A Body of Contradictions

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.