 23, a newlywed, living in a foreign country where I didn't have a single friend. Once in a blue moon, the phone would ring for me in our little one-bedroom apartment in Anaheim, CA. And it would be my mother-in-law. God bless her. If it hadn't been for her, I might have gone off the deep end.

Then I had my beautiful boy, and quit my nanny job to stay home and care for him. It was a magical time, just me and my sweet baby, but it just deepened my isolation. My husband would bake scrumptious chocolate-chip cookies, which I would just munch on all day. The big outing of the day was putting baby Joakim in the stroller and walking to the convenience store to buy Sugar Babies. Needless to say, the baby weight did NOT come off.

The following year, we decided to move our little family to Texas. And to try for another baby. My ever-laconic husband figured, since I was still carrying around the extra weight, we might as well go for it. Mattias was born a year later.

When Mattias was a baby, I came in contact with a group of Swedish girls who, like me, had come over to the U.S. as nannies, then stayed and married American men. As you can imagine, we bonded immediately, and so did our husbands. Us girls would get together with our babies and toddlers, and the guys would go out and do their thing.

I wasn't unaware of the stresses my young marriage was under. We were broke, tense, and frustrated, parents of two little boys, with no grandparents around to lean on for support. My husband had told me before we even got married, "Don't you ever get fat, because I hate fat women." Well, as a self-fulfilling prophecy, it worked like a charm...

My husband didn't find me particularly attractive with 20 - 30 extra pounds on my 5'2" frame. He figured, he'd asked me repeatedly to lose weight, so when I didn't, it must be an act of defiance on my part. Because if I truly loved him and wanted him to be happy, I would've just done it, right? He punished me by giving me the cold shoulder in a hundred different ways. And yet, our marriage hobbled along. We went to counseling, things got better, I had lost some weight, and we became the parents of an adorable baby girl, Linnea. Our family was now complete.

My wise friend Carina claims, when you're stressed, your body hangs onto extra weight. I'm sure that's true. I also know that food, and especially candy and sweets, is what I turn to for comfort when I'm depressed and, yes, stressed.

When I turned 30, I was the mother of a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and a one-year-old. I was still overweight and unfit. I never seemed to find any time to work out, or take care of myself in smaller ways. But my husband and I had just bought our first house, and I had set about painting and renovating it. Also, my work as a preschool teacher had allowed me the opportunity to use my creative talents painting murals in some of the classrooms. People were beginning to take notice, and pretty soon I was getting paid paint work on a regular basis.

I figured, in my 30s, things were bound to start looking up.