It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (9 page)

After the dance, I spent a week gorging on every food I saw. I ate straight through Christmas and clean into the New Year. My self-esteem had fallen to a new and seemingly bottomless low. I realized the food wasn’t making me feel any better, but even still, I stuck with the habits I’d created long ago.

I promised myself I’d try again to lose weight.

When winter break ended and ninth grade resumed, I tried out for the girls’ lacrosse team. Thankfully, it was less of a tryout and more of a “we’re going to accept anyone.” After our first practice, where we were instructed to run suicides across the field, I went home and threw up from exhaustion. Running with what felt like a knapsack of fat left my knees in agony. Gasping for air left my throat hoarse and dry and my lungs racked with sharp, icy pain. On top of being terrible at the sport and winded from a light jog to get my water bottle, the uniform was a horror show. The shirt, even in extra-large, barely made it around my midsection, distorting and somewhat obscuring the letters as they stretched to either side. And the skirt. The skirt barely covered the place where my thighs mingled and chafed.

That whole spring season—despite falling in love with being part of a team—I dreaded all the practices, all the games. I knew that my body would not only fail me physically but also embarrass me. And the fatigue made me hungrier. Rather than wanting to eat healthy things, I found myself ravenous and unable to control the kinds and the amounts of food I was eating. Pizza, ice cream, cookies—they were rewards for hard work, for putting myself out there. I gave up on losing weight when I realized that the very thought of trying to cut back sent me into panic attacks, which sent me directly to the candy aisle of CVS.

By the time sophomore year came, I was diet weary. I’d already attempted downsizing a dozen times. I’d gone to a Weight Watchers meeting with Kate’s mom, who also wanted to lose weight, and I’d cursed myself for half of the meeting, knowing that no one else in the room was under thirty with no children. I feared discovering
that any of the women at the meeting was a mother of one of my classmates. I worried that she’d tell her child she saw me, with the other Medfield moms, at a diet center.

One week of tracking my meals and counting points in my head at the school lunch table, and I felt like a loser. I resolved to buy a salad every day, only to end up pouring ranch dressing on top as though it were water on a fire. I knew the points ascribed to creamy dressings, but I wasn’t always competent at eyeballing a two-tablespoon serving or willing to stop there. I went to the YMCA after school to work out; it was the only gym in the area where I was certain no one I knew belonged. I weighed myself daily just to see if I’d made any progress, any progress at all, and no. Nope. None.

Again, I failed.

As people around me started dating—as my best friends started experiencing their first kisses and started going boy crazy—I felt more like an outsider than ever before. I wasn’t teased any longer; I wasn’t being bullied. But I was still painfully aware of my fatness and all the ways it excluded me from normalcy. I began to withdraw, often eschewing invitations to hang out and instead retreating to be on my own. I built walls around myself with bricks of cake, using frosting as mortar.

A really frustrating part was realizing that being boy crazy wasn’t even a worthwhile pastime. You can’t be boy crazy if no boy would ever be crazy for a girl like you. You can’t fantasize about your first kiss if you can’t even imagine that a boy—any boy—would kiss you.

And so instead of moving on to healthy adolescent relationships with boys, I clung to my childhood crush. While my friends were kissing boys, I was kissing that poster of Leo. I pined for
someone who wouldn’t have the chance to let me down, someone in such a castle-in-the-sky of a world that I knew he couldn’t concern himself with real-world flaws.

At sixteen, I’d reached five feet nine inches tall and 210 pounds. I’d all but given up on myself, when Mom found out about another medically run weight loss program. I was reluctant. I detested dieting. But I detested my body more, and that alone was so potent, it compelled me to try again. This time, the plan was to consume a mostly liquid diet. Two high-protein shakes and one reasonably healthy meal per day. Though it sounded an awful lot like a more expensive dabbling in Slim-Fast, Mom trusted it was more legitimate. She always trusted these medical programs. They were created and facilitated by doctors, after all.

I lasted four days. I was too embarrassed to bring a shake to school for lunch because—who brought a shake to school for lunch? Preparing them required ice and a blender. Drinking them required forgetting the pleasure of all other food. I’d wake up frequently throughout the night, hungry from the lack of snacking after dinner. I’d feel light-headed and moody. Mostly, I missed chewing.

I had come to a place, three years into a cycle of dieting and bigger than I’d ever been, where I believed I’d qualify for gastric bypass surgery. Mom believed it, too. She assured me that if I thought it was something I needed to do, we’d find a way to pay for it. The potential financial guilt aside, I thought, long and hard about going under the knife, about downsizing my stomach and removing much of my intestines, as my only hope for health. It never felt right, though. Some part of me knew I had to do it on my own, or at least that I hadn’t yet exhausted all my other, less extreme options.

I found myself with a muddier relationship to eating than ever before. Until I was thirteen, I ate with reckless abandon, using food for every reason unbound to hunger. But through my various concerted efforts to change the only body I’d ever known, I was accepting that all of what I’d been was less than ideal. I was trying to lose weight on the surface, but deeper, I was acknowledging that I’d been wrong for sixteen years and had to work to right myself.
How do you walk away from all you’ve ever been?

I felt tethered to the food. Beyond having grown up believing that food and eating were expressions of love, food came to exist as the only thing in my life that was mine and mine alone. She comforted me; she filled in the hole where a dad might have been; she puttied the cracks of a broken heart; she stayed home with me when no one else would, when no one else could; she let me make decisions all by myself; she promised I was in control when we were together.

And better yet, she loved me. More of her meant more—of everything.

When I failed at all the many diets I attempted, I proved I couldn’t keep promises I made to myself.

I realized,
I’m always going to be the fat girl
.

THE SILVER LINING
of resigning myself to being fat was the sense of acceptance that came with it. I learned quickly that my submission didn’t mean giving up; it simply meant moving on. I would still be fat, but that wasn’t the only thing I had to be. And so, even as my weight remained stagnant during all of junior year, everything else around me thrived. My circle of friends expanded, I had my first boyfriend, and Mom fell in love.

At the beginning of the school year, I met with a guidance counselor to discuss my plans for college. I’d had my heart set on the University of San Diego for a while, and I fantasized about living in the sun and warmth of California. Years earlier, Anthony had visited San Diego while on break from school in Arizona. He returned, raving about how beautiful it was and how perfect the weather was all year long. “You’d love it,” he told me, describing the beaches, hills, and canyons with such detail that I was able to picture them, like postcards. From then on, I dreamed of going and thought school would be my chance.

There in the counselor’s office, I watched as he inspected my transcript. “Well, you have a solid GPA,” he started, eyeing me through the glasses that rested on the bridge of his nose. “That’s the good news. What you need now is more extracurricular activities.”

After the meeting, I walked slowly down the hallway to my next class, mulling over his advice. I knew that he was right; I’d have to get more involved in order to have a better chance of getting into a school like USD, but the very thought of putting myself out there overwhelmed me. As the fat girl, it was much easier to pass through high school quietly and unassumingly. Joining clubs, playing sports, being active in highly visible social circles could make me vulnerable—potentially open to more judgment. But those things could also facilitate gaining new friends and new experiences. They could allow me to leave our lonely little apartment, and that reason alone was powerful.

I began by rejoining the lacrosse team—a comfortable starting place, since I’d played the year before. In time, as I gained more courage, I volunteered to manage the varsity swim team; joined peer mediation, peer leadership; worked nights at Casabella, a small pizzeria uptown; got elected to student government; and sat on the planning committee for prom.

Surprisingly, it felt good to throw myself into so many activities. I reconnected with Kate and Nicole through lacrosse and swim team, and as a tight group of three we met even more friends. I learned about what it felt like to be ambitious and outgoing and social. I laughed more. Through all of this, I started to gain some confidence.

When working in groups, I didn’t hesitate to interact with anyone, even the popular kids. Guys like Mike Oppel—undoubtedly
the most handsome of our eleventh grade, and perhaps the whole of Medfield High School—weren’t as intimidating to me as they once had been. But Mike was a special case. Funny yet solidly good natured, he was the one who played dodgeball best in gym class; who made jokes often, but not at the expense of someone else; who charmed girls and teachers alike, just by smiling. The two of us had shared a few classes during middle and high school, and because ‘O’ppel sits a few seats just behind ‘M’itchell, so did we. We were friendly, but not “friends.”

The emerging ease I felt—with friends, with school, with guys—was affirming. And none of it was connected to my weight. In some ways, deciding to just accept my fatness gave me a way out. A way to exist without bullying myself as others had. Because acceptance, tainted with sadness or not, is acceptance nonetheless.

And as I felt my life beginning to change, Mom’s did, too.

One year earlier, Nicole’s parents had divorced. That break, and all the painful changes that come with a split family, hurt Nicole and her two younger sisters deeply. Her mom, Peggy, and her dad, Paul, attempted to maintain some semblance of normalcy. The yearly camping trip that Paul had always invited me and Kate to tag along on was one tradition kept intact.

Paul and Peggy had known Mom as an acquaintance for years—since the year we moved to Medfield and Nicole and I had become friends. Now, with the camping trip approaching, Paul asked Mom if she’d be willing to come along to help with the five of us girls. After careful consideration, she said yes. Mom already spent any free time she had outside of work with Nicole, Kate, and me. We’d go to the movies or out to eat; we’d lie all together in her king-size
bed and talk with her honestly about boys and friendship and life. We could go to her with anything, and she’d listen. Her closeness with each of us gave her a second-mother status among my friends, and Paul knew that.

A week out from our camping adventure, Paul invited Mom to dinner at his apartment to plan. Together, they ate from Chinese takeout boxes and made lists of supplies to pack. Until that dinner invitation, I hadn’t seen Mom go anywhere that wasn’t related to work or me or Anthony. I couldn’t remember the last time, if ever, that she’d received a dinner invitation from anyone.

She came back from the meal talking as if she’d made a friend. For the rest of that week, they shot phone calls back and forth, tying up odds and ends in preparation. I knew there was a purpose to the calls, but I sensed there was something more going on when I heard a new tone to her laugh, when I saw a blushing smile after she’d hung up. By the time we set up camp in the woods of New Hampshire, it was as if the two of them had been good friends for years. They seemed a well-suited pair, laughing and commiserating as they wrangled the five of us kids.

Mom and Paul stayed in touch after we returned home. Every week, Paul invited her over for dinner to catch up. He always cooked—hearty comfort meals like beef stew and London broil steak with mashed potatoes. I grinned when she came home from his apartment the first time he made her his famous spaghetti and meatballs, glad to know that she had found them as unbearably delicious as I always had. She was so happy; for the first time, someone was making dinner for
her
.

I adored Paul. And I loved that Mom had found someone to spend time with; I really did. But I struggled with it, too. It was
downright foreign for her attention to be divvied up between me and anything other than work. As she got ready to go out with him, my mood turned pouty and irritable, and I was unable to let her go without forcing at least a twinge of guilt. I wanted her to feel remorseful for leaving, but then the second I noticed in her eyes the inner battle she fought before heading out the door, I was ashamed. While it took some getting used to, the longer they dated, the more comfortable I became. Observing how much they’d grown to love each other softened me. I noticed the ways in which the two of them were alike. Like Mom, Paul had a massive heart—one that made him so unreservedly generous, loving, and kind that you’d take him for a big pushover if you didn’t know that he also had a rule-loving, stern side, too. But where Mom was often extreme, disorganized, and chaotic, Paul was mild mannered, calm, and collected. Where Mom was emotional, he was rational. They balanced each other.