Then he looked at me and said, “Well yeah, because you’re fat.”
In that moment, every part of my body felt different. I became acutely aware that the shorts I was wearing had ridden up between my thighs and that the waistband was leaving indentations on my hips. That the fat that had started to accumulate in my breasts wasn’t perky, but rather made them sag horizontally across my chest into my armpits. My tummy was not just pale and soft, but bulbous and unattractive.
Suddenly, something had been put out into the universe, and there was no takes-backsies. Like that quote by Alice Hoffman, “Once you know some things, you can’t unknow them.”
That’s totally what happened when I found out that ducks pee, poop, and have sex all in one hole. They are also massive rapists. It was a traumatizing realization, and I can never like ducks again. It’s also exactly what being told I was fat felt like. My days went from thinking about normal kid stuff to obsessing over my body and what people were saying about it.
Was I the one blamed for passing gas during silent reading time in school because fat people are grosser and fart more than skinny people?
Did the boys in gym fight to not be my square-dancing partner, you know, the equivalent of child marriage, because I was chunkier than the other girls?
Anxiety over my looks consumed me, and suddenly being fat went from a private issue I struggled with to a medical one as I stood on the scale in gym class during the annual fitness test and was officially crowned the first kid in third grade to reach 100 pounds. A century ago, my weight would have meant I was wealthy and fertile, with access to actual doctors and nondiseased meats. Now it meant there was something wrong with me, as the kids behind me audibly gasped while my gym teacher fumbled with the metal slider on the scale before squinting at the numbers a final time and recording them onto his clipboard. I thought that his record keeping meant the whole embarrassing experience was over with, but by the end of the day a sealed envelope was sent home in my folder explaining the perils of childhood obesity to my parents with a list of helpful tips to aid in my fun journey to a new, healthy lifestyle.
1 Incorporate wheat bread into your child’s lunches.
2 Park farther away from malls and restaurants to encourage walking and fitness.
3 Have your child complete their nightly homework standing up.
4 Replace all your forks with chopsticks.
5 Write the word “NO!” on a piece of paper and tape it to the front of the fridge as a gentle reminder that they are not allowed to snack.
6 Have your child eat slowly in front of a full-length mirror to mimic the public shame they’d feel while being fat in cafeteria situations.
These are tips that I still get to this very day, only instead of sealed envelopes from my gym teacher, they come from strangers on the Internet. Why was I fat? I was fat because being fat was what we could afford to be, and being fat was easier than facing whatever stress was happening at home.
So now that you know the why, how about the why still. Why am I still overweight? Well, in the simplest of terms, I like to eat food, and I’m really good at it, so as a result, I eat like a girl who thinks she has the metabolism of a Kenyan marathoner. Also, the thing about dieting is that it’s really horrible and boring for a longer period of time than feeling pretty in small jeans feels. That’s just basic math.
2
HONESTLY, I DIDN’T HAVE A CHANCE
WHEN YOU GET into your twenties and begin to take mental stock of your life, the good parts and the bad parts become glaringly apparent. We all have them, good parts and bad parts, but your twenties are generally the first time that you really begin to see the timeline that led you to your current existence. It’s what all obnoxious, first-time voting, finally out on our own, we know how the world works, pseudo-adults do. We gather up our parents’ flaws and lay them across the table like a poker hand in the ultimate game of WHO’S MORE FUCKED-UP.
It is this very moment that led many of my friends to freak out and seek a steady therapist by twenty-three. Having already been over a decade deep into therapy myself, I was past the notion that I’d ever be “fixed,” and was instead aiming for the much more achievable goal of “pleasant to be around in normal society.” It sounds easy, but if you knew my family, you’d realize that it was not. Sure, everyone says they grow up in crazy families, but I am happy to provide medical data and empty prescription bottles to back up my claims.
I grew up in Swanton, Ohio, a small town about thirty minutes outside Toledo. It’s a rural area characterized by cornfields, the empty buildings that once housed small manufacturing businesses, and the words “I’m leaving and never coming back” wistfully inscribed by angsty seniors in the backs of yearbooks over many decades. But Swanton is not without its charm. There is a quiet beauty in the vintage buildings that line Main Street, and a certain sense of safety that comes with knowing everyone, as well as probably being related to them.
The only thing stopping me from saying that I’ve lived here my whole life is the fact that when I was an infant, my parents allegedly moved to Palm Springs, California, for my dad’s job, and one time in a supermarket, Jackie Coogan, the guy who played Uncle Fester on The Addams Family, asked my mom if he could hold me and told me I was pretty. We moved back to Swanton shortly after that, and while I have no actual memory of the experience, it was that temporary glimmer of hope and a faded Polaroid of me and my dad in front of a palm tree that fed my inherent belief that I did not belong here. It also had me doing really douchey things like demanding to cover California for our fourth-grade geography project, you know, because I was “from there.”
Unlike Palm Springs, Swanton was a relatively conservative town and could easily have served as the inspiration for the movie Footloose. My household was a mixed bag, my mom being Irish Catholic and my dad a liberal agoraphobic. My parents were high school sweethearts, and when I was growing up my mom would tell me stories about falling in love with my father, who was poor and from a large family, shortly after she had moved to Swanton with her wealthy parents.
“When I met him,” she’d say, laughing wistfully, “he had no shoes. I had to buy him shoes.”
The stories were always funny and adorable, and a stark contrast to the actual den of religious guilt, sexual tension, and mental illness I was being raised in. Half the time, I think she was telling the stories, not for my benefit, but to remind herself why she was still in this mess to begin with.
In 1983 my dad was hit by a semi-truck. You weren’t expecting that, were you? Don’t worry, he’s alive. I haven’t spoken to him yet today, but he was alive yesterday when I was over there showing him how to use his DVR. So, as of yesterday, he was alive.
I was two, and my mother was nine months pregnant with my brother. My dad worked for the maintenance department of the Ohio Turnpike, and one day a semi driver fell asleep and veered into a work crew, killing the man in front of my dad, and then slamming into my father, throwing him twenty-five feet headfirst into a giant compressor. He had been running a jackhammer. The flagman never warned him and he never heard it coming.
My dad was left in a coma, his left lung was crushed, he suffered a massive brain injury, and his shoulder and left side were destroyed. I was sent to live with my mom’s cousin on a farm in western Ohio while my mother gave birth alone to a baby she refused to name until my dad was able to meet him.
When my father finally woke up, it was a month before he consistently remembered who my mother was, and when he was taken to see my brother, he declared he wanted to name the baby Sherman T. Potter, the old guy from M*A*S*H, not the one that dressed up like a lady, although that would have made for a much funnier story. Eventually, my mom talked him into the name Adam, and after two months in the hospital and six more in various rehabilitation facilities, my father came home.
I don’t know if you’ve ever lived with someone who suffered a traumatic brain injury before, but it’s like winning a Publishers Clearing House drawing
, only instead of a big check, they show up on your doorstep with Gary Busey and then run away before you can give him back. If you were to ask my mom what happened the day of the accident, she’d tell you my father died. As in, that one guy who lived in our house and had sex with my mom before the semi-truck hit him.
My dad was able to return to work in a limited capacity, leaving the labor-intensive maintenance department to work in tolls, but he was often in and out of reconstructive surgeries and residential rehab trying to regain use of his shoulder and arm and life. It was all very superficial. Nothing could repair what had been done to him psychologically or mentally. In rare moments, I caught glimpses of the man my mom referred to as “old dad.” The engaging guy who swung us around by our arms, collapsing into dizzy piles of giggles and reading us Grimm’s Fairy Tales until we fell asleep under forts made of bedsheets. Most of the time, I got “new dad,” the transient man would go on manic benders of rash decisions and financial free fall before spending entire weeks anxious and locked in his bedroom watching old episodes of Saturday Night Live, forgetting to pick me up from school or what year it was.
This is not to say his short-term memory loss didn’t work to my advantage a time or two. Like in junior high when I had a parent conference after slapping a girl in the face for calling me a fat Tori Spelling. My dad never showed up, and after sitting in the office waiting for thirty minutes, the assistant principal, who looked like a balding Geraldo Rivera, assumed my outburst was due to absent parenting and let me leave out of pity. But on the same token, it was devastating when my dad would forget birthdays or miss soccer games because he was too paranoid to leave the house.
My dad was often between medications, leaving his moods unpredictable and running full throttle. The majority of my childhood can be described as walking into a room having no idea who was going to be in there waiting for me. Our home life had become dictated by his cycle of manic highs and lows. We’d hit a period of time when he was kind and excited about life. He’d buy fancy cars, and businesses, and take us on fun vacations. There were the little moments you just expect to happen within families that stand out as limited but treasured stones I could hold on the palm of my hand. Kissing my mom before she left for work. Seeing a picture of me from college and telling me I had a pretty smile. Taking my brother and me to see Bill Cosby perform live at a local theater. These were normal dad things.
Then we’d hit a pothole and he’d just shut off. His demeanor became mean and he’d levy cutting jabs about our appearance, and how difficult we’d all made his life on a daily basis. He’d accuse my mother of cheating on him if she’d forget to call to check in, and then he’d announce to my brother and me that she’d left us and was never coming back. He’d get frustrated with everyday tasks and communicate that by throwing the phone or remote at the wall. He’d stop leaving the house or helping with its upkeep, hoarding frivolous paperwork and documents in brown boxes he’d stack in his bedroom and office. Money would grow tight because of his inability to handle finances and work consistently, so broken items would stay broke, like remotes held together with duct tape or holes in the walls and torn window screens. I’d come home from school to find our electricity or gas turned off, and our phone shrill and shrieking as bill collectors called at all hours of the day. I lay in bed anxious for 9 P.M. to come each evening, since that’s the hour when the calls would finally stop.
As much as I love my dad, growing up in that house was exhausting and overcrowded. The mental illness and cycling emotions were far too heavy for me. My mom, who carried the stress of dealing with my father and two children, had already lost her sister to depression and suicide, and was becoming increasingly depressed herself. She often explained away his outbursts with “He’s just scared and confused,” “He doesn’t realize what he’s saying,” or “Sometimes it’s like he’s a big child.” Many nights I’d hear her crying through the thin wall between our bedrooms after a volatile fight over finances or my dad’s behavior. It was harder for her to separate the two versions of my dad in her head, and I’d get mad at her inability to stand up to him. Only as an adult can I appreciate how difficult it must be to have to see every single day the face of the man you are essentially mourning.
When something traumatic happens, like your dad getting hit by a semi-truck, there is a grace period where people treat you with kid gloves and understanding nods. For me, that was about three years, which is three seconds in brain injury time. By then, everyone assumes things are all patched up and back to normal, which meant I was no longer that little girl eating her emotions from that poor family who had that horrible accident, but rather, that chubby emo girl with the weird dad who sometimes never leaves the house and screams at people in banks. Brain injuries are for life, like those gangs in prison you get raped into. The bad parts are always there, like tattoos, the good parts buried deep inside, lining the insides of my ribs so I can breathe every day.
It’s those sweet and sour moments that make up life with my father.
MY FATHER, KITTEN KILLER
In fourth grade I became obsessed with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as I was very much feeling like a bored girl hungry for adventure myself. As my birthday approached, I made it clear that this was the year I wanted a cat like Alice.
My mom always bred cocker spaniels and pugs, and you couldn’t throw a rock in my house and not hit a whelping dog. (Whelping, by the way, is a fancy dog term for giving birth, which is a scenario that happened during much of my adolescence on the linoleum of our kitchen floor. I still can’t eat my mom’s spaghetti.) We were decidedly dog-people, and my mother reminded me of this every time I answered what I wanted for my birthday.
“Just a cat, please.”
“You’re not getting a cat, dammit,” she’d reply exasperated. “And besides, I’m allergic to their dander. Having a cat in the house would kill me.”
On April 28, 1991, I rolled over at around 6 A.M. to find my dad quietly sitting beside my bed, which was jarring. Anytime you wake up and find a six-foot-tall man with a blond mustache staring at you while you sleep is jarring.
“Happy birthday,” he whispered. “I was thinking you and I could go and pick out a special present today, just us; a secret present.”
I just realized how creepy that looks written out. Kids, if a man with facial hair sneaks into your room and asks you to go with him to get a “secret present,” don’t go. Unless that strange man is your dad and he’s taking you to the humane society to get a cat because your mom is mean, in which case, yes, definitely go.
The seat belt was the only physical restraint holding me in my seat on the way to the shelter as I bounced in excitement, singing Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” with reckless abandon, shouting the cuss words extra loud because I knew my dad wouldn’t say anything. It was a surreal experience, not only being alone with my dad doing something special, but also going to the humane society. We lived in the country and the “Free Kittens” signs were only outnumbered by the “Free Bunnies Dead or Alive” signs, which I never quite understood until high school when I got a tattoo from a guy who had an albino boa constrictor that devoured a rabbit in the tank next to me as I lay on his kitchen table getting a blurry butterfly etched into my hip. It was an agonizingly slow process, on both accounts.
Walking into the shelter was a shock. I had really built it up in my head as some sort of happy cat utopia, but everything smelled like stale pee and the sawdust janitors put down when someone pukes in school. All the cats looked old and scraggly, like feline versions of my drunk uncle Jay, whom we don’t invite to Christmas anymore because he once rummaged through our drawers for change, threw up in my closet, and half passed out while touching himself in our shower. I couldn’t appreciate at that age how truly badass this guy was, and now he’s sober, has found Jesus, and works as a magician and balloon animal maker at nursing homes. I knew you when, Uncle Jay.
I stood at the entrance frozen in anxiety un
til my dad put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me in tight, and I was suddenly calm because he always smells like sweat and freshly sanded wood. He walked slowly up and down the aisles of rusty metal cages, stopping every so often to stick his finger through the bars and play with the eager cat batting at him for attention. I finally decided on a small kitten with fluffy orange fur, minimal eye goop, and a smoker’s cough.
Overwhelmed with guilt and homeless cat empathy, my father sent me to wait in the car while he paid, appearing at the passenger door a short time later with a small cardboard box riddled with air holes and the word Sunshine scribbled across the front with a Sharpie. What a ridiculous name for a cat. On the car ride home, I used the pen from the glove compartment to cross out Sunshine and rename her Kimberly, which is what I was legally changing my name to the second I turned eighteen. Kimberly and I bonded the whole trip home as I whispered to her through the tiny holes in her container.
We returned home to find my mom and brother waiting on the porch. This is what we did before the Internet, by the way. Sometimes we just sat outside and looked at nothing for hours at a time. My mom was visibly unhappy when she saw the box, but what could you do, I had legally adopted Kimberly; it was official, she was mine. I excitedly ran to the front porch to show my brother the box and let him peer through the holes while my dad went to the garage to get a box and a blanket, a peace offering to my mother to keep the cat outside. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was a cat, so I would make do.
Then it all went pear-shaped. When my dad removed the lid of Kimberly’s box, she lunged at him, clawing him across the cheek and darting off across the grass, scaling the thirty-foot oak tree in our yard. My dad was furious, vomiting curse words and wiping blood from his face with a rag. I was hysterical, screaming her name and chasing after her to the base of the tree, pleading with her to come down and shaking her food bowl. My mom took my dad inside to clean up his wounds, but I refused to leave the tree, staring up at the orange ball of fur wedged on one of the highest branches. An hour later, my dad came back outside.
Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It Page 2
