I know this is probably a common experience but I’m home for a funeral right now, and every time I see my mom my anger about this gets stirred up. This morning it was when I was looking through my stuff for a dress to wear to my grandfather’s wake and she kept saying the dress I’m wearing isn’t flattering (every other person who has seen me in this dress has complimented me on it) and then when I changed into a different dress she said, “that looks good and it’ll look even better once you put on shapewear.” Too bad I was already wearing spanx.
To be clear, I am fat. I’m 20 years old, 5’4, and 200 pounds. That being said — this is the first year of my life that I have actually been fat by any reasonable person’s standard. I was unatheletic in high school, but I wasn’t fat. And I actually looked really good at the start of college. I was often on the high end of average for my height — around 140. But that’s not medically overweight.
I started gaining weight rapidly in college, but part of why I didn’t notice it until I was 60 pounds overweight was that my mom had made me believe all my life that I was fat.
As a little girl my brothers used to take food off my plate during dinner, and she would say “don’t get upset, they’re helping you and making it so you won’t get fat.” Because kids repeat their parents, my brothers’ lifelong taunt for me was “you’re fat, you’re ugly, and you have no friends.”
When I wanted a snack and she thought I shouldn’t have one, she used to say this nursery rhyme, “fatty, fatty two by four — couldn’t get through the kitchen door.” To make matters worse, I went by Maddie as a little girl, so my siblings would usually altered the rhyme to include my name. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to eat or didn’t want to run and my mom’s automatic, emotional, response was “you’re going to be fat.”
All this meant was that I learned to steal food from the kitchen when no one was looking and eat six cookies or a pint of ice cream or whatever all at once because it felt like I’d never get to have it otherwise.
And I really need to stress, that at no point was I overweight by any definition. I was still in line with typical beauty standards and I was medically fine. But my mom never stopped talking about. I don’t think a week has gone by since I hit puberty that my mother hasn’t talked to me about my weight or “what I’m going to do to get skinny” or when I’m going to do a few more sit ups.
When I started taking anti-depressants in college her primary concern was that I would gain weight. She never let me take birth control when I was younger, and I realized I was gay in college so it’s a moot point, but I’m positive it had to do with weight gain.
And to make matters somewhat worse — she’s always struggled with her weight. She’s one of those middle class suburban women who’s just always on a diet and was almost always heavy. And I think it would be easier to feel angry if she was a size two than if we’re in the same boat.
It got to a point where I was spent all of high school thinking I was fat. I recently redownloaded MyFitnessPal and realized I’d make an account as a sophomore in high school. I weighted 134 pounds! Why the hell was I so stressed about losing weight at 134 pounds? Why did my mom convince me that I was too fat to wear rompers or bathing suits? Why did I make it a challenge in high school to see how many meals I could skip by just drinking coffee and not eating? Why did my mom only give me yogurt and nothing else to eat for lunch at school?
I remember one time, I came home from a physical and had lost five pounds. It wasn’t something I was trying to do — it was just puberty. My body was changing. For some reason my mom and I still got into a screaming fight about my weight on the way home and she said, “what they won’t tell you, because they don’t want you to get an eating disorder, is that you’re packing on the pounds.” But I literally wasn’t. I had lost weight that year. And all she said to that was “five pounds is nothing.”
I was going through my old yearbooks last night because I’m home, and I was looking at the picture from sophomore and junior year, which were the years those physicals encompassed. I had visibly lost weight. I always store fat in my face so things like yearbooks and drivers’ licenses make my weight really clear. I pointed these pictures out to my mom and said “look I lost weight in high school” and she just frowned and said, “maybe you knew your angles better.” I didn’t. The angles were the same. I had lost weight.
My mom claims she talked about my weight all the time because my sister gained a ton of weight in college and she was trying to prevent the same thing from happening to me. But my sister obviously had other emotional issues going on. Like the way she gained weight is the way a severely depressed person gains weight.
Now that I’m trying to lose weight, I hate even talking to her about it. Earlier this year, my friend, who is a super talented athlete wanted to workout with me because her ACL was torn and I was just trying to get into shape. I needed my mom to drop something off for me at school and we ended up meeting at the gym and she was so bizarrely enthusiastic about me working out with my friend, that my friend commented on it later.
I hate telling her about working out or eating healthy. It actually makes me want to do it less. In her mind, a woman is only worthwhile if she’s always trying to get skinnier. I don’t want to be skinny or conventionally attractive — I just want to be healthy.
Also, to make matters worse, I’m a lesbian, which she doesn’t like to begin with. And there’s all this baggage about being a fat, ugly lesbian that’s in my head to begin with. But my mom always seems to make any expression of my sexuality contingent on weight loss. Like I have a pixie cut now and she’s always upset about it. She insists that I don’t “have the right face for it” (how is it that every man has the right face for short hair, but only some women do?) , never mind that I like it and that the girls I date like it and that all my friends like it. And the excuse my sister makes for her is that my mom finds my haircut stressful because it makes me look even heavier than I already do because I store weight in my face.
I wanted to wear pants to my cousin’s wedding when we went shopping I saw a gorgeous jumpsuit. I pointed it out to my mom and she immediately said that if I wanted to wear something like that I needed to “slim down.” And while it’s not as directly tied to being gay — she also gets upset every time I mention wanting to pierce my nose because... you guessed it — I have a fat face.
I’m sorry. This is a long and rambly post but I just needed to get it all out there. I’m so mad. Yes, it’s my fault that I ate too much and didn’t exercise enough. But the way my mom treated my body my whole life and continues to treat it makes me so sad and angry. I mean, here I am on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, and I’m most upset about how everyone there is going to think I’m fat because of what my mom said.
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