It was the summer before I began the first grade. It was a warm, humid southern summer day. The sky was crystal blue and the air was stagnant. We were on our way to visit my paternal grandparents who lived about 45 minutes away. I was five years old and riding in the back seat. I had fallen asleep to the rhythm of the highway beneath the tires of the car and the voices of my parents talking in the front seat.
The car hit a bump and I woke up. I lay quietly listening to the sound of my parent’s voices. They were talking about various things in our neighborhood, when the conversation turned to my friends. They were discussing how one friend had poor posture, how another friend’s family was “not well off” and the friend and her female siblings had to wear “homemade clothes”, but of course the male siblings had store-bought clothes as it should be. Another friend seemed to not be very bright and so forth and so on. As I lay in the backseat, I began to softly cry, wondering what these things were they were talking about my friends. Not understanding what it meant or why it was important. I had never noticed anything about my friends or their families. I loved them and they loved me and that was more than enough.
It is ironic how until we are taught different, we do not see the dissimilarities in others as flaws. To me, the friend they said had poor posture had pretty olive skin. The not so bright friend was very funny. The children in the not so well off family had built-in playmates in their siblings and their clothes were special because they could not be bought in a store. It is all in one’s perspective I suppose.
Then the conversation turned to me. My mother asked how my father thought I would do in first grade. His answer was a puzzlement to me. He responded by saying he had no idea how I would do, because he could not get past the fact I was fat. He finally said he suspected I would not do well because everyone knows fat people are lazy, stupid and have few friends. Not to mention my weight embarrassed him.
I can remember thinking … fat, what is fat? What caused fat? Why was I fat and why was it so bad? How could I stop being fat? Up until that day I knew people came in all shapes, sizes and colors of skin and hair but had not given it any thought. I had not thought one was better or worse, just deliciously different.
The next day, my mother said she was going to put me on something called a diet. I was not sure what that was, but quickly found out it was Carnation Instant Breakfast made with skim milk in the morning and mostly canned tuna fish and english peas for other meals. My parents continued to eat like we had always eaten and I figured that must mean they were not “fat”. I was thankful when school started so I could eat lunch in the cafeteria and only have tuna fish and english peas for supper.
At five years old, I was on my first of many diets. I quickly learned, or so it seemed, that what I ate would decide if I was lazy or not; smart or not; had friends or not; and whether my parents loved me or not. Thus the self-esteem downward spiral began early in my life.
That one single event was ground zero for so much in my life. It was the first seed of self-doubt and inferiority sown into my heart. Over the course of my elementary and middle school years my parents would water and tend those seeds until they became a full-blown garden of second guessing, self-doubt, inferiority, and self-hatred.
Before I began the first grade my mother took me shopping for school clothes. I remember she picked an outfit for me which came in several colors, five colors to be exact. She bought me one outfit in each color and I was set for Monday through Friday. Then she told me I could pick out any outfit I really liked and she would buy it for me. I was so excited. I carefully looked through the store and picked an outfit. It was a red plaid top with matching red pants. My mother bought the outfit, in a size smaller than I wore, and told me it would be my motivation to lose weight. This clothes shopping experience repeated itself every year, without exception. Strangely, the outfit in the smaller size never worked as motivation and each one was discarded, with the tags still attached. Apparently, my mother never heard doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a classic definition of insanity.
In high school my weight became less of an issued because I was very active playing basketball. I put much of my energy into practicing, running and lifting weights. While I was never thin, I certainly was no longer “fat”. I had friends as evidenced by being class favorite my senior year. I was not stupid as evidenced by being on the honor roll. I was not lazy as evident by being a 3-year starter on the basketball team and holding down a part-time job. As far as being a continued embarrassment to my parents, I was never given a reason to believe that had changed.
When I went to college I felt the pressure of being in the adult world for the first time. I had this radical idea if I could be perfect enough, I would have friends and be successful. Per my upbringing, I sincerely believed if I could control my weight then everything else in my life would fall into place naturally. I determined to control what I could to perfection and let everything else fall into place.
I began to watch every morsel of food that entered my mouth. If I at any time lost control of what went into my mouth a sense of guilt would overcome me like a thick, dense fog rolling in off the water. Because of the guilt, I learned the art of purging by inducing vomiting.
After purging, I would feel shame for my initial lack of control and then having to resort to the further manipulating my body, ridding it of my failure.
I can remember being at my parent’s home over a weekend off from college and eating something in the kitchen and walking to the bathroom off the kitchen to throw up. I walked back out to the table with watery eyes and my parents never asked a single question.
By my sophomore year of college I had mastered the art of controlling what I consumed and purging was no longer necessary. One weekend in particular I remember going on a retreat. To save on cost each person brought our own food. Everyone, but me, showed up with a small ice chest. I showed up with a jar of applesauce and a row of crackers and came home with food left over.
Looking back it is astonishing to me that no one in my life seemed to notice. I was 5’7” and weighed under 100 pounds. My hair was falling out and I could not wear Levi jeans any longer because the seam in the back of the jeans rubbed blisters on my tailbone. After a year, I stopped menstruating.
Christmas of my junior year in college, to be supportive of my new-found obsession, my parents gave me a digital scale to track my weight, which I renamed the magic machine and Cambridge diet powder to make meal replacement shakes for weight loss.
This behavior followed me throughout college and to a greater or lesser degree, has haunted me my entire life. Now I am over 50 years old and in the span of my lifetime I have gained and loss the same 50 pounds at least a dozen times. To this day, the way I see myself is directly related to where I find myself on the weight continuum. Not only has this been extremely difficult on my emotional health, it has had serious consequences on my physical health.
There comes a day when the decision can be made whether I am going to continue to tend the weeds others have planted in the garden of my life. As an adult I have often wondered how I weed the garden of my heart and brain of the inner demon seeds that were planted decades ago and reinforced daily for all those years. The answer … as best I can tell … is to get my hands dirty, work very hard and pull one weed at a time, until they are all gone … until every last damn one is gone. My life … my garden … I have the joy and responsibility of determining what I will nurture and what I will not. Some days I am more successful than others … but every day is a step forward.