Friday, Sept. 13, 2002

My mom thinks I'm fat

5:19 p.m.

PROFILE BIO E-MAIL DESIGN DIARYLAND

My weight really bothers my mother. We can't have a conversation without her bringing it up. For every gift-giving occassion she presents me with new clothes that are several sizes too small. She says she does it to encourage me to lose weight. When I visit she always pushes her unfinished diet pills on me and carps about my eating habits and my lack of exercise.

To be fair, she criticizes herself the same way. She never eats more than two meals a day, and she has a huge collection of exercise tapes, including this bizarre one she loaned to me the last time I went home. It's all about breathing really hard, and she claims to have lost five pounds just by following along with the breathing exercizes. To my eye, she's on the verge of emaciation, but she doesn't believe me when I tell her she's thin enough. Why should she believe me? After all, I won't even admit I'm fat.

I can see where her problem comes from. My father is a skinny man who likes skinny women. My mother gained weight during each of her four pregnancies, and he would carp at her until she lost it again, but she was never skinny enough to suit him. And to twist the knife a little bit deeper, both of my sisters grew up to be supermodel thin. All of her efforts are an attempt to look like them, and to make me look like them.

As a kid, I was horribly skinny. I grew so quickly that I could never keep my ribs covered with enough flesh to hide them. Other kids would circle their fingers around my arm and exclaim at my stick figure proportions.

At 12 I finally stopped growing up and began to fill out. Soon after, my father took me aside one day to warn me that if I didn't stop eating so much I would end up looking like my mother. For the rest of that day I made sure he never saw me without food in my hands.

If I have body dysmorphia, it's the opposite of that which fuels anorexics and bulimics. When I look in the mirror or picture myself in my head, I see Marilyn Monroe with long, dark hair.

LAST ... ARCHIVE ... NEXT


Get E-mail When I Update
Notifies Sometimes Include Photos