One of the best moments I have experienced as a mother happened two weeks ago. I was getting my daughter out of the bathtub, drying her off, and getting her dressed when she looked up at me and said, “Mama, I’m pretty.” It wasn’t a question. I smiled and agreed with her. My daughter is only two, but I try my best to let her know how pretty she is, how she has the best eyelashes I have ever seen, how cute her tummy is, how her curls are the best. I want her to know more than anything that she’s beautiful and for her to believe it. It was one of my goals as a mother because I have never felt that way.
The first time a kid called me fat was in first grade. We were on the swings together and we were seeing who could push themselves higher. He screamed that I’d never get as high as him because I was fat. I remember my swing getting slower and slower until my feet were scraping the gravel below me. I knew that word wasn’t good. It was a word my mom didn’t like to be called – strived to distance herself from – and now this kid was calling me fat.
To this day I still hate going on the swings.
The first time I heard the term “obese” I was 10 and seeing a nutritionist for the first time, because my cholesterol was too high. She was talking to me about portion control and what foods I should and should not eat. Showing me how I could have a cup of cereal and half a cup of watered down milk. No more soda. No more sugar. I needed to lose 10 pounds in two months. I was 10. I had three other siblings that weren’t watching their portions, that were drinking sodas, and eating sugar. It was a hard concept for me to wrap my brain around. They looked better than me so they could eat the good stuff.
I was fat.
I was an active kid too. Not ridiculously athletic, but I enjoyed being outside. I started participating in team sports when I was still in elementary school. I could never run as fast as other kids and the “fitness trials” in P.E. class were my personal Hell, but it’s not like I was sitting on the couch vegging on Cheetos. We had a trampoline and a pool out back, and I used those as liberally as my siblings.
But for some reason, I was never as small as them.
The first time I felt okay with my body was when I was 12, in the 6th grade, and I stopped eating. No breakfast, sometimes lunch because it was right before gym and if I didn’t eat I’d get dizzy, and I’d have dinner if my parents were watching too closely. I could only drink water. No one cared that I was dropping weight at an unhealthy rate. Everyone just told me how good I looked. It didn’t matter that I felt terrible because at least I was starting to look like everyone else.
So now I’m 23 and the world tells me to embrace my curves, to call them beautiful, to love the stretch marks I’ve had long before I carried a baby. The world also tells me that I don’t have to think every inch of me is beautiful, that I should learn to love the parts of me that are ugly. And I try.
I try to look at myself and see someone worthy, see something beautiful, but I can’t. All I see are the ways in which my thighs are so much bigger than my sister’s. Or the way my chin doubles if I hang my head to low. Or the way my stretch marks curl around the underside of my arm and I’ll never be able to wear short sleeve clothes. These things aren’t beautiful to me. They’re flaws. They’re things I’d wish away if I was granted three wishes, because more than anything I’ve just wanted to feel pretty, to feel normal, and to feel like I deserve to share the same space as everyone else.
I’ve spent my whole life making myself smaller, avoiding eating in public – because when you’re fat people think about your eating habits differently. I avoid public spaces in general because all I think about is “am I the biggest person in here right now?” There’s a constant swirl of anxious questions. If I sit this way will they see my stomach? If my shirt hugs to tightly will they see rolls? Is this table too low for me to cross my legs? Am I spilling over my seat? Am I taking up too much space? Are they looking at me? It’s exhausting.
I’ve spent so much of my life hating every part of myself that it’s hard to find anything to love. I don’t want that for my daughter. So I’ll tell her everyday how pretty she is and I hope that it’ll stick. I hope that she’ll wake up in the morning and she’ll love the parts of herself that some people in the world won’t. I hope that she’ll fit herself into the places she deserves to be. Because I know what it’s like to feel unworthy and if the only remarkable thing I accomplish as a mother is making sure she loves herself, then I’ll feel accomplished.
