I know a lot of words. Beautiful words, descriptive words, lyrical
words: indigo, gubernatorial, pugnacious, nascent, plop, roan, slalom, egress,
gelatinous, glib.
I also know a lot of really ugly
words. Words that cut and bruise and
appall. And one word in particular seems
to have played an outsized role in my life so far. No pun intended.
"Fat" is a very ugly word
for me, as I imagine it is for a lot of people: a single, loaded, and
surprisingly aggressive syllable, inflected and dripping with invisible
emotional punctuation. I don't so much say the word as spit it out, like
a bullet or a challenge.
When I was twelve, my family went on
a ski vacation, and before we left, my mom gave me an old pair of her ski pants
to try on to see if they fit. They did,
but barely.
It's worth noting that my mother is
5'11 and had worn those pants well into her thirties. I was probably
about 5'2 or 5'3 at that point and just tipping over the cusp into puberty.
I remember standing in my parents'
bedroom in the house where I grew up and enjoying the way the unyielding,
waterproof fabric seemed to squish me into a thinner form. I don't
remember exactly what my mother said, but I can take a pretty good guess, which
is that she sighed, and said something like, "I used to be so
skinny."
I don't know if my mom said “fat” in that
instance, but she often did. Whether explicit or implicit, self-reproach and self-loathing were mundane, painful, and ever present
throughout most of my life.
There are a lot of things we never
talked about in my family when I was growing up. One of them was that for
many years my mother was anorexic, and that diets and eating disorders have been
part of our family's status quo for decades. Anorexia was one of those
things that happened in health books and to unhappy teenagers-- not to good
families, who lived in subdivisions, were never divorced, and were chock-full
of high achieving daughters.
When I began to put together the
pieces about my mother's eating disorders-- the history, the contradictions,
the painful reality-- it was cathartic to actually put a name to it. And
make no mistake, it's hugely powerful to name something, especially with a name
that should signal all sorts of trouble and some very serious ramifications.
Unsurprisingly, though, my planting of that flag in my own mind didn't
really change anything in my family, nor did it change anything fundamental in
my own fraught relationship with food.
Still, it was meaningful. It made the problem real for me as a
problem: this thing is real and it has a name, regardless of whether or not
we use it.
The way I say “eating disorder”
sounds more like throwing a gauntlet than a diagnosis.
In one memorable instance, I
actively called out the inherent contradiction of my mother’s telling me that I
was perfect as I was when she constantly fantasized about (and, I understand
now, fetishized) her own past, anorexic body. When I asked her how those
two things could coexist, she didn't have an answer.
When I told my oldest sister, who is
usually the most articulate and brutally honest of us, about this interaction,
she was dumbfounded and impressed.
"You actually said that?"
she asked me, seeming to be almost as unnerved by my gumption as I was.
"Wow."
My sisters and I each have a thread
in this narrative, and mine goes as far back as I do-- in fact, further.
My parents were desperate for another baby, and eventually my mother's doctor
said to her pointblank that she could lose "those last ten pounds"
from her already bare frame or she could have a baby. Either/or. So
my very existence somehow both saved and ruined my mother's body, and I've been
implicated in this whole system for the subsequent thirty years.
My goal here is not, by any stretch
of the imagination, to make my mother into a villain. The other thing we
didn't really talk about, but that I had to put together for myself, was that
my mother's father was an abusive shithead. To him, my
mother’s only worth was in being exceptionally beautiful, which she was and is. My grandfather was a photographer, and from
the moment my mom went, seemingly overnight, from awkward and gawky to screaming
babe, she had a camera shoved in her face, right up until she married my dad.
For the record, my mom isn’t just
gorgeous—she’s also exceptionally intelligent and one of the most loving people
I have ever met. She emits this
frequency to which pretty much all mammals, and especially the small or wounded,
gravitate. The contradiction I called
out hasn’t changed so much as I’ve learned to accept that something can be very
real but make very little sense: that someone who has always loved me
unconditionally also simultaneously, and unintentionally, taught me a very
potent kind of self-loathing.
As my middle sister told me once,
our hating our bodies is because of her, but it's not her fault.
More than that, I did not grow up in
a bubble: the inclination for body-hatred was in no way alleviated by rampant
and ridiculous expectations in popular culture, nor in the vicious sport of
elementary and middle school mean girls. All these causes are layered
with, woven into, and enhanced by each other. But in a way, causality and
fault are sort of beside the point: I am the agent in my life, and as I close
in on thirty, I want to start bloody acting like it.
What that meant for me is that I
sought out a nutritionist, with the express if inarticulate goal of becoming
"less screwed up about food." I want to do it so that my
darling boyfriend does not continue (as compassionately and kindly as he does)
to experience whiplash from my dieting/indulging back and forth. I want
to do it because I want to have babies, and I want those babies not to learn
anxiety, guilt, and self-loathing from me in any area, including food.
And, most importantly, I want to do it for myself, because all that anxiety,
guilt, and self-loathing takes up an almost obscene amount of real estate in my
mind. Hell, if I manage to shrink that footprint, I could probably learn
to knit or speak German again. A worthy goal if ever I set one.
Of course, I speak only for myself,
and I speak for myself as I am thinking about it right now. As I admitted
to my best friend, this may just be the glow of a new way of thinking about
eating-- a lot of diets have that "new plan" smell too. It's
possible my enlightenment is more self-congratulatory than bone-deep. But
for the moment, it's working.
It’s not a straight line, and it’s
not all forward progress. It never
is. Nevertheless, if hating my body is
something I learned, then I think it’s certainly worth the effort of unlearning
it. And if it’s more like a word or a
language, maybe I can’t unlearn it so much as put it aside, not speak it, remove myself from unthinking immersion in that culture, and ultimately, forget it.
It’s doubtful that I’ll ever forget
the definition of the word “fat,” but maybe its meaning can change. And maybe, someday, it can just be another
word.
