I can't even be fat correctly, Part I

Some words on bodies, motherhood, sobriety, and fat camp. There's a lot happening here.

(Note: I feel compelled to give a little context for this piece of writing. I wrote it ten years ago, when I was 36 years old, then edited it a few years later, at 40, so you’ll see writing that reflects a wide range of ages, both the time of writing and the eras I reflect on. You’ll see mention of my age as 40 although I am now 46. I’m sharing this here because it’s sort of an interesting piece of writing and I have nothing else to do with it.

It was originally a chapter of my memoir, which published in 2018. Then it became a stand-alone essay. Now I’m not sure what it is except LONG, which is why I’m publishing it in two pieces. Part II will publish in a few days.

And to my fat activist friends and body positivity folks, I know I’m “problematic.” And that’s kind of the point. I’m not a beacon of health, here, or enlightenment, but at some point we have to grapple with what we are as opposed to what we “should be,” although I never stop trying to be a tiny bit better than before. I think I’ve come a long way on this front, though, and maybe I’ll write about that someday, too. I read this now and although I remember feeling this way about my body at 22, or 30, it’s a distant memory. I understand much of what I wrote here in a more nuanced way having undergone mental health treatment for childhood trauma that affected my sexual life and ability to exist in my own body. All that said, I still think it’s worth reading, and grapples with the rather impossible position many of us Kate-Moss raised Gen X-ers found ourselves in, suddenly told to love our bodies and all our rolls, to BE FEMINIST, yet finding little in ourselves to support that transition. Now I’m too old to give a shit, and I see my body as a rather burly, tough thing that grew, birthed, and fed four children, survived alcoholism, and keeps me ticking along to this day. Quite grateful for it, actually. We’re alright.)

***

“When is your baby due?” He smiled and gazed at me in a deeply meaningful way. I imagined him remembering his wife’s belly from three years ago. It was all very sacred. They took photos of his body pressed against hers out in a lavender field, streaks of evening sunlight beaming across her womb.

“Yeah, hi. I’m not pregnant.” I said.

I tried to soften the blow with a deeply meaningful smile matching his. It failed. He mumbled horrified apologies and scanned the walls of the elevator until his eyes landed on the floor, begging it, I imagine, to consume him whole.

“It’s okay! I’m really fat!” I laughed, vaguely aware of my strange need to improve this moment for this man.

He wedged a smile through stone despair and shook his head as if to say, “Oh no, that’s not true,” but of course not actually saying it because that particular piece of information had already been addressed. The doors opened and he tumbled out, “Have a nice day” trailing off his cursed tongue.

I pressed the button for the 15^th floor seven times in rapid succession to make it go faster and backed into the corner of the elevator. I thought about being fat and my belly. I didn’t think I had a belly like a pregnant lady, big and round, proud and unmistakable. I thought I was more round all over. Maybe it was the outfit. Maybe it was too much of an empire waist.

This was the second time I had been mistaken for pregnant in that very elevator on my way to that very job. The first time was three years before, when I was still drinking, and about thirty pounds heavier. I was probably hung over, probably weak and feeling half-dead or wishing I was. I probably had missed the day of work before. I probably had not seen my kids in four days. The backseat of my car was probably not visible under the trash and gear I felt necessary to carry with me. There was probably a bottle or six of Ancient Age whiskey in the trunk, empty. There were probably fifteen or twenty empty packs of Pall Mall cigarettes on the floor under the front seats. There may have been a baggie or two, licked clean. There was definitely not a single dime.

There was probably a fast food wrapper somewhere, because I had given up caring years before about all I’d learned about the sins of fast food, and when I arose from my drunken stupor, called in sick, slept all day, got up, smoked a few cigarettes, went to bed and woke up the next day to go to work, I often craved something from McDonald’s, something greasy and “disgusting” and I wanted two of them just to really seal the deal. I wanted the coffee-like sugar drink too and I needed to eat it in my car because then I could know I was really the woman eating fast food alone in her car because nobody is there and that’s who she really, really is.

This is not to say other people are foul for eating fast food alone in their car. Quite a normal thing to do, actually. But for me, where I was then, it was an act of self-loathing and punishment I don’t fully understand.

After eating it, I would wad up the bag and wrapper in my fist, making sure I covered the logo in case somebody who knew me from work saw the McDonald’s wrapper in my hand. They were progressive, healthy, smart types. The kind of people who jog on purpose. The kind of people who take bike rides along the Truckee River and pack kale salads in sustainable lunch boxes.

I didn’t want them to know. I wanted them to see me eat healthy lunches or nothing at all. After I’d known a person for a while, I would make sure to casually drop into conversation that I was fat because I was on psychotropic medications and therefore it was not because of food and thus failure of me as a human. At one point that was somewhat true. I gained seventy pounds in four months on antipsychotic, anti-depressant, anti-anxiety medications—all part of the quest to get me sober. The doctor had consoled me with the words, “You’re lucky. Some people gain 100.” In other words, I preferred people thinking I was insane instead of Fat Due to Behavior.

But later, the weight was there because I didn’t care anymore. At least, that’s what I thought. I was already fat. I was an obese drunk without her children. I’ll take two sausage biscuits and an extra large iced mocha. Thanks.

I couldn’t even eat both. I just wanted to know they were there.

After the first time somebody mistook me for pregnant, I walked in the door of the law firm carrying the silent shame of body and alcoholism and cocaine addiction and looked around the crisp, bright office, quite exactly the opposite of me, just like it was every day, and I saw thin women looking beautiful, successful, at the absolute top of their game. I said “hello” to the receptionist. I always said “hello.” We all always said “hello.” We were a nice group of people.

I turned on my computer, opened my email. Tried to respond. I would usually find one that required actual work. The rest was silly, nothingness. I was no longer doing a job that mattered. Nobody was pretending I performed real functions anymore. I was showing up just enough to not get laid off again, and they gave me a desperately sad little title that nodded to my five years with the firm - “Office Manager” I think it was - but I was barely hanging on. Everybody knew it. They were kind enough to let me stay.

Even I wondered why I was still there, if perhaps they pitied me.

I was on a three-day drink cycle at that point, having already burned through four or five rehabs and a stint in the looney bin. My husband, Mac, and I had been separated for almost two years. He had gotten sober, become an apprentice ironworker, was really cleaning up his act. Whenever I saw him, I’d try to get him to drink with me, just a beer, like the old days when we’d stay up for five days on blow and miss work.

“No, thank you,” he’d respond. “One is too many and a thousand not enough.” Strange talk from a guy who used to drink Captain Morgan at 9am on Tuesdays. He had found god or something in church basements. Seemed a bit cult-y to me. I was waiting for him to come around. I knew he would.

He didn’t, but I eventually did.

In 2009, I got sober in the same basement meetings. And in 2010, our family was reunited, which is around when erroneous-pregnancy-congratulations number two occurred.

That second time, I walked into the office without the cloud of impending alcoholic doom but still exhausted. I was in graduate school, working, and raising two children and a baby. I was trying to put my family back together. I had just weaned off my last psychotropic medication.

I said “hello” to the same receptionist and sat down at the same cubicle, which was organized now, with a little bonsai plant on one corner, and neat piles of paper to push around, papers that mattered slightly more than the ones I pushed around before. As I opened my email and sipped my coffee, my mind drifted back to the elevator, and I felt once again the button of my pants cutting into my waist, and I wondered if I’d always be fat, and tried to remember the time when I wasn’t, and the moment I realized I was.

I was 22 years old, a week after giving birth to my first child, Ava, standing in our bedroom in front of a mirror, trying to wedge myself into jeans. My mother-in-law saw me through the cracked door. I was crying, which made the situation unbearably humiliating. Because if I ever let tears fall, which I constructed an entire personality to avoid, it certainly wasn’t in front of people.

She poked her head in and said, “Your belly stays like that for a long time, Janelle,” and I felt relief that it would go away at some point and horror that women were expected to exist like this at all. But it wasn’t just the belly. It was the boobs. They were immediately huge, saggy, and covered in stripes.

Three weeks later, my mother-in-law took me to a hip little boutique clothing store to find an outfit to get married in. I didn’t want to go but I couldn’t say no. The thought of trying on clothes for a high-stakes event such as a courthouse wedding made me want to bury myself alive, but I was too insecure to even give voice to my insecurity. So I went along with it, smiling. Now, at 40, if somebody tried to take me clothes shopping four weeks postpartum, I’d look them dead in the eyes and explain that I had rather remove my own teeth with rusty vice grips, but I’m older now and own my defects more fully.

If the idea of going clothes shopping was painful, the actual event was its own circle of hell. The women in the boutique snarled at me: “My god look at that sad thing getting married on a cold December day.” They felt sorry for me, the rabid demons. “Oh that poor thing, coming here. For a wedding! With a baby! And did she grab the L off the shelf? Look away.”

They did not say that out loud, of course. They said it with their eyeballs while I tried to fit clothes on the alien body attached to my head. I watched fat curl over the waistbands, a soft bulge hanging where it used to be flat, pushing the skirt out in strange directions. I tried another and another, all the types of clothes I used to wear now looked awkward and weird, like the women I used to cringe at in the bars. At 22, I had become the woman I used to feel sorry for, under the imaginary gaze of the woman I used to be.