Weight should never be an issue.

Sadly, it is...


As I sit here I wander back through my old pictures which depict a younger and skinnier me. An unmarried me with no realistic thought of children. I was so skinny. It's hard to imagine 5'9 me only weighing 120 pounds, but it did happen once. Even if that once was short lived. Now I'm heavier and ashamed to discuss weight, looking back at that time and realizing that I had been obsessive and too thin. I never once faced myself in the mirror and said "I look too skinny" as I should have. Being 120, I still wore a size 10 and wallowed in the fact that I was not wearing a single digit size yet. I viewed myself as the whale who tried to fit in with dolphins. It was not going to happen. Everyone else was so skinny, and I was still huge. So I thought. My everyday consisted of walking for 2-3 hours, working for 8-12 hours (depending on how badly I was needed or how lame my night was looking) and one small vegetarian dinner. I had no idea what weight I really was and felt determined to lose 40 more. Only shortly before I moved to NY did I find out just how far my obsession had brought me. For an instant, I felt good. I looked myself in the mirror and thought, "I look good!" That is, until I remembered that I am still a size 10 and still wearing medium shirts. I could almost feel the fat weighing me down. My reckless schedule continued.

Fate, it seemed, saved me from my demented ways with the arrival of Charlie into my life. With his help I understood that weight was not everything. He loved me for me and I didn't need to know anything else. A month before we were to marry, we found that I was expecting. A week later, the baby was gone, but the tiny pudge it had already brought was not. I lingered on the misery and the barely expanded waist line. I wanted to drop the weight, but I wanted a baby even more. After marriage things were blissful. Our bathroom scale was thrown out and I forgot my worries of if I wore junior girls pants or not. After almost six months, I was pregnant, and nothing in the world could have brought me down. Now that my son is nine months old, I fret over my weight. I tell myself things over and over. "I haven't lost enough. I should do more. I need weights. I must eat less." Along with far harsher things that I'll spare you. Even in the bedroom, if things do not follow through when I am in the mood, I find myself crying as I think "If I were Charlie, I wouldn't want a cow like me either." Such thoughts are ridiculous, and I know it! But they do not stop. At the moment, my stomach has felt rather gross for the past week and I find myself hardly touching food. I feel sick, and anytime food is ingested, my stomach begins to reel and I find myself in the bathroom. (I'll spare you the details, but it is not vomitting.) Each time I finally do eat that one small meal, again, my face feels round, my hin feels like it's dragging my head down, my thighs suddenly seem too large and my gut still too flabby from post-baby. I sicken myself. Now I can't help but wonder if this stomach bug is nothing more than my own mental disease.

I miss my family desperately, and yet I am terrified to see them again. Horrified at what they and my old friends will think when they see me again. My skinny minnie sisters are gorgeous, petite, and the older two even have 2-3 children. Even my sister in law who is again expecting looks more like an elongated stick. I can't face them, or anyone like this. How do I even go in public?

Thinking all this over, I can't help but return to my father. Vividly my mind plays memories of him stating that I am fat and stupid. I even remember one point in time, where he would not allow me to eat applesauce because sugar is an ingredient. I often wished he'd chosen another method. I never felt loved. I felt fat. And who would love a fat child? I hardened my heart against him and became all that he told me not to be. But what was the difference? I figured that he'd never care about the fat child. He had told me that I was a 10 pound baby. I was fat then and I was fat now. It was my fault, and had always been my fault, he'd told me. Carrying my own child I feared for him. I was beyond terrified that he would take after his mother and be 10 pounds and ridiculed as I had been. I could picture my father on the phone laughing that I was fat, and had successfully passed the trait to my unfortunate son. Upon Damen's first weighing, I nearly lept out of my hospital bed in hearing that he was 8lbs 5 oz. A reasonable weight, and nothing like me. I wonder if my father understands....

I apologze profusely to anyone who reads this if it sounds like I am complaining. I do not intend to drag anyone down. But seeing as how this is my journal, I feel it is my right to contemplate and speak the things on my mind. At the current time, I cannot sleep because this subject pounds in my brain so. In closing, if there are any parents out there, fathers especially, who are reading this, please be a better father than mine. Please don't put your children down. They hear you. You may think they brush it off, but they don't. They hear, and they remember. Forever.