This is not a post about weight loss, weight maintenance or weight anything. Just letting you know.
Yesterday evening, I had about ten people over at my place for a little get-together. For the most part, we are well-educated, middle-class "professionals", some single, some married, some with children, some not. We all went to the same high school and represent a fairly good cross-section of the school's graduates.
We had a great evening and talked up a storm, all sitting around my dining room table. For most of the evening, I spoke almost entirely to the people sitting nearest me and also did a lot of jumping up and down to go to the kitchen since I was the hostess (BTW, I didn't mind that at all. I love having guests over.)
At the very end of the evening, I carried a large bowl out to the car of one of my guests since she was helping another guest who has a severe degenerative disease get into the car to take her home. And that's when I learnt that my disabled former classmate--one of those nice, settled, married, professional, middle-class people--had recently been knocked down by husband, and not for the first time. He has left the house and left her with a number of unpaid bills plus a mortgage (in both their names) coming due in a month.
My first impulse--which I immediately quashed--was to ask her what she was doing, staying with someone who has apparently been physically mistreating her for at least 8 years. You don't expect a woman who has a good education and an interesting career to be a punching bag behind closed doors. But it happens. And it happens more often than we could ever imagine.
She has a lawyer but says the lawyer is not answering her basic questions, i.e. will she still be able to stay in the house in a month's time? She's in shock and I don't think she's processing things very effectively. My friend who was driving her home said she would look into helping her find another lawyer. I gave her the phone number of the women's assault line.
Sometimes it's horrifying to find out what lies underneath the surface.