Clark Kent Can Kiss My Ass

A lot of wonderful things have started to happen since I left my false identity and ripped off my disguise (mild-mannered secretary). To begin with, I write every single day. I feel like that song, “If I had a hammer.” I write in the morning, I write on line at the grocery store, I write on my blackberry and email it to myself so I can write some more at home.

I have thrown away my purple fringed business suit (no kidding) and 2-inch pumps, and one-word-at-a-time, I am making a super-hero outfit with a thousand pockets for stories and an endless supply of bullet-proof ink.

This is not the only dream to come true for me since leaving behind a few nightmares and villains; if everything goes okay, I will begin the process of finishing my degree in September. (I have a 4.0 and never finished.) I’m not bragging here, if you know me at all, that’s just not my nature – but I am reminding myself that I was good at school and I loved it. Two great reasons to go back and finish.

A few other dreams? Well, probably the biggest dream is that I am fully participatory in my own life. To be honest, working in the city was killing me long before someone stuck a knife in my back. I was gone at 6am and got back at 8pm if I was lucky. I would call my eight-year-old to say, “Have a good day,” and pray to get home in time to tuck her into bed. I missed every single cupcake birthday she ever had at school. Other things suffered as well. Since I was only home on weekends, they became my religion. It was me and my daughter time, which left nothing for friends or anything else. So there was a lot of lemonade in the lemons life handed me when I left my career.

And over the course of a few months, I have definitely landed on the other side of ”there.” Now I still don’t have words to explain what “there” is, but I do know that the childlike pitch to my voice is gone. Maybe you know women like me – forty-year-olds with the ingénue of a little girl. It’s charming, but underneath, without a doubt, that woman is terrified. I know because I lived it. Most of all, I was afraid that you might not like me. I know that sounds crazy at my age, but it is the truth. I had learned to charm and cajole and be kind and smart and do anything I could to be absolutely sure you would like me. Even … if I did NOT like you.

There is no explaining the process of letting that particular disguise go. But week after week, assignment after assignment, it is definitely gone. Sometimes it takes a minute; I still make every effort to be warm and gracious. But after a while, I remember to stop and listen; to use my late-blooming discernment and stand back and decide if I want to use my energy on this particular situation. And if not, I charmingly fade into the crowd and take the nicest, funniest, sexiest, most charming woman in the room with me.


If you have any questions, you can definitely reach out to me, but you may have to come to Monroe and find my sweet gorgeous ass sliding across Mombasha Lake in that magical canoe.

Love always,
Mary Agnes Antonopoulos (Mary Vetell)
Freelance Writer and Spectacular, Uncommon Woman

Welcome, You’re Just in Time

When I filled out my intake questionnaire to work with Laura Fenamore, the theme that came up over and over was time. What did I value? [Time with my little family and friends.] What did I want more of? [Time to write. Lazy-in-the-grass watch-the-clouds free time.] and on and on. The question that stopped me in my tracks, however, came up during our first session. It was What are you afraid of? That question stopped me. The answer hung like a noose around my neck waiting for the floor to drop – it was the unrelenting, unavoidable passage of time.

Since my husband’s first heart attack, I had felt every moment, as though I were looking into some dark, spiraling vortex. I could almost hear the ticking of the clock in the back of my head. Some nights I would wake up and sit on the edge of my bed, in the twilight from the window, and wonder how long would my life be as it is now -- with my husband and daughter? Other days I would find myself terrified of simple things like driving the car. The every-day beauty and fragility of life was killing me.

For those of you who know us, this won’t be a shock – we had definitely had a rough couple of years. We had lost our dearest friend. She died, but lost was definitely the right word – it felt like someone had come in one night and simply stolen Theresa – and no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find her. A few weeks after that, during surgery to remove two broken disks in my neck, my husband had a heart attack in the waiting room of Good Samaritan Hospital. So while the blessing of being in the hospital (which literally saved his life) was too obvious to miss, the fragility of life itself started to take my breath away. And despite all of my spiritual attempts and exercise to get past it, that clock kept ticking. Every day above ground became so potent and so beautiful that I would sometimes stand in paralyzed agony as it ticked by.

And so it was that two years later I ended up working with Laura Fenamore. The coincidence that she was a Body Image Mastery Expert and had lost 100 pounds was simply a bonus. Stop the clock in my head and help me stop hurting myself with food and inactivity? That would simply be too much to ask for.

Now to be fair, Laura thought I came to her for the latter – and I suppose I did too. But it was my unspoken, deeply hidden hope that her expertise could help me stop that clock. After all, her website says that she helps you handle paralyzing emotions. (I’m sure she meant without eating them away – but with a size 20 butt, I guess I qualified any way you looked at it.) I’m embarrassed to admit to that size, but I’m already 2 sizes smaller – and hey, when you call most people a BIG ASS, it’s a bigger insult than a dress size.

My first appointment with Laura focused a lot on time and how my fear was literally eating me alive with every pound I gained. Laura knew intuitively where to guide that conversation and what questions to ask, and she quietly picked up on something I said about my friend, Theresa. Before she died Theresa told me, “It’s just for now. It’s only right now,” and I had remembered it in a dream. Laura asked me to breath and to imagine what life would need to look like to be the life I wanted – but to be centered and perfect right now. She went on to say that losing Theresa and Tommy’s heart attack and my neck injury… that all of it was an old story. That with my fists clenched around this old story, I simply could not embrace anything else. (I wondered, silently, if I wasn’t beating myself up with those fists too.) Laura added that although my fears might be very valid, my husband was here with me and our little family of three was just fine – right now.

And quietly, almost without notice, the clock stopped ticking.

There is an irony to this story, and it is right up there with me losing pound after pound without dieting at all. It’s about the clock in our living room. Fourteen years ago, my bridal party gave me a Grandfather Clock before we were married. And somehow, day after day, year after year, it never got turned on. It’s a beautiful clock, and it’s face watched us, silently from our living room, throughout our whole marriage. But it did not mark time. It didn’t chime; it didn’t tick.

Then two days ago a wonderful man named Elan Hahn came to tune our piano, and noticing the clock, he reached up onto the top, as if he somehow knew where the key was, and explaining that he had a grandfather clock store with his brother, he began to hang the weights and attach the pendulum that had sat silently at the bottom of the locked glass door all those years.

If you stand quietly in our beautiful house on Mombasha Lake and really listen, you can hear that clock in every room. Every single hour, day and night, the house fills with chimes more beautiful and gently louder than my fear ever was. Life is here. It is right now. And halfway through it, I am learning, finally, to take care of the body I live in and live the life I deserve.

I write this blog mostly for myself, but if you have struggled with body issues or tried endlessly to lose weight, somehow working with Laura Fenamore is changing my life. I told her today that the question her clients need to ask isn’t if they can afford to work with her (you can), but if they can afford not to.

Yours truly, Mary Agnes Antonopoulos
Freelance Writer and Magnificent Woman

Contact Information:
Laura Fenamore, Body Image Mastery
http://www.laurafenamore.com/
415-464-1234