I was a chubby child but when my parents divorced, my weight skyrocketed. During my freshman year of college, I decided enough was enough and dieted extremely to drop weight. Every day, what I can and cannot eat is a problem. I would rather go hungry than eat something with several calories or even something as simple as a sandwich. My body is starting to become ideal.
Not all trajectories are so obvious, not everyone’s parents so vocal. My mom, for example, never explicitly held up achievement or busyness as virtues the way she did independence, honesty, or fun, but her actions were the boldest statements. My most immediate model of womanhood was whizzing past me faster than a speeding bullet, in many different directions from sunup to sundown, accomplishing all of her variable tasks with efficiency, excellence, and emotional presence. My dad was busy at work but chilling out at home.
Hard work is often associated with generations past, but the Puritan ethic certainly hasn’t died. If anything, our generation has brought it to a whole new level. Dr. Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me, reports that “in a 2000 survey, young people were 50 percent more likely than older people to say that working hard was ‘the most important thing for a child to learn to prepare him or her for life.’ ”
A recent report by the National Council for Education Statistics confirms that girls are internalizing their mothers’ lessons about obsessive activity and achievement. Girls consistently outperform boys on reading and writing tests. In the United States, girls score an average of eighteen points higher on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Even in math and science, fields previously dominated by men, young women are making their mark. Female high school graduates in 2000 were more likely than their male peers to have taken algebra II, biology, AP/honors biology, and chemistry. Young women dominate extracurricular activities as well. In 2001 females were more likely than their male peers to participate in music or other performing arts, belong to academic clubs, work on the school newspaper or yearbook, or hold offices in student council or government. Women outnumber men on college campuses by at least 2 million, and their majority is growing. In a recent New York Times op-ed, “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” the Kenyon College admissions officer Jennifer Delahunty Britz admitted relying on the equivalent of affirmative action for boys in an attempt to create a gender-balanced class. Responses flooded the paper, including one from the career educator Vaughn A. Carney, who said that “ ‘gender norming’ is the dirtiest little secret in higher education.”
The daughters of baby boomers have driven straight on past equality to dominance when it comes to achievement—academic or otherwise. Unlike our brothers and boyfriends, who settle for being great at certain things and uninterested in others—a style borrowed perhaps from their fathers—we desire, like our mothers, to do it all and do it all near perfectly. Mediocrity is for sissies, and as inheritors of Title IX and “go-girl” feminism, we despise nothing more than weakness (except perhaps fatness, which we equate with weakness).
Every time I did well in school or had a good-hair day (rare as that was)—the world gave me glowing praise. I quickly learned that the question “Have you lost weight?” actually means “You seem like you’re doing well” in female-speak, even if a person clearly hasn’t changed a physical inch. The evidence was conclusive—real women were busy, accomplished, thin, and perpetually chasing after perfection at a mind-numbing speed without so much as a grunt.
My mom stacked my shelves with Our Bodies, Ourselves, books on financial literacy, Mary Oliver poetry, weathered feminist tomes that I would not crack until I was far away from home, and blank journals waiting to be filled with angst-ridden scrawls. She told me: “You can be anything that you want to be.”
My translation: “I have to be everything.”
Unspoken Legacy
So that is how we went from good to perfect, but how did we get from Jane Fonda to bulimia? Easy: Jane Fonda was bulimic.
In her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far, Fonda writes: “How much better I might have been back in those early movies had I been able to show up fully in the roles rather than work half-crippled by a disease that no one knew I suffered from!?” Sweet Jane, like so many of our mothers, thought no one knew she suffered. In fact, like women in general (perhaps more than women in general), young girls are highly perceptive and intuitive. As I watched my mom bounce maniacally on the mini-trampoline to Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical,” I wondered what bad feelings could lead to such self-torture.
Many young women I interviewed admitted that they knew intuitively their mothers hated their own bodies or, worst-case scenario, their own lives. Tara, a twenty-seven-year-old living in Lebanon, explains, “I think mothers saying lines like ‘my thighs look huge in this’ takes a toll on the daughter because unconsciously you look at yourself and see your mother’s shape and start having the same issues with it, even if you really aren’t built the same way.”
Even if their moms adopted the trademark superwoman smile— forced and tense around the edges—their daughters picked up on the little signs that spelled desperation. Nancy Friday, author of My Mother/My Self, describes this discovery: “The girl is left with the perception of the gap between what mother says, what mother does . . . and what the girl detects mother feels beneath it all. Nothing mother really feels ever escapes us. Our problem is that because we try to live out all parts of the split message she sent us, our behavior and love all too often represent a jangled compromise.” We read the messages, as cryptic as some of them may be: a smaller portion of food on Mom’s plate, a whispered epithet at the mirror, a blanket refusal of birthday cake or Christmas cookies.
For some, the unspoken legacy was handed down in more obvious ways.
Karen’s* mom did everything that was supposed to be kept secret in the bathroom. With the door shut and the lights off, she would light up her cigarettes and blow the smoke out the little window above the toilet, but Karen smelled it. Sometimes, after dinner or in the late morning, Karen would hear the sounds of her mom gagging behind the closed door. Karen tried crying, hoping that it would make her mother emerge from the secret place and stop doing whatever it was she was doing in there, but the sounds of the toilet flushing repeatedly were much louder than her tears.
Sela’s* mom was a workaholic, a flash of muted silks always running past her to get to the car in the morning. Sela was ticked off that her mom was so much skinnier and less available than the other moms. Even if her mother had possessed one of those wide, comforting laps, Sela never would have had a chance to lie in it. Instead, she spent most of her time with her nanny—a kind maternal substitute. When her mother was home, she always refused food but insisted that Sela eat. “But I want to eat with you, Momma,” she would whine. “Don’t be difficult,” her mother would order.
Heather’s* mom was a feminist therapist. She marched around with scarves flying, flowing skirts dragging on the dusty floors (she wasn’t much for cleaning). Heather was embarrassed by all the talk of feminism but liked that her mother was more liberal than her friends’ uptight, out-of-touch moms. She could talk to her mom about boys or fights with girlfriends, sometimes even hint at sex. What Heather didn’t find so comforting was the discrepancy between what her mom said to her—“Heather, you are a gorgeous goddess! Don’t let anyone ever tell you different”—and what she said to herself. After catching a glimpse of herself in the full-length bedroom mirror, her mother scoffed, “Jesus, how did I get so round? Disgusting.” It was just a passing comment, but it burned into Heather’s brain. If her mom was “disgusting” and Heather—who looked like her mom—anticipated growing up to have her mom’s body, what did she have to look forward to?
Not all of our mothers had undiagnosed eating disorders, but many did. And many of those who didn’t still had unhealthy patterns with food (fad or yo-yo dieting), new and twisted fitness regimens, and distorted views of and relationships with their own bodies. Second-wave feminists politicized the idea that unrealistic beauty standar
ds are dangerous, certainly, but they clearly didn’t internalize their own cultural critique. The more enlightened Jane Fonda reflects: “Up until then I had been a feminist in the sense that I supported women, brought gender issues into my movie roles, helped women make their bodies strong, read all the books: I had it in my head. I thought I had it in my heart—my body—but I didn’t; not really.”
This is not a blame game. My mother’s generation taught mine to be questioning, critical, outspoken, unafraid. Well, here we are: looking back on our childhoods and trying to understand how we acquired such bottomless hunger for achievement and perfection and such resistance to balance, wellness, and satisfaction.
Most mothers do the best they can so that they do not pass on their pathologies to their daughters and sons. Even the moms who say one thing but model another are hoping their children won’t discern the difference. Mothers with serious eating disorders may have chosen not to talk about them because they thought that ignoring them would help them go away and keep them from becoming part of their daughters’ lives. Or maybe they were so sick they didn’t even know they were sick, so separated from their bodies that they didn’t feel the pain. AARP: The Magazine recently revealed that “more and more midlife women are being diagnosed with anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders.” Remuda Ranch, a treatment center in Arizona, reports a 400 percent increase in female patients over forty since it opened in 1990. William Davis, vice president of research and program development at the Renfrew Center, which has sites all over the country, reports that about half of the older women now seeking help have struggled with food issues for years, untreated.
Just getting through the day with double or triple duty was probably all most mothers could handle. As long as they put on the happy face and kept providing, comforting, cooking, and cleaning, they hoped they could keep their intimate and destructive “body issues” to themselves. Yet we soaked up what they did and how they felt. Fifty years of attachment theory—the psychology of the unique physiological and emotional bonding that goes on between mother and child—confirm that no connection is more intimate than that between a mother and a daughter, no bond of bodies more tangled and powerful.
Interpreting Our Mother’s Bodies
My own mother is tall. In sixth grade she had a tremendous growth spurt and shot up to her full height of five feet ten inches. My dad likes to tell stories about this giraffe of a girl who sat in front of him, swinging her ponytail in his face until he would yell at her and then, in turn, get yelled at by the teacher, Mrs. Lamb. Though my dad was smitten from the first swing of that ponytail, he decided not to ask her out until he was taller than she. Finally, right before sophomore-year homecoming, he approached her in the hallway, stood back to back with her, and declared himself worthy. My grandmother made my mom go.
What my grandmother said was law, a lot of which was disastrous to my mom’s self-image. She grew up knowing that her mother disapproved of everything about her. My mom represented everything that my grandmother was not; her most obvious differences were in her body. My mother is tall and athletic, was a fierce competitor when she played semipro softball, and is a generous and spontaneous flirt. My grandmother was petite, private, and pious. She believed that God liked women who were steadfast and internally strong but not showy, not women like my mom.
I pieced all this together little by little, through snatches of phone conversations I overheard, the under-the-breath complaints traded between my parents on the ride home from Grandma’s house, the way my mom’s eyes got watery sometimes when she talked about her adolescence. At one of my mother’s birthdays, as we all sat around the dining room table in my grandmother’s pristine condo staring at the giant cake she had made from scratch, my grandmother announced: “I made German chocolate because that’s Jere’s favorite, and we all know how much Jere likes cake!” Everyone laughed, but I saw the discomfort behind my mom’s smile.
These scraps of memory, seemingly inconsequential in isolation, constitute an important quilt of meaning that I painstakingly sewed together as a young observer. My mom’s presence, her personality, her body made my grandmother uncomfortable. My grandmother, in turn, made my mom feel too big, physically and otherwise.
My mom was a little overweight when I was growing up, but when I was a little girl, this extra weight seemed like an essential part of her vast repertoire of mothering—a warm lap for sleeping on, big, fleshy hands for smoothing the hair off my forehead, a shelf of breast to rest my head on when I crept into the nook of her arm. My mom still has a Mother’s Day gift that my brother made for her when he was six years old: It is a plate with a picture of her, jumping on the mini-trampoline, two long, winding coils springing from either side of her stick body. “Those are your boobs, Mommy! When you bounce up and down!” This hilarious but telling memento sums up how my brother and I understood our mom’s body back then. It was big and wonderful, a toy and a talisman.
Eventually I wanted a voice-over for all the nuanced scenes I had witnessed over the years, an explanation of the subtext. I could sense that it was a language of pain.
One lazy summer afternoon, I asked my mom about it: “Why was Grandma mean to you?”
I could tell from my mom’s expression that she was taken aback. “What do you mean, Courtney?”
“I mean, how did she make you feel back when you were young?”
“She was critical, that’s all. She was critical, and she really liked men better in general.”
“What do you mean, ‘liked men better’?”
“Well, it’s kind of hard to explain. There were a lot of women back then like your grandma, who were more accepting, more forgiving of men, and more interested in men.”
“Weird,” I said, the eloquent summary of a nine-year-old. I had never thought about such a thing—women liking men more than women. It seemed that all the women I knew spent hours talking on the phone to other women, going out for lunch, congregating in little groups at family picnics or after school as they waited for their kids to come running out with backpacks hanging off their shoulders.
“Mom, will I look like you when I grow up?”
Quickly she responded, “I think you have your father’s frame. You’ll look like me in the face, maybe.”
I knew what she was doing, even then. I knew she was trying to reassure me that I wouldn’t be “bigger,” like her, that I would grow into a female equivalent of my lanky dad. That seemed safe. Becoming wide-hipped and big-breasted, like her, could get me criticized. Staying thin and tall, like him, could get me respect. I have lived in the shadow of this conversation since then—always wondering if I am becoming my mother, in spirit and body. I am wide-hipped like her, big-assed like her, slight in the shoulders like her. I am not big-breasted or round-bellied. I lurk at the edges, always afraid that I will unconsciously slip across the line into her burdens and her body. I pray that it is not a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At twelve I named our new kitten Murphy, after Murphy Brown. There was something contained, autonomous, inarguably successful about that quintessential eighties sitcom character that stood in opposition to my fear of becoming my mother. Murphy Brown represented a mix of independence, authority, and humor—a combination I wasn’t seeing in my real life.
My generation sees our mothers’ lives for what they are—often well-intentioned but failed experiments at being superwomen. Their bodies were the casualties of so many of these experiments. In my mom’s case, her worst nightmare came true; this energetic, ambitious, and optimistic woman was suddenly trapped in a body weakened by chronic fatigue syndrome. Slowing down, of course, is death for a perfect girl. It was certainly a hot, silent hell for my supermom.
It is widely known that women are more prone to depression than men, but in recent years studies have confirmed that they suffer disproportionately from a variety of illnesses. Panic disorders are also twice as likely in women. There are 1.2 million more American women than men who have diabetes. For reasons re
searchers still don’t understand, about 75 percent of autoimmune diseases occur in women, most frequently during the childbearing years. Women’s relationships with their bodies are fraught, not simply with the pressure to be thin but with the most basic pressure of all: just to keep up.
Some mothers wear stress like a badge of honor, acting as if being stressed is a sign of a good woman. Others deny it even exists: “No, you’ve got it all wrong, sweetie. I love juggling ten things at once, having the same ‘discussions’ [never fights] with your father over and over again, and scheduling in ‘me time.’” Stress, like weight preoccupation, had begun to look like a necessary landmark in women’s country to girls at the border. In fact, studies show that women’s bodies are affected by stress differently than men’s, and further, that the toxins in pesticide-treated food and even cosmetics may be contributing to the rise in autoimmune illnesses among women in the last few decades. Despite early evidence that our mothers’ bodies were breaking down under so much responsibility and expectation, few young women even know about the critical connections among stress, health, and body weight. We have watched our mothers “emotionally eat” when stressed out, but few of us have seen them draw the parallels between their busy schedules and their ailing bodies.
Feeling as if there is an unspoken subtext to our relationships with our mothers and, additionally, to their relationships with food is common among the young women in my survey. Their mothers feel comfortable talking all day about protein, saturated fat, Jazzercise, Atkins, Olivia Newton-John, and their daily sit-up regimen, but when it comes to having a down-and-dirty conversation about how they feel about their own bodies or their daughters’, they become mute. It is as if they anticipate that the impact of the truth would be seismic—that they have hated their bodies since their mothers first taught them to, that they are doing everything in their power not to make the same mistake—as if their words would shatter a delicate pane of glass between their daughters and the ugly world outside. Yet the daughters pay the price of their mothers’ well-intentioned silence in their own physical symptoms.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 7
