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Where it all started

May 21st, 2009 by heidi

It’s funny, really, that M. of Diapers and Dragons posted an entry today about feeling flabby. It’s funny because I’ve had a little post bubbling around in my head about a question that’s perplexed me for a long time…when did I really START feeling fat?

During one of my summers home from college I was sorting through old boxes of stuff that my mom had had stored in our garage (after having stored them in my grandparents’ shed) for years. One of the boxes had old homeschooling papers from Africa, including one that was a simple little writing assignment about choosing five words that described me.

I don’t know what age I was when I wrote it but am certain that it was younger than eight and older than four, when I first learned to read. Somewhere between four and eight, when I thought up five words to describe myself, one of the ones I chose was…wait for it…thin. Little Heidi, of the blonde hair and blue eyes felt thin.

That was the last time in my life I was going to feel thin and I wish so much that I remembered it.

I also don’t remember the first time I felt fat. I do remember two incidents, which must have occurred fairly close together temporally, that make me think it was when I was eight or so. The first was hearing my dad, whom I worshipped, tell me time and time again that I needed to watch what I ate, or I’d get fat like my Aunt C. She’d been thin too, you see, until she hit puberty and got fat. I suspect my Aunt C. must be a size 18/20. She’s also tall. She is not fat. She is, however, the “fattest” one in my relatively lean paternal family.

But I digress.

I can still hear him now, in my head, telling me to watch what I ate as I sat moving salad on my plate around in the dressing, then putting on more dressing, then adding salad to the dressing. (Note: I said salad there. I remember binging on salad and feeling guilty). I remember sneaking homemade divinity, a true treat in West Africa, because we only got the packages with the light Karo syrup from my grandmother once a year. I’d sneak it, hide, and eat it in secret. As I did it, I felt guilty…and I felt fat.

The other incident was more insidious. M. (TeacherMommy), was my best friend in Africa. My very best friend in the WHOLE world. She was, truth be told, also the only other white girl of my age that I knew in the entire world. While I suspect we would have been good friends anyway (we both loved reading, cross stitch, baking, and creating elaborate fantasy worlds), the fact that she was the only person my age that I knew and could completely understand within a twelve-hour driving radius (she lived in Cote d’Ivoire and we were in Burkina Faso), sort of clinched the deal. We were BEST FRIENDS FOREVER.

M. was thin. By thin, when I told my mom this story a couple of weeks back, she said in astonishment, “BUT M. WAS SKINNY! VERY SKINNY! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!!” I was probably an average-sized kid. I might have had a little puppy fat, so to speak, but I wasn’t fat or skinny. I was normal. Muscular, active, and entirely normal.

M. was my frame of reference for girls my age and color. Let me say that again. She was my frame of reference for girls my age and color. Every single other child of my age and gender that I knew was Burkinabe. They all looked different (incidentally, I seriously coveted African hair – I wanted cool spiky updos!) None of them could read. None of them dreamed of being in America, land of clothes that were never stained by red dirt, soil that you could walk on in bare feet and not worry about getting worms, and electricity. Heck, never mind electricity, running water and flushing toilets that didn’t involve squatting over a hole in the ground. Paved roads. Ice cream more than twice a year. Barbie. New books that I’d never read before, indeed, more books than I could read in an entire lifetime.

M. knew about those things. The Burkinabe kids didn’t. They were different. An adult would probably call this attitude racist but, when all was said and done, I was too introverted to feel like I could connect with kids who were so different from me. Add to that the fact that a year in the States at the age of four had decimated my Dioula and I was pretty isolated from anyone but the other missionary kids and my siblings, who were all at least three years younger than I was. M. was my frame of reference and M. was skinny. Therefore, as eight-year-old (seven-year-old?) logic had it, I must be fat. If she looked the way she did and she was cool in EVERY way, the fact that I was larger than she was must mean something was wrong with me.

Just to make clear. This is NOT M.’s fault. M., so far as I know, never told me I was fat. This was my own distorted eight-year-old way of looking at the world and NOT any kind of message that she or her family ever gave me. I thought it up all by myself. M. is a dear friend and I blame her in no way for any of the thoughts I had about my weight and hers.

But anyway. The point is, my dad’s obsession with weight and my own isolation were, I suspect, part of what combined to convince me that I was really, really fat. I should get Graham to scan in a photo of me at that age. I was not fat. I was not even overweight. Our move back to the US only made all of this worse. That was when the hoarding started. I could hoard candy for a long, long time. It was a family joke that I could keep Easter candy in the freezer until Halloween and Halloween candy in the freezer until Easter. Conversely, I’d sneak bowls full of frozen strawberries and eat them until I could eat no more. A common after-school snack was chopped raw cabbage in dressing, or a big bowl of thawed frozen peas with a chopped hot dog. My mom used to tell me that peas weren’t good for me and didn’t count as a “real” vegetable because they were starchy.

I got less active, because PE as I grew breasts and hips turned into torture, not because I couldn’t do it but because I was teased for not knowing how to play games that the other kids had been playing for years. I was horribly self-conscious of my changing body and my perceived inadequacy at sports. By the seventh grade, at the age of 11, I could run a mile in under ten minutes but my PE teacher was already recommending diets. I binged and dieted, binged and dieted. I forgot what it was like to feel hungry because I constantly ate, gained weight, hated myself, and kept trying to lose weight.

If only I could go back in time and tell my dad that the message he should be giving his beautiful, intelligent, funny eight-year-old daughter was that he would love her no matter how she looked. If only I could go back in time and show that little girl that the fact that her best friend was thin, no matter how fantastic said friend was, did not mean that she was fat.

If only I could go back in time and tell Mrs. Murphy, my 7th grade PE teacher, exactly where to stuff the advice that any junior high kid needed to diet.

Tags: fat

Posted in Burkina Faso, Size acceptance

2 Responses to “Where it all started”

  1. on 22 May 2009 at 4:02 am1TeacherMommy

    Oh honey. Oh honey. I’m crying for you, for that adorable little girl you were, the wonderful woman you are. I need to process this, but I do understand what you mean by me being your frame of reference. That phrase triggers some things for me and my own self-image issues, and I think I’ll be writing my own post in due time.

    Meanwhile, and always, I love you.

  2. on 25 May 2009 at 3:42 pm2Beth

    This is an amazing post. You address lots of issues that many, many women face in our lives- the pressure from family to have the “right” body and to be “good”, the cruelty/discrimination found in our schools and other institutions, and our own (often so unkind and harsh) expectations.

    It must have cost you a lot emotionally to write this, but thank you for doing it. I hope it is read by lots of people that have never heard of FA or never spared a thought about these issues.

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