I moved from my hometown in New Zealand to London in May 2009, leaving behind my parents, friends and (almost) everyone I had ever known. Nine months later, I went to the airport to meet my mother who had come to visit. As expected, the first thing she said to me was "How great to see you!".
The second thing: "I don't like what you're wearing. It shows too much of your fat thighs."
Not expected.
That is, not expected if you haven't lived with my mother for 23 years. First off, I should say, I don't hate my mother. This isn't a rant about how terrible my parents are and how I would have been better off if they had sent me off down the river in a basket made of reeds. I think my parents did an amazing job, and I generally look back on my childhood with fond memories tinted pink by the passing of time. However, there is one area where my parents and I disagree, and it has caused some of the most painful memories of my childhood, and also adult life, like the comment above. One part of me that my parents didn't praise me for and want to show off to the whole world in small wallet-sized photographs or framed school reports.
My weight.
What feels like an uphill battle with my parents has been going on for what feels like forever, or certainly since I was old enough to have coherent memories of my childhood. I can remember dressing for a school photo* when I was five years old, and my mum telling me what I should wear to cover up my "chubby bits". As I moved through the years, this was always the goal when buying clothes. To "show off my only thin bits" - my legs. My mother, heavily influenced by the 80s, saw the perfect remedy to her daughter's "problem" in leggings and big jumpers. As fashions changed, I wanted to change too. Let me wear what all the cool kids are wearing! But my mum, and dad too, not that he had much involvement in what I wore, told me that I couldn't wear the fashions of the day, because of what they liked to euphemistically refer to as my "size".
Friends'parents, also, regularly commented on what I was wearing. Comments that started out in a perfectly polite vein, such as, "I like your outfit today..." ended with a sting in the tail that mirrored my parents' comments "... It doesn't make you look as fat as what you wore yesterday." Needless to say, as soon as I had any control over it, I saw those parents as little as possible. But the idea that I looked bad, that I had a weight problem, that there was something wrong with my body, stuck with me.
As a child, this was deeply disheartening. The messages of popular culture for kids in the late 80s and early 90s had major themes of loving yourself, being happy with who you are, and all the other sorts of positive reinforcement about accepting difference that were delivered to kids with accompanying neon cartoons and a soundtrack of half-hearted rap songs. Being the easily
I couldn't understand why my parents didn't accept me.
As I reached my teen years, the time when practically all people have issues with acceptance, their body, and petty things like popularity, I began to see that (in some ways) my parents had been right. They were only relaying the prejudices about appearance and weight that the blissful ignorance of youth had kept hidden from me before. With the onset of puberty, the same judgement came at me from classmates as it did from my parents. Being picked last for sports teams. Hardly any boys having crushes on me (and one of those who did only doing so for a dare!). All traumatic experiences that seem to be handpicked from a reference entitled 'The Worst Parts of Being a Teenager'. Looking back now, I can see that the behaviour was typical pettiness. A way for some kids to make themselves feel superior by putting others down. But at the time it didn't feel like that. They were only confirming what I had been told most of my life. I was fat. And that wasn't something you wanted to be.
I staunchly kept silent about my unhappy moments at school. I did not want to let my parents know that I was anything less than happy with my body. Because, at this time, I had no problems with my body. It was just the way that other people treated me based on my body that caused my unhappiness. And that included the way my parents treated me. Instead of comforting me and offering me sage advice on standing up to bullies and being true to yourself, I knew that my parents would tell me that if I was thinner this wouldn't happen. That in reality, I had brought teasing and unpopularity on myself because I was fat.
My mother's way of dealing with my fat, which I could feel offended her so much through every stinging comment, was dieting. This was my mother's own personal beliefs, in which anything that contained fat was bad (read: almost everything), as well as anything that contained sugar (almost everything else). Celery and carrot sticks. Low fat cottage cheese. Bran flakes and apple slices. These were the foods that you should live off. Shopping for food with my mother was something like a reverse game show. Whenever you pointed at a product, she would tell you exactly what was wrong with it. Everything was "laden with fat" or "full of sugar" or just "really bad for you". Most of the staple 'exciting' parts of a packed lunch (in New Zealand, unlike the UK, everyone brings a packed lunch to school, from primary through secondary) - a small packet of crisps, some dried fruit and nuts, a muffin - were deemed too unhealthy for me. As a result, I ate in secret. I didn't understand why other kids could have these foods, and not be made to feel bad about what they were eating, so I ate those things too. And I didn'r feel bad about it. Take that, mum! Sadly, I probably ate more than everyone else was eating, and what was probably actual overeating encouraged my mum in my quest to 'help' me fit into an 'acceptable' size for society.
I know she was trying to help, to shelter me from the cruel truths and prejudices of the world by making me fit into the mold that society has for 'woman' or 'girl'. But shouldn't she have done it the other way around? Made society less cruel, easier for me to fit in as I was? She gave me an androgynous name, so that my future career prospects wouldn't be determined by my gender/sex, by apparently the feminist revolution didn't extend to fat, as far as she was concerned.
Angry at the way my mother determined how I saw myself, and how I thought the world saw me, and around the same time that I started high school, a friend and I made a pact.We were around the same 'size', and went to the same primary school, so were kindred spirits in our experience as 'fat' kids. We decided that we would take control of how people saw us. No more hiding behind giant sweatshirts, as our parents had dressed us. We would only wear clothes that fit properly, since we figured hiding only made us look bigger than we actually were. I only vaguely remember most of the other rules, but one more stuck with me for many years, and I only broke it recently:
No shorts.
At the time, shorts on girls were worn reasonably short, above mid-thigh, unlike the later trend that led the word 'shorts' to mean any trousers that ended somewhere between your ankles and your knees (more correctly termed capri pants, pedal pushers or cropped pants, though I try to hold back my pedantic nature). I distinctly remember the comparison in our minds with sausages bursting out of their skins. Our thighs were not meant to be shown to the world. So we would not show them. Not nobody not nohow. For years afterwards, I wore jeans year-round. Even in the heat of summer, trudging up a hill on my paper route. Such was my dedication to the cause of not letting anyone see my fat.
In a narrative turn that seems to come straight out of the 'True Life' sections of Teen Vogue or Girlfriend magazine, my friend-in-fat decided to show her dedication to the cause in a different way. She basically stopped eating. In the intervening time between our summer pact and her drastic measures we had somewhat grown apart, so I can't comment as to how much she didn't eat. Her parents never seeemed to worry or show any signs that she wasn't eating at home, but every lunch she brought to school went straight in the bin instead of her mouth. The girls at school gossiped, of course, but this was nothing new. A school with 1200 girls is no stranger to eating disorders, or its more easily disguisable cousin, disordered eating. As terribly damaging as that sort of eating (or not eating) can be, no one can argue that not eating doesn't cause weight loss. My friend lost a lot of weight.
My parents noticed this weight loss, and not-so-secretly wanted this for me.
Often, they would comment to me after just seeing her walk by: "Doesn't she look nice and slim" "Why can't you look like that?". When I angrily told them the 'secret' behind her 'success', that she had practically stopped eating, my parents told me I should "probably give that a go". Shocked, I told them that was what most people called an 'eating disorder', and not exactly desirable. Had they not seen enough lifetime movies of teen gymnasts being pressured by parents to stay slim, and wrecking their bodies in the process? Was this what my parents wanted? Evidently, yes, since my father responded to my eating disorder argument against that method of weight loss with "Well, maybe you should have an eating disorder. At least then you'd lose a bit of weight!". Congratulations, Dad, your wish was granted. There have been periods of my life when I threw up everything I ate, because I was scared of what food would do to my body. But that didn't actually induce any weight loss, just anxiety and a destroyed throat. Be careful what you wish for, Dad.
End of Part I.
Next time: High school, weight loss, weight gain, and what I have learned. How exciting!
* I still have this school photo. Looking back on it now, I see a normal sized child that would not cause me to think twice about her weight if I was a parent. In case you read this thinking 'Damn, you probably were a chunky little thing and just needed to stop putting crap in your mouth' (which I hope you weren't), I was not an exceptionally fat child. A little heavier than the median, yes. Not crisis-level deathfatz, by any means. I still have no idea why my parents started targeting my weight at an early age.
