Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It (14 page)

         
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MOM VANS.
The drop off and pickup line at my kids’ elementary school reads like an anthropological study on motherhood. There are the twelve-passenger vans, you know, typical Catholics. There are the SUVs driven by moms who insist they are still trendy and pretend that it’s totally not hard to cram three car seats onto a single bench, or, you know, what I drive. And then there are the mom vans. Mom vans are minivans often as identical as the homes on a cul-de-sac, distinguishable only by the variations of stick-figure families on the back window and the blinking of lights from the keyless entry. These vans are loaded with DVD players and amazing features like sliding doors that open automatically and a tailgate that lifts when you wink at it; everything you need to make your life as a mom effortless and enjoyable. Except that driving one comes with the stereotype that you’re old and enjoy missionary sex through the open zipper of your Ann Taylor LOFT capris.

         
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SOCCER MOM.
If you were to pop my trunk right now, you would find, admittedly, fast-food wrappers, half-empty bottles of water, and lots of clothes. But intermixed with all of that, you’d also find two soccer balls, a bag of football cleats, a couple of packages of emergency juice boxes, and two collapsible lawn chairs. If we were driving in a remote area, and our car broke down leaving us stranded, we could survive for days on the sustenance contained in the back of my SUV. We once drove Andy’s car to a soccer game, and I watched him put two left shoes on our kid and deliver an after-game snack of unfinished Mentos. Soccer moms are the pack mules of parenthood. It’s why they keep trying to make us drive vans.

Maybe finding the balance between sexiness and motherhood was hard for me because I wasn’t confident with the sexy part to begin with, and the line between the two was often blurred between the screaming children and endless homework.

“Do you think I’m sexy?” I asked Andy as we sat in a booth during a rare date night at our favorite sushi restaurant, Kyoto Ka.

“Of course,” he answered, not taking his eyes from the giant hockey game happening behind my head.

“Do you think I’m sexy when I’m being a mom?” I pushed again.

“Well, when
aren’t
you being a mom?”

And that, friends, is a bit of truth right there. I was always being a mom. Andy had defined roles in his life. He was an engineer when he left the house each morning to go to work. He was a partner every Tuesday evening at his golf league. Andy was a dad when he came home from work and a husband when I needed him to kill a spider, and I mean that all in the best of terms. Andy was really good at compartmentalizing his life. I was not. I work from home, so the separation between writer and mother is blurred by the open door of my office, which ensures motherhood is a hat I can never take off. Even as I sat there on a date, I was gathering the stray straw wrappers into a pile and pouring soy sauce into our dishes. I was momming Andy out of familiarity and exhaustion, and as a result, I didn’t feel like Andy’s sexy wife or a strong, empowered woman. I felt like Nana from
Peter Pan
.

“I need to feel sexy in a nonparent capacity,” I admitted, lowering the zipper of my hoodie and exposing more of my cleavage.

“I agree,” Andy said, suddenly interested in the conversation. “It’s a little emasculating when you cut my meat for me.”

“Well, I like when you call me mama, but only when you make it sound telenovela exotic and not
Dora
exotic.” I laughed.

“I don’t like when you spell out sex words,” he countered. “Or when you finish first and you cheer me on in the same voice we use to get Gigi to go in the big potty.”

“Yeah, that’s messed up.” I exhaled into my beer. “Also, I know the wet spot in our bed is probably just apple juice, but for a second, I’d like to pretend it’s not.”

Can motherhood be sexy? Yes. Did I feel sexy? Not yet. But my lack of sexiness was not mutually exclusive to motherhood. I had forgotten how to be an actual woman who puts on makeup, cleans her vibrators, and deserves to like herself separately from the success and failures of those she cares for each day.

I THINK MOTHERS
have an innate response to protect their daughters from low self-esteem. The problem is that they don’t always have the tools or wherewithal to do it. Sometime after my father’s accident, my mother went through this thing where she cut off all her hair, bought lots of knee-length cargo shorts from the men’s department, and started breeding cocker spaniels. Or as it’s called today, going butch. It was like she knew her life had changed and she was going to be suddenly carrying the roles of both father and mother. She took an equally masculine approach to my body image and tackled most of my concerns with an “eh, fuck ’em” attitude. Today at thirty, I can nod my head in agreement and put my fist in the air and yell,
Yes, fuck them all!
But as a teenager, reading
YM
magazine, watching MTV, and putting up with kids making farm animal sounds at me in the hallway, that fuck-’em attitude was a little harder to come by.

Realizing she was ill-equipped to handle the task, my mother
decided to outsource my self-esteem issues by enrolling me in the prestigious Margaret O’Brien’s International Modeling Agency. I would also like to add that Katie Holmes attended this exact same elite school before becoming famous for making Tom Cruise look creepier.

Margaret O’Brien’s International Modeling Agency was in a run-down business park in South Toledo between a Kinko’s and an office rented out for AA meetings. The only thing international about the place was the Hyundai parked out front and the fact that the lobby smelled like body odor.

Margaret O’Brien was an old woman with short dyed auburn hair, fake eyelashes, and long earlobes that drooped under the weight of her giant gold costume earrings. For more than forty years, Mrs. O’Brien had been running what was originally billed as “An Etiquette and Manners School for Fine Young Women,” but now focused on launching the careers of future catalog models and wannabe Disney stars. She welcomed my mother and me into her office, and clicked her tongue as she went over my admission forms.

“It doesn’t have your weight on here?” She looked up from the stacks of paperwork now spread across her desk.

“Oh, I haven’t been to the doctor in a while, so I wasn’t sure what it was,” I lied.

“No matter.” She stood up from her desk and walked around to my seat, reaching her hand out to me. “Give me your wrist. I can tell you everything you need to know about your body from your wrist.”

I hesitantly put my wrist into her open palm.

“Do you see this?” she asked, showing me the tips of her cold, bony fingers wrapped around my wrist like a bracelet. “My fingers can’t touch each other, that is how big your bones are, you will always be this big; nothing will change that, so you might as
well get used to it,” she said dismissively. This should have been a reassuring concept. I wasn’t fat because I ate too much and wasn’t active enough; I was big because my bones were big, and that is something you just can’t control. But, because I was a teenager lacking the logic to understand that not every use of the word
big
in relation to my body was a bad thing, I took my large bones to be yet another personal failure.

Mrs. O’Brien was not in the business of turning people away, no matter how unsellable they were, so despite my giant bones, I was placed into the beginner’s course for Confident Modeling, an exclusive course open only to people willing to pay the fee to attend. It was a rigorous six week program that culminated in a “professional” modeling photo shoot and fashion show in front of family and friends. Classes were focused on such topics as how to walk, how to behave in public, and basic hygiene. It was like going to school to learn how to be a well-mannered toddler, and many of the other girls in my class weren’t far from that demographic. My classmates ranged in ages from seven to thirty-five; our only shared connections were excessive social awkwardness and ungroomed eyebrows. None of us was what I would consider to be star material. We fumbled through posing lessons and overcompensated for our insecurities with loud, exaggerated horse clomps during runway practice. I wanted to tell my mom that I’d been shoved in the ugly class so that they could still take our money while pretending to make us feel pretty, but she’d spent so much, I felt horrible bringing it up at all.

Every Wednesday night I’d meet my mother in the parking lot after class, defeated and sore after the thirty-minute cheekbone-contouring marathon and having to squeeze my size 10 feet into size 8 heels.

“Do you feel prettier?” she’d ask, hopefully. As if that had been the point all along; if I felt pretty, I’d feel confident.

“I do,” I lied, rubbing the balls of my feet and turning up the radio.

The night of the fashion show, I walked the runway in a purple beaded mother-of-the-bride dress with the matching ruched bolero jacket my mom bought for me on clearance at JCPenney. My parents clapped and when I got to the end of the runway, I silently mouthed the word
way,
just as my instructor encouraged us, so that our lips would be slightly parted and sexy in pictures. After the show, my mom and dad were waiting for me at the door with a bouquet of pink carnations and the envelope of “professional” head shots taken earlier that month.

“Now you can tell people at your school you’re a real model!” my mom said excitedly from the front seat as we drove home.

“I’m not a real model, Mom. You paid an old lady money to take Polaroids of me in front of an oscillating fan.”

I understand what my mom was trying to do. She didn’t understand my confidence issues, because she didn’t struggle with them herself. At least she didn’t appear to. It wasn’t that she walked around feeling gorgeous and untouchable, but rather, those weren’t things that mattered to her, and she didn’t understand why beauty and self-esteem had been things I was so hung up on. My mom had great intentions, but sending me to modeling class to feel good about myself was like enrolling someone who doesn’t have any legs in figure-skating lessons; it just made me feel worse.

“She’s a mini you!” they say, gushing over her big brown eyes and long thick hair as she spins in circles in the grass or sings complicated melodies of nonsense while dancing around the aisle in the supermarket.

And they are right. She has my eyes, and my wavy rebellious hair. She also has my thighs, feet, and lips. Gigi is witty and smart and curious and beautiful and I’ve spent five whole years nodding along with every relative, friend, and stranger on the street who told me she is exactly like me, even though I thought exactly none of those things about myself.

I woke up each morning and watched her dance in the sunlight coming through the curtains and thought,
Jesus, she is the most magnificent girl I have ever seen
. Sometimes my breath would even catch and my eyes tear up at her effortless joy and perfection.
And then I walked to my bathroom to get ready for the day and swore under my breath at the haggard and fat reflection staring back at me. Until one day it hit me. In a few years Gigi will stand in front of her own mirror, hating her own thick thighs and giant feet. She’ll call herself fat and disgusting. She might even think, for a moment, that it would just be easier to not exist at all. I don’t know what would destroy me more. The part that she could even for one moment think that she is anything other than beautiful, or the fact that she learned it
all from me
.

Of all the hobbies I have picked up and dropped over the years—the fiddle, magic, competitive eating—body hate has been my most dedicated and refined. And now with the birth of just one tiny and beautiful girl, everything I knew about myself had changed.

Being a mother to boys has been completely different than being a mother to a girl. I love them all the same, that goes without saying. I would murder for them on a completely equal level, as well. There are just some things a little more terrifyingly relatable to raising a girl.

Some of them are obvious, like when Jude and Wyatt exclaimed during her first diaper change, “Why hasn’t her pee-pee come in yet?” Or “Why does she have two butts?”

But the rest could only be picked up by a skilled eye. The way she’d linger in the bathroom to watch my nighttime routine, or stand in my closet as I picked out dresses for a night out. Unlike Andy, whose eyes glazed over when I would talk to him about clothes and makeup, Gigi would listen to me, wide-eyed, soaking it all in. It was momentarily lovely to have someone there to talk to. Until I realized that that someone was not my friend, but my very young daughter.

When they say you’re not supposed to be friends with your kids, this is what they mean. All right, yeah, they also mean don’t buy them beer and condoms and stuff, but more important,
treating your little girl like a friend in place of actual friends is a terrible mistake.

One afternoon I watched her put on a fancy princess dress from her costume chest and walk to the mirror, frown, and touch her stomach in a way that brought me to my knees. She wasn’t twirling or smiling or thinking about how sparkly and pretty she looked; she was mimicking the way I’d touch my stomach standing in front of the mirror, frustrated with my body and what it looked like in clothes, pressing my palm into my gut hoping to eventually just hit a reset button. I was not Gigi’s friend at all. I was the woman ruining her life.

Looking my daughter in the face and telling her she was just like me, and in the next breath destroying my body in front of her, was a catastrophic mixed message. I was drowning in self-loathing, and the only way I could save her was to save myself. The problem was I had no idea how. I had been involved in a decades-long turf war with my weight, it’s truly all I knew. I was able to completely ignore all the miraculous things I had done despite my size, and instead fixate on the scale. I had fallen in love, gotten married, had three healthy kids, and launched a booming career. I also never lost any friends due to my size, and to my knowledge, Andy has no plans to divorce me because I weigh over 200 pounds. The reality was that my life wasn’t miserable because I was curvy;
I
was miserable because I thought I’d be happier if I were thinner, and when I sat down to think about it, it didn’t really make sense. I was healthy and successful, all within the confines of this skin; so what if it made jeans shopping harder or airplane seats tighter? And even if for one second I was able to shut off the societal propaganda about how the better, thinner, half lives, how on earth could I ever convince myself that decades of beauty standards could legitimately be wrong?

Say it out loud

Changing the narrative I supplied for my body was a very real fake-it-till-you-make-it scenario. I’ve never read
The Secret
. I am not a huge believer in hypnosis or positive thinking. My enthusiasm toward new-age hippiedom extends to almond milk and Nick Drake albums; that’s it. Getting up each morning and saying three positive things about my body as I stood in front of a mirror felt silly and fake.

“My hair is pretty.” (But I have two chins and my face is round.)

“My chest is sexy.” (My stomach pooch hangs over my privates.)

“The area at the bottom of my ribs makes for a nice waist.” (My legs are full of dimples and veins.)

My original goal here was to prove to a preschooler that I loved my body and that she should, too. But, as months passed and I stood grudgingly in front of the mirror, the positive affirmations were no longer followed by faults. In fact, I began to see less and less of them. I would catch my reflection in the car window or a security camera at the store, and instead of zeroing in on everything wrong with me, I began to only pay attention to the good. I did have great hair, my breasts were amazing and I had a really great waist and hourglass figure. I had talked myself into loving myself purely out of persistence and repetition. I still knew there were things about my body that I didn’t love, but eventually, the good began to outnumber the bad.

Buy actual pants

Listen, I love stretchy pants as much as the next person. And I make it a point to never judge other people based on what they are wearing, as long as it’s not a Klan robe or a suit made of human skin. But for me, showing up at the store in leggings so thin you can see your cervix does
not spell confidence, it spells resignation. I was in leggings because all my jeans were more comfortable in a ball on the floor than they were buttoned and on my body. I could buy bigger ones, sure, but if I did that, I’d be admitting to everyone that I’d gained even more weight, so instead I went through my late twenties riding a carousel of black stretchy pants; their level of formality determined by how faded they were.

“Does this look okay to wear to the funeral?” I asked Andy as he looked for a tie in the closet.

“Well, they’re leggings, so . . .” He trailed off, unsure how seriously he wanted to debate the issue with me an hour before burying his grandmother.

“Right, but they are black,” I said out loud, assuring both him and myself that it was a logical choice.