the acceptable body
Last night, I finished watching the entirety of Shrill on hulu, to which I finally subscribed with the bonus of getting to watch a couple other things there, including Handmaid's Tale (which requires a whole entry of its own-whoa.) I started watching midweek, intending to move rather swiftly through, but slowed my roll a little when each episode was a bit more emotionally taxing than marathon viewing permits. For any woman who exceeds the acceptable 2-4-6-8-10 size range, it's all there--the shaming, the well-meaning tone deafness of the world. You'd be so pretty, if only. .. When the main character finally asserts herself and gets to write a real article, immediately the trolls that call her fat for daring to have an opinion surface to steal her thunder. It's the same old song and dance fat girls have heard ad nauseum for daring to be fat and having something to say.
One of my chief pet peeves always have been those friends and lovers for whom, when confronted with a fat girl saying I'm fat, respond with no, you're not, you're beautiful. As if these two are mutually exclusive. It taps the same nerve as men singing songs about women who miraculously don't know how gorgeous they are. It annoys the living fuck out of me, even though I stopped talking about my fatness a long time ago, but every time I see it elsewhere I roll my eyes. And we all know the danger of the comments section on pretty much anything written by a larger woman, Or about larger women. Or sometimes about nothing at all related to larger women, but that attract the sort of men whose comments dissolve into fat-shaming (or slut-shaming, or both) and violent threats.
I was a hefty baby. 10 pounds plus (and supposedly a couple months premature, though it was the 70s and the math was surely off because I dropped into the world chubby and healthy.) We always joke that I absorbed a twin, that what my mother thought was her last period may have, in fact, been some sort of miscarriage. Who knows, but it's a bit of trivia I love to throw around that's kind of weird and circus-like. I picture another self, moving around inside me and making bad decisions ala The Dark Half. I always knew I was just a bigger child, bigger than neighborhood playmates, bigger than my closest cousin who turned out to be super petite--all the people who were my frame of reference. I eventually wound up with a size 10 shoe, so my frame is largish in general. Despite, standing with the boys in the back row of class photos, I never thought much about in the early years. I knew I was tall for a girl, a little bigger. But whatever.
It was probably my mother who introduced me to fatness as a concept. I've written about her body image issues (in the hunger palace, in the swallow series a bit) that informed my own eventually. But one of my earliest memories was often being in a store and my mother asking me, gazing at another plus size woman, is she fatter than me? to which I would dutifully answer yes or no and we'd go on about our business. It was still this abstract thing--not at all related to child me. As an adult, I would get so sad thinking about her constant need to know that--the distorted sense of self, the need to compare--and it would break my heart a little.
I also knew her own history of being a chubby child and a fat adult. Because my grandmother died when I was eight, I have no idea what their dynamic was in regard to body issues. I do know she was super slender, dark haired My mother's sister, my aunt was thin for a good chunk of her life until her metabolism caught up her (and then joined my mom in the chorus of self-hate that continued until both of their deaths a couple years back). My mother would always say it always was worse for her, having once been slim to now be fat. Better for my mom, always having been fat. I do know my mother carried her fatness with her always feeling less than her entire life and then, in those final months, carried it to her grave.
When I was 10, the first time I ever heard the word "fat" applied to me, or the feeling that i needed to be less than I was was in my 5th grade checkup. The doctor, who was new and replacing my childhood physician who'd retired, told my mother that both I am my sister, then 5 years old, needed to immediately lose 10 pounds and 5 pounds respectively. My mother was shocked, she said, and later once said she wanted nothing more than that her children not have to face the same fatness that had afflicted her. That of all the things that are bad in the world, this was the worst thing that apparently could happen. That we'd follow in her footsteps. Not that we'd get lukemia, or hit by a car, or kidnapped by a creeper in a white van. That we'd be fat, and therefore, subject to the same sort of pain she'd experienced her entire life. When she said this too me again as an adult, I called her bullshit. That we had actually turned out pretty good--smart, successful, decent people with no major health afflictions-- even if we were fat and she agreed it was a fucked up thing to think. There were truly so many worse things to be than fat--stupid, or lazy, or sociopaths. But still, what was instilled in her was hard to shake.
So at ten, the diets started. The cutting, the winnowing. As a child, and an adult, who loves food and tends to indulge myself in everything (I blame being a Taurus) , I felt this acutely. While eating before had been just a thing you did, and a thing to be enjoyed. now, there was a guilt associated every time I filled a plate. I was learning to measure and compare. In school, I felt different, and there was comfort is never quite being the fattest girl in the room, but also not the thinnest. I look at my junior high photos and, comparatively, I was actually pretty thin--probably the thinnest my body would ever be, but the relationship with my body and food was already jacked. I would skip breakfast and eat little all day and then get home and raid the fridge, hiding the snack cake wrappers in in the bathroom garbage so my mother wouldn't see I'd been eating them. I was also going through puberty, so my developing breasts seemed conspicuous in a school where other girls followed behind me in terms of development. I became acutely conscious of my body's currency--the boys who made comments about my nice legs when I wore shorts, or the ones who giggled and thought I didn't notice when I sat by my crush in the lunchroom and they gestured behind my back with their hands indicating I was well-endowed in the chest.
I was slowly becoming aware that attractiveness was to be prized above all else, and it certainly didn't come with being too fat. In geography class, there was a similarly chubby boy who sat behind me and joyed in drawing attention to the fact that I was fatter than every girl in the class (weirdly I offered him gum one day and he was nice the rest of the year.) There was the garage sale tank top with the airbrushed rose and the words "absolutely perfect" that drew a bitchy comment from a girl in my math class about me being not so much. The bus bully, who larger herself, made fun of my leopard leggings and called me a whale. I already knew I had a harder time finding clothes that fit me--my hips too wide, my chest too large for the tween stores at the mall, my mother forever uttering the words "Lane Bryant" which struck fear into my heart. This was where she shopped--the clothes (at least then, actually LB is pretty stylish these days), sacks and drapes of fabric meant to hide pretty much everything. We battled through malls and discount outlets over what fit me and what would not. I was probably a size 14-16 by freshman year, again, thinner than I ever was as an adult, but so, so fat in my head. I actually took to wearing my mother's oversized blouses and leggings. Large sweaters and sweatshirts that hid what I felt I needed to hide, but also revealed nothing much else.
By high school, I started a diary, my first step to becoming a writer, and all that body math is in there. The summers I listed everything I ate and the caloric counts and weight check ins. The bribes--the summer where I would lose 10 pounds a month and buy a new stereo with my allowance. I would eat terrible salads in the cafeteria and then binge on after school snacks unhappily because I was ravenous. These were the years of chewing up cupcakes and spitting them out. I would never have purged because I still cannot handle throwing up, but there was plenty of restraint, then binge. The years of so many diets--the one where we only ate cabbage soup and bananas. The summer I spent popping dexatrim and trying to survive a day on a single bagel w/ cream cheese. The Richard Simmons deal a meal program and it's cards and skim milk smoothies with sweet & low. But of course, I didn't get thinner. If anything, I stayed the same weight, while also fucking up my metabolism beyond repair and keeping my body alternately in starvation mode or mid-binge. When I went back to eating anything like normally, I would gain weight easily. The blue diary, alongside poems about cats and flamingos, detailed dreams of showing back up at school thin and transformed into a svelte goddess with the wardrobe I longed for but that never fit.
It continued for a few years like this--a weird relationship to food as denial and reward and a failing metabolic rate, but by my senior year, I was slowly starting to be over it. Many fat kids will talk about the bullying of their school years, but by high school I was actually picked on less or not at all--I was quiet as I've always been, one of the smart kids, but also reasonably popular since I had a hand in everything--newspaper, theater, student council. Maybe I was overcompensating for being a fat girl by being everything else. But my worse bodily critic was myself. Maybe by senior year, I was more secure in my other sorts of skin to care less. I was also busy plotting--ways to get out of Rockford, ways to figure out what I wanted to do. My currency became less about my appearance and more about success, as it had to. As such, I started eating a little more like a normal teenager, and oh, did the weight pack it on. By the time I finished high school, I was at a new heavy. (I blame daily weird cafeteria pizza and fries and being too busy to even think about exercise.) In my first semester of college in NC, instead of gaining a freshman 15, I actually lost weight--the cafeteria and classes being far away from my dorm, doing a lot more walking, and a weird subsistence on cool ranch doritos and peanut m&ms from the convenience store. When I came back to Rockford and was living with my parents again after deciding to change majors, I felt adrift, uncertain about the future, subject to my mom's good cooking, and a little heavier. Thus fell back into some diet attempts (Susan Powter and her anti-fat in food crusade was all the rage, so we ate a lot of dry chicken breasts and fried potatoes cooked without oil. ) It didn't last, and eventually I said fuck it, if I was going to be fat, I was going to be fat. This was probably not the best solution, but I was tired. Tired of the body math, the calorie math. Knew that if I diverted all that energy into better things, like reading and writing, it would be far better spent.
Years later, in a hotel room, my mother stood in front a mirror getting ready and tearily admitted she'd hated her body her entire life. This made me sad, but also resolute, that I would try to love my body, whatever it's size. I'd also learned that while some guys weren't into anything but slender models, most were far less concerned about the dress size of the girls they were fucking than whether or not the women were confident in whatever body they possessed. In fact, some dudes were actually really into fat girls (which always felt weird, and probably not a good basis for a relationship, romance based on a fat ass just as shallow as one based on a super-fit one. ) I also discovered there was such a thing as the BBW porn, which is a strange fetization, but whatever floats your boat. I once asked a longer-term boyfriend why he loved my body so much and he said who doesn't like all that softness? Mostly that men were far less particular than we'd been led by the culture at large to believe. Also, I was learning to care less and less what men thought in general--either they were into me or not into me. That my existence, my worth as as a women in world, didn't matter so much on who wanted or did not want to fuck me. My 13 year old self was dumbfounded and exhilarated.
For most of my twenties though, I actually lived in a weird bodiless space, dating very little, fixated on college, then grad school, then finding a job I didn't hate. Then in my 30's, I started dated a lot. Suddenly I was smack dab back in the body and I was determined to love it. To find men who loved it as part of the package--that I was a whole package--smart and endearingly sarcastic and had some good curves in choice places. It wasn't all roses--I still felt uncomfortable shopping for the body--I hovered at the top range of plus sizing available in most non-specialty stores. I wore a lot of longer skirts and t-shirts with cardigans almost like a uniform. I still wanted to hide things--my legs, to lengthen my torso. What was flattering, what was not. Later, I would lose a good portion of weight and my options opened up and I re-learned that I loved clothes and fashion, like almost as much as I loved books and writing. But even still I play the flattering/unflattering? game when I shop.
Admittedly, that weight loss about 5 years ago was coming from a better place..I was getting older. The weight I carried was beginning to hurt my knees and back and I felt like diabetes and heart problems could very well be in my future. I was almost 40 for gods sake. If not now, then when? But I needed to do it right, not through fad diets or quick-fixes. I started monitoring but not limiting calories at first. Started walking more and exercizing. Because my metabolism over the years of not dieting had ramped up, it was easier to lose the weight through less restriction, and sometimes none at all. I ate , and still do, a reasonable amount of food in a day, try to make healthier choice and move more, and have kept if off with an exception of about 10 pounds that comes and goes (I call this my eating my feelings weight--2016 election and and my mom's death caused particular spikes.). And I feel good most of the time, far better than when I was heavier, both physically and psychologically.
But still, even thinner than I was, I am still fat, but I'm okay with this. I actually monitor calories less now, but know I want to exercise more, mostly because I feel stronger and better when I do. I do sometimes still have weird issues and thoughts about food, but I can recognize them when they arise. I don't need to be less, but I do want to be stronger, less prone to injuries. I had all the feels when watching Shrill last night, particularly in the pool party episode and bust out crying, mostly because she was lucky enough to come to certain conclusions over several episodes that it took me years to. That had that show, and shows like it, existed in my own formative years that what took me decades to come round to would have been settled at 15. Earlier, I had come home to a Torrid catalog in the mail. I was flipping through during my dinner and spotted some super cute lingere on all sorts of shaped bodies and wished that my teen self had not felt so invisible and sexy-less for all those years. Granted a woman's goal should obviously not only be to be sexy, or care too much about appealing (to men or other women) . But everyone probably wants to feel desirable in some way, either through our physical attributes or our mental ones (ideally maybe a mix of both). I couldn't help thinking if Seventeen magazine had actually featured plus-size models all those years, my relationship to food and my body might have been entirely different and my adult-body healthier for it. That even seeing bodies like yours in the world, presented as acceptable bodies, good bodies, does a world of good when everything--culture, entertainment, the random haters-- tells you you are not acceptable.
And mostly, I wished my mother had been alive to watch it, but came up a year or so short. That what she was never able to fix in a lifetime could have been remedied by the end of it..
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