Tonight, while meditating on life in general as I enjoyed a nightly cigarette, a memory came whooshing back into my mind with a fervor that could not be ignored. Of course, I feel the need to blog about it for two reasons. One, I feel like it was significant, and I have something to say about it. Two, my blog has been frightfully neglected lately, and I like to jump at a chance to write something that may have some small amount of substance.
When I was a young girl, my grandmother had a relative who was a nun. I'm not sure about the specifics, like what order she was in or what have you because my father had converted to the Baptist faith after marrying my mother. We never really learned much about the Catholic faith, needless to say, other than the easy things like how to say the Hail Marys of the rosary for funerals. To be candid, I don't even recall her name.
This particular nun found quite a bit of favor with my grandmother and her two sisters. They were all devout Catholics. They volunteered regularly at their local parish and attended services very regularly. In the event that they could not attend mass, they watched the mass which was broadcast on local television. Because of their devotion to their faith, they often had the sister over for dinner.
I remember one particular dinner. I must have been around eight years old, I imagine. I was old enough to know I'd been insulted, to be hurt, without being so old that I had the guts to say anything back. My grandmother had made some sort of meat, of course, but the best part of the meal were the roasted potatoes that she made (mostly because, like all delicious and terrible for you foods, they were DROWNED in butter). My grandmother's potatoes were wonderful. We all loved them, and they always went quickly. I must have been eating them with particular vigor, however, because I recall the sister looking at me and saying, "You like those potatoes, don't you?"
Of course, trying to be polite, I nodded and replied, "Yes." Mostly, my responses to the sister were monosyllabic because she was older and made me uncomfortable, as all old people did when I was young.
Her answer to my reply shocked me into submission. With all the cruelty she could muster, she said, "That's why you're fat."
To be perfectly honest, I have been fat basically all my life. You can chalk it up to whatever you want. I'm working out, I'm eating much more healthily, I've reduced portion sizes. I'm still fat. I'm probably always going to be fat. I know this. What perplexes me is not that she pointed out that I was fat. Let's be honest, everyone with eyes knows that I'm fat. Why cover what you can't hide? What perplexes me is why she would so cruelly point it out in front of other people when I was but a child.
Now, I could launch into a tirade about how inappropriate it is to say that to a child. I could mention that nuns are supposed to live their lives as manifestations of God's love on Earth. Neither of these things are the centrality of why my memory struck me as so terribly important. I'd been called fat in school before. This, however, was the first time that I'd been confronted as being undesirable for being fat by someone who was related to me. It was the first time a relative made me feel terrible for my body.
Don't get me wrong, family has made me feel terrible for personal choices or what-have-you many times since then. Feeling terrible has not been in short supply in my life. Yet, this was the first time that I'd been made to feel terrible about my body, the very beginning of all my real struggles with body image. I've hated my body for so long. I've never embraced my body. I always think, "If only this were smaller," or "If only those were bigger," or "If only I wasn't so fat!" All my life, I've always thought that I'd be more desirable, more lovable if only I were just a little less fat.
Here's the problem: being less fat won't make me less of a bitch. It won't mean that I'll suddenly start to trust people. It won't make me stop pushing people away when they say things I disagree with. Being less fat won't mean that I'll be nice to people. Being less fat won't make me stop saying terrible things to anyone that gives me a sideways glance or mistakenly finds themselves on my bad side. Turning into a skinny, gorgeous little thing won't turn me into Mother Theresa. It probably won't make me happy. It certainly won't provide me with the direction that my life is lacking.
The most important part of the memory is the part that I almost always forget. I get so wrapped up in the cruel words of the sister I forget the really important part of what happened that night: the look of abject horror and shock on my grandmother's face. I always forget that, after the sister left for the evening, my grandmother and her two sisters, my great aunts, sat at that table and told me how wrong she was. I forget the huddle of glorious, loving, motherly women who tried to tell me how much they loved me by telling me how beautiful I was. I forget how offended my mother was when they related the story to her, how she reacted in agreeance with what my grandmother and great aunts were telling me at that table. That's the part of that memory that counts.
People will always be ready to strike you at the core of the most obvious faults you bring. Fat. Skinny. Pimples. Whatever it is, they'll always be ready to call you out to make themselves feel better by making you feel worse. The important thing is the support that we get from the people who really love us. Personally, I just hope that all the little fat girls out there who have their feelings hurt by other people trying to tear them down, whose body image issues will begin at a young age and continue to be a terrible struggle, have a gaggle of loving women ready to tell them how wrong those other people were. I hope that, like my grandmother, someone will react as though they themselves had been personally insulted. I hope those little fat girls have the kind of love that I did because that's what really counts.
Body image continues to be a struggle for me. I'm going to try a lot harder to believe it when people tell me that I look good. I'm going to try to believe it when people tell me that I'm pretty or that I have sex appeal, even if I can't see it in myself. Just do me a favor: if you ever see someone that doesn't believe the compliments they're getting, smack them upside the head for me. Sometimes, we need it.
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