To continue the thought of the Skydive? Or Walk Around Naked? post, I’ve been reviewing times in life when being a fat girl has affected my desire to participate in life.
There seems to have been a golden age of Beth that began circa 1986 and ended sometime around 1989, where, even with a higher weight than the circle of most of my friends (there are a few bigger girls in my circle, though we never really compared notes. Everyone in my high school class–for the most part–was friends, period. Of course there were exceptions. But we were, as a majority, an exception), super-puffy 80s hair helped by hideous home perms and eyebrows that I lovingly referred to as “the caterpillars” (thank God, never the “Unibrow”), I didn’t let my weight issues stop me from doing anything. Almost anything, I’m sure, because there were probably times I didn’t do something I wanted to because I felt too ugly or fat to do them, but the majority of my high school social career was rarely influenced by my weight.
The major way my weight impacted me then was that I just didn’t even dream of talking to guys as potential boyfriends. I didn’t flirt whatsoever because I had an unnatural fear of inducing laughter. I was the best- friend-girl every guy had. If guys wanted to ask a girl out, or wanted to know what a girl thought of them, I was the girl to do that. I’d work it into casual conversations (you must know that the only girls guys wanted in high school were the athletic types or the cheerleaders, and going to a school so small where you knew everyone did have its advantages. I talked to almost every girl on a somewhat regular basis). I was the matchmaker of the year–in fact, to this day, a few of my most successful projects still exist in marriage form.
But I wasn’t the girl who asked guys out, and I was the girl only asked out by default. So I don’t really have many tales to tell of being at all the high school drinking parties held by the jocks when their parents went out of town because I wasn’t a cheerleader dating one of them. I don’t have the memories of romantic love in high school (insomuch as that’s actually possible) because that happened only rarely. (Three times. One ended up being a mistake because the guy and I were better suited to being friends, the second because the guy had such guilt issues over a former girlfriend that he dumped me to run back to her, and the third was probably the worst mistake of my high school life because he dumped me (and lied about it) because his father didn’t think my parents made enough money, that I wasn’t smart enough and I was not pretty enough for him to date. But that’s another topic for another post.) I don’t have memories of sneaking out to meet boyfriends (but I do have memories of sneaking out, so let’s clear that up now) because I didn’t have that kind of boyfriend. I didn’t have the courage to. I didn’t fit into a cheerleading skirt and I didn’t parade myself around in tight jeans, so I don’t have the memories of ever being that kind of girl.
If I have few memories of being the desired girl in high school (rest assured, I have tons upon tons of high school memories–that was a good time in my life–just not of being all I wanted to be because of the fat), I have but a rare handful from college. It’s one of the laments of my life, that I don’t have the memories of college that others have. When we went to my sorority reunion last month, the girls (I sat at the table with the founders because I was in the first class–but that was my first and only year at that college because I got married that summer and we moved away) jabbered about a million memories they had of college. Of pulling crazy all-nighters, of bar-hopping in different cities, of socials and dances and silly things they did that made them the silly, wonderful people they are today.
Those are hard to listen to because I don’t have them. Partly a combination of being afraid of myself because of my fat (it became painfully obvious, even as a freshman in college, that I was never meant to be one of “those girls”) and because I spent my college years as a wife, then soon after, a mother going to school, I get a little melancholy when my friends start reminiscing about college memories. Aside from my first year and the sorority girls, and the last year, when a core of us student taught together, there aren’t any memories for me of fun in college. It’s like a blank, black canvas where I desperately wish to see something but nothing comes up.
Part of that is due to my marriage and the kid coming along. It’s hard to justify qualifying for beer bong nationals in a toga when your husband is coaching until ten p.m. and your kid will need a diaper change between now and then. I don’t lament the parties I missed, though–I wasn’t a partier or big drinker. What I lament are college friendships and goofy memories of road trips, study sessions and social stuff.
When I start thinking in this line, it gets to be a circular vortex of blame and dislike. Of myself, of course. If I’d have had more confidence (believe me, the baby weight didn’t help. In fact, it was the beginning of my weight hatred for the last two decades), maybe I would have branched out and made friends. It isn’t a case of the hubby keeping me home. We could have hired a babysitter and he wouldn’t have cared if I’d have gone out with friends.
I just hated myself, so deeply to the core of myself because of my weight, that I figured no one else would like me, either. I didn’t know any of my college colleagues with baby weight, didn’t know any who had kids, didn’t fit in. It was a lonely, hollow place to be. A busy husband without time, a kid to take care of, college to work on, a household to run and a self-loathing that made me cry most mornings. Not too many good recollections can be built upon those memories, eh?
Studying and learning became my world. Thank god a large portion of me is a nerd and loves being consumed by a textbook on Mesoamerican History or a research project on linguistic differences, because if I hadn’t had that, I might have ended up at the funny farm. At least when I studied or researched or wrote, the outside world dissolved and I could pull strength from knowing I was going to be smarter than half the people on Jeopardy someday soon. I read voraciously, wrote constantly and ignored the fact that I’d never really have the kind of friends I’d had in high school and that no one really wanted to do anything with me.
Maybe it was my attitude, maybe postpartum depression, maybe being in a still-new marriage and not knowing my role, maybe living in a new city where people didn’t like you if you didn’t have old money and would tell you that, maybe it was driving to a college where I didn’t have a single friend and never really fit in, or maybe it was because I was a commuter and not on campus to grow myself as a college girl that kept me from creating all the tales my college-finished friends tell now–but what I do know is that I blamed most (if not all) of my pain during those years on being a fat girl. In a strange way, realizing that I didn’t have any strong friendships from my college years was much, much easier to tolerate and stomach if I just blamed it on being fat. Nevermind the fact that I could have gotten out and done something (though god knows what because I had no idea even where I’d have begun) to make friends–blaming my fat for all my problems was easier than admitting how horrible every single facet of my life was at that time. The world around me was alive, vibrant and dynamic. I was closed in the shell of a person who used to be that way but had made some life choices and had such a poor image of myself as a valuable person that I didn’t know how–I didn’t believe–I was worthy to participate.
Not until my late 20s, after I left my first teaching job to take a new teaching job in a new district–the greatest single decision of my career–did I ever feel I had the right to participate in life. Those are some dark days when I reflect back, and I don’t think they’re completely behind me. I still feel myself occasionally slip back into the horrible confines of that glass-walled box when my self-confidence starts to wane and I feel myself put up a barrier based on my weight rather than an acknowledgment of the reality of the situation I’m facing, but I work hard not to. I’ve missed so many life memories already because it’s easier to blame the fat rather than attack whatever insecurity is causing it…I want to have more tales to tell.