Fall With Grace

I don’t know that I can convey strongly enough the power of two sentences to affect every aspect of my life, forever. “No one will ever love you if you’re fat. You’ll have to settle for the first man willing to kiss you.” My dad said it to me. I was eleven, about to turn twelve. I don’t think there is a cell in my body that wasn’t immediately engraved with those words. Thirty years later, they still live deep within the darkest parts of me.

He’d told me in the car. We had a long drive home. I remember it, the tight feeling in my throat, choking on silent tears. Tears always enraged him.  I turned my body away from him, leaning towards the window, watching myself silently cry in the passenger side window mirror, tear after tear running down my double chin.

We were moving that summer, I’d be starting junior high in a new school. My great aunt bought me a pair of chunky heel boots to wear on my first day. I was very hopeful that my boots would be so cool, no one would notice that I was fat. They noticed.

I was living a pretty miserable existence. At home, I had a father who often hated me for my weight, and freely told me so.  School was horrible, as junior high usually is. The only happiness in my life I found in food. Looking back, it’s pretty clear that was a first sign of addiction in my behavior. I could eat and change how I feel. As you might imagine, this became a vicious cycle, the more I ate, the more weight I gained, the more bullied and degraded I was, the more I would eat.

My dad never let me forget my weight. He’d talk about it to others, to my mom, his priest, random people at the coffee shop. He sent me to a nutritionist (alone, at age 12). He bribed me. He punished me. Nothing worked, it only made it worse. Around the time I turned 15 I ended up in foster care.

My foster mom was a heavy lady, as was most her family. I stopped thinking about my weight when I was there. I ate freely. No one shamed me for my body. I gained more and more weight. I stopped going to school when I couldn’t fit on the bus without turning sideways and pivoting around the seats. I’m not sure what I weighed when I went into foster care, but I know about six months after I left, I weighed more than 350 pounds. The pediatrician office didn’t have a scale higher than that, so I don’t know how much more I weighed, just something above 350.

That was maybe nine months before my dad died. I overheard him talking to someone towards the end. About me, about my weight, how he worried it would destroy the rest of my life. His concern was real, he wasn’t trying to be mean. He truly believed the worst possible thing I could be was fat. He offered me money to lose weight shortly before he died. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know how.

Once my dad died, I lost weight rapidly. Unintentionally. I suppose grief kickstarted it. Then I got a summer job working for the city, doing a lot of physical labor. I often walked 2 miles there each day, and walked back about half the time. I moved more that summer than I perhaps had over my entire life. The weight just fell off. I lost about 100 pounds over six months. I made friends. I bought clothes as I slimmed down. It had been years since I could shop at normal stores, most didn’t carry sizes beyond XL. I wanted to lose more and more. I started to buy phentermine supplements to lose weight. I stopped eating many things. If I slipped and ate something bad, I’d make myself throw up. I never became thin really, I was still chubby, maybe that’s why no one noticed.

I got my first boyfriend around that point. I got a job bartending, where I was essentially hired based on what I looked like. It seemed that the more weight I lost, the more people liked me. Even people I had known for years acted differently towards me. People who loved me seemed to love me more. It seemed like my dad was right, no one loved me when I was fat, no one even liked me. But everyone liked me when I lost weight.

I spent the next few years eating less and less, but drinking more and more. My food addiction had seamlessly transitioned to full blown alcoholism almost overnight. As I drank more and more, I found that people, especially men people, liked me even more when we were drinking. I didn’t see it at the time, but I’d discovered validation through sex. It felt like proof that my Dad was wrong, that I was worth loving.

I spent about 3 years drinking. Now when I commit to something, I am all in, and drinking was no different. I drank every day, all day, pretty much from the beginning. I was a bike messenger back then, the culture supported day drinking. I would drink with the guys all day long. The more I drank, the more impressed they were. I went home with one or the other of them often. If they had a girlfriend or wife, it just meant a bigger challenge. My thinking was so fucked up I actually thought that these men cheated on their partners because I was special, so if their partner was attractive, it was basically the biggest compliment possible to me, because it meant they liked me better.

It sounds obscene now, as I write it. But it’s a pretty good example of exactly what those two sentences did to me. There are two distinct beliefs that formed in my mind that day in the car. First, that in order to be worth loving, I must be thin, and if I wasn’t loved, it was some personal defect, probably my weight, responsible. The other point was more subtle. In the words you’ll have to settle for the first man willing to kiss you, I heard the whole goal of life was to get a man to love me, and that if a man didn’t love me, there was no purpose.

When I quit drinking, I lost weight, in part just from bloating going down. I was also living at treatment and not allowed to work. I had no money, so I had to walk everywhere. Also, I had no money, and foodstamps don’t buy that much food.  I still had an unhealthy preoccupation with my weight, slipping in and out of criteria for an eating disorder. I never became underweight. I stopped sleeping around for validation, and instead clung to a single man for validation.

In the almost 20 years since that time, of course I knew my dad was wrong. Of course I knew that I was loved for who I am, not what I look like, that he was taking out his own insecurities on me, etc.  I got an undergrad degree in psychology even. I knew with my entire rational brain that my thinking was disordered and the information I was given by him was wrong. Nonetheless, I couldn’t really believe it. If the scare went up, I panicked. When that relationship ended, I started going to the gym. I started dating for the first time. I chose man after man who didn’t have the capacity to value anything except my body, wondering why my body wasn’t enough to make them love me.  

Over all those years, I couldn’t see how those words were still hurting me, still directing my behaviors, particularly with food and men. I had done counseling, all the 12 step groups, CBT, nothing helped. At some point I sort of made peace with the fact that on some cellular level, I believe those words to be true, such that they cannot be removed from me. I accepted it.

Then I got pregnant. Unexpectedly. I had for years wanted a baby, but at thirty-seven, I had given up hope of it, written it off as another thing meant for other people, not me. I was happy, overall. I wanted a baby for years, but I had never really considered what pregnancy meant, since I didn’t think it would happen to me. What it meant was I gained weight. A lot. Quickly. And Early. The only thing that made nausea better in the first trimester was eating. So I ate all the time. And I enjoyed it. I hadn’t eaten liberally since childhood. I gained about 30 pounds in just the first trimester. I was beside myself with terror. I was literally having panic attacks as I moved up in size. With a lot of support, I made it through, seventy pounds heavier, with a beautify baby girl.

Shortly after we got home, my partner said something about getting to the gym, that he’s sure I’d have no trouble losing weight, or something along those lines. I set the first boundary I have maybe ever set with a man- “You are not to bring up my weight. Ever.” I was right to set the boundary, but he thought I was crazy. Over time the relationship deteriorated and became downright toxic, but I will say this for him- he never again commented on my weight.

Now I sit three years later. It took over two years to start losing weight. It took leaving that relationship. Developing arthritis in my hip. Being the overweight mom of a moving non stop toddler. I have lost most of my pregnancy weight. It’s different this time. I don’t think about my size, or what I am eating most the time. I don’t think about what men think at all at this point, I’ve proven to myself now is not the time for men.  I’d like to say it’s different because I am smarter. Because I found god. Because I’m more active. All of that may help, but I can actually pinpoint the moment it changed.

My daughter is in daycare. I know little of child development, but it seems social constructs are a pretty big deal around age two to three. My daughter came home one day and was crying and throwing a fit over her shirt. What about her shirt, who knows. Eventually she said that her stomach was too big in the shirt. At age two. TWO. I don’t know what gave her the awareness of it. It was tight, she was growing non stop. I told her that her belly was perfect. I kissed it. I meant it.

Later that night, I sat watching her sleep. Thinking about how perfect and amazing she is. Wondering why she is already questioning that. Emotion filled my chest as I sat there. I could hear the little girl inside me crying in that car, so many years ago. I thought about my dad, wondered how he could look at me and see anything other than a perfect little being, as I feel when I look at my daughter. I could feel the pain of my twelve-year-old self, silently asking a car mirror, why me, what is wrong with me? I could finally hear my own cry, I could give voice to that twelve-year old’s silent tears. I sat in the dark that night crying and alternatively comforting myself. Finally telling myself all the words some grown up long ago should have said to me. You’re perfect. I love you. You’re enough.