My weight and I have a… complicated relationship. Usually, I ignore it. I honestly tend to forget how big I am because when I look down, all I can see is tits and thick thighs. Since I love tits and thick thighs, I don’t see this as a problem.
Until I’m forced to acknowledge reality.
Either by walking in front of a mirror, trying to put on a shirt with tight sleeves, or … you know… looking down and feeling my neck flab cut off my airway…
There’s a lot of ellipses in this. I feel like this sort of implies I shouldn’t be writing it. But I mistakenly thought I’d come to terms with my weight recently and so I was blindsided by what happened on Monday. I skidded on the pavement and now there’s gravel in my wounds. Until I pick out every last piece of gravel, I’m at risk so I’ve got to keep poking and prodding.
No matter how much it hurts.
My mother complains. A lot. She is prolific in her dissatisfaction with the world around her. And it’s not entire;y her fault. This craptastic worldview runs in the family. My aunt complains. My grandmother will manufacture things to complain about. This is the future I have to look forward to.
Sometimes I think back to the person who told me I was just never happy and I wonder how much worse I’m going to get. Will I become like my grandmother someday? Insisting my daughter buy me nightgown after nightgown because this was too big and this one is too small and the arms on this one are too tight while the neck on that one is too loose…
Will I be like Goldilocks, but without a Baby Bear?
…I got off topic here…
My mother was complaining about being sick, her favorite topic as she has not come to terms with her diabetes and the lifestyle changes she has to make. On Monday, she was contemplating calling the doctor. Her reason being that she’d lost five pounds in a month. She was down from 140 pounds to 135.
And the bottom dropped out of the car (because of course, I was driving. We carpool to work and this is when all the complaints happen.) This was the moment I skidded on the pavement and developed my road rash.
My mother, who always complained about how fat she was, weighs one hundred pounds less than I do. One hundred. One-freaking-hundred. And that’s not an exaggeration, friends. I weigh 234 pounds. My mother weighs 135.
I weigh one hundred pounds more than my mother.
And I can’t blame being five inches taller. It’s five freaking inches and I know that doesn’t equate one hundred freaking pounds. My husband is eight inches taller than I am and he only weighs twenty pounds more.
And is a guy.
I can’t blame osteoporosis either since bitch is stronger than I am. I can’t blame genes because they are her genes. You look at the two of us and you can tell I am my mother’s daughter. I can’t blame anything. Not a single fucking thing. I can’t write this off as–
It was when I started choking down my silent tears (because I do not want to get into this in the car on the freaking way to work on a Monday freaking morning) that I remembered it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter that I weigh more than my mother. It shouldn’t matter how close I am to my husband’s weight. I had come to terms with my body. I was better.
I was better…
But that was a lie. I hadn’t accepted that weight was just a number. I’d resigned myself to being fat. I hadn’t come to terms with being fat and beautiful. I acknowledged that I find other fat people beautiful. What was okay for everyone else was not okay for me. I was holding myself to a different standard, and I hadn’t let go of my outdated ideals.
And I still haven’t.
There’s no happy ending to this post. This all happened Monday morning and I’ve written this in a rush on Wednesday morning. In between, I’ve dealt with the never-ending shit show that is my nine-to-five and gotten more bad news about loved ones. I haven’t even begun to process this.
All I’ve done is acknowledge that I’m gonna have to rip off the bandages and scrub the wound with steel wool… It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna suck. I’m not even sure how I’m gonna accomplish it. But in the long run, it’s gonna be worth it.
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Ginny Lurcock 