Since I take a sort of sadistic-humorous pleasure in nicknaming myself “the fat girl”, (with help from dad, because that’s kind of been his pet name for me for a long time. It wasn’t created from maliciousness, it was a defense mechanism. He’s about 3 inches shorter than me, so I call him “shorty”. It works for us both), I figured it was high time I figure out just where this entire concept of self-fatness came from.
This isn’t a self-loathing kind of thing. I don’t sit around thinking of myself as “the fat girl” and cry Kleenex boxes dry, all the while munching a can of Pringles and sipping away on soda. I won’t lie, though–comparing myself to others, noting my extra fleshy bits compared to their wafer-thin profiles does, at times, send me into fits of self-hatred and spits of bad words directed at my reflection–most often, when I’m unfortunate enough to have to try on something new in a fitting room. The grip of being a fat girl has lost its power to make me drop into a sobbing heap and compare my life to nothing for days at a time, but it’s still there, lurking.
And I want to know where it came from.
I’ve been pondering this and, as a result, have come up with a startling revelation: I am the originator of seeing myself as a fat girl but not by myself. (Dad’s nickname didn’t start until well into high school, maybe even college. By then, the damage was done.) Even though I was in a 6X at age six, I didn’t see the X as a negative. I wore a bigger size only because Patti and Alice commented that I wore a bigger size. I didn’t have any idea of what size girls wore in kindergarten and first grade. I was more worried about getting picked for the freeze tag team at recess and in making sure I had enough fat pencils to write on my fat-lined green flecked paper during handwriting time. (The theme of elementary writing does not escape my observation) I didn’t lament the issue that Dina, Cathy and Darla were probably wearing 4T jeans to my 6X: as a first grader, size didn’t mattter.
I don’t think that size ever mattered throughout elementary. Sure, there are bits and pieces of random comments I recall from Patti and Alice about jean sizes while shopping, or a reminder that I didn’t need to eat “all of that”, or that I should go out and play instead of watching Tom & Jerry some days after school. Those are the suggestions all moms and grandmas make to their kids. I wasn’t a lazy kid; I was active. I liked to veg out on occasion just as much as others, but I had a great group of neighborhood (if you could call the houses my friends lived in that bordered the edge of my parents’ field as a ‘neighborhood’) friends, and we were always doing something, into something, getting in trouble for something.
I know that there were times in 4th and 5th grade that brought my taller size (in looking back, I still don’t consider myself “fat” at those ages. I was one of the two tallest girls in 1981′s class photo, and there were other, more qualified entrants in the fat contest for that picture, name and initials withheld because graduating with a class of 54 kinda makes it easy to single folks out) made me self-conscious, made me wish my legs were only made of bones and skin like the other girls’, not bones, skin and a layer of blubber and that my chub rub would magically disappear, but overall I don’t remember feeling (or being made to feel like) a fat freak of nature incapable of being considered a normal human.
No, those thoughts didn’t arise until 6th grade and the period of time I’ve consider the 180 Days of Howard to Bladensburg Hell, aka The Daily 28 Mile (round trip) Bullying Session. As luck had it, my friend Michaela and I managed to snag the next-to-last-seat on the right side of the bus that first day, the day that determined our bus seating arrangement for the remaining 179 days. As unluck had it, the 8th graders behind us wanted their friends to sit in the seat, not a couple of snot-nosed 6th graders. Instead of being intrepid youths, we were bullheads and refused to move, thereby cementing the name-calling and bullying for ourselves, twice a day for the rest of the year.
The two bullies, let’s call them Deidre and Kathryn, took it upon themselves to never let us forget that we had stolen the seats their friends evidently earned as a birthright. The 2 bullies were a little more lenient toward Michaela, for one reason: her brother was in 8th grade and a friend of both girls. Me, on the other hand, had no such luck. In fact, Deidre had haunted and taunted me for years–as we had been in the same Girl Scout troop, the same 4-H Club and lived within half a mile of each other. She despised me from the start, for whatever reason I never knew, and appointed herself the Queen of Mean when it came to me. You think I’d have had the smarts to steer away from her but the seat was just too good and we hit numerous bouncy spots on the ride every day–jolts that couldn’t be felt in the front seats.
I think back and wonder if I’d have developed such a strong dislike for myself in those (and subsequent) years if I’d have had the smarts to move to a seat away from her, but…who knows at this point.
From almost the first day, I remember her comments. She started low and quiet, almost as if she might convince me that I was hearing things, or that if questioned, neither of her two seat mates (another friend of theirs, Dora, sat in the single last seat on the right side and was also an 8th grader–but she was nice to me) would be able to swear they heard her. Deidre’s first comments were about not my body but my trumpet. Yes, my trumpet. My parents didn’t have the money to fork over for a new piece of shiny brass like hers had, but I still wanted to be in band. Grandma R. remedied this by digging out the coronet my dad had played in the high school band. Deidre’s case was shiny, hard, gray plastic. Mine was circa 1964, fake leather covered veneer with a very becoming red velvet interior and the scent of valve oil from years gone by. The case was formed almost exactly in the shape of the coronet (hers was smooth, rounded and had flip-snaps) and the bell of the case was worn and shaggy. I didn’t mind–I thought it was kind of cool that I’d be playing the same trumpet dad did.But it was a carved invitation to Deidre to start picking apart what little self-confidence I had.
“Where’d you get that trumpet? A junkyard?” she’d whisper against the window from the seat behind me, mean spite dripping from her words. “It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” I’d scootch away from the window, more toward the middle and get Holly into a conversation to avoid being near Deidre’s mouth.
My proximity from her mouth increased but she’d successfully bored into my brain. In the world of 6th grade, I didn’t know the rules–that to be popular, you had to wear the right thing, dress the right way, have the right hairstyle and makeup (which I wasn’t allowed to use until 8th grade), hang out with the right people, and have the right parents. As I discovered over the course of the school year, I had none of those. Each day it was a stomach-sinking adventure to discover which of those elements I lacked any certain day.
Her snarls ranged from my clothing (“Are those hand-me downs? Don’t you own a pair of Jordache jeans? Wrangler jeans are ugly. Nobody wears a sweater vest. Don’t you have any Nikes? Nikes are just the best. A sweater with a horse is totally ugly. Who wears purple penny loafers besides geeks?”) to my appearance (“Hey, buck teeth–here’s a carrot. If you walk so pigeon-toed all the time, you’re going to trip yourself. Your perm is so ugly/frizzy/curly/short. Your nose is so ugly it looks like a bird beak. You better not ask anyone for crackers or they’ll think you’re a parrot.” (This one she took all the way to high school. When I was a freshman in band class, she had the upperclassman nickname me “Polly”, as in “Polly want a cracker?” She was the reason I left the trumpet section to pursue a career in the percussion section on the marimba. And by upperclassmen, I actually mean everyone in the band from the lowest to the highest members.)) to my social status (“You have loser friends. Your boyfriend is a loser because he isn’t on the football team. Who has boyfriends not on the football team? No boys will dance with you at the dance if you wear that. If you were as popular as me, all the boys would like you.”)
She commented about my parents, my sister, my grades and my friends. If there was a subject she could degrade me about, she didn’t save it for later. She made it known. As the year progressed, she even got her seatmates to make comments about me.
The most unique facet to Deidre’s raging meanness toward me was that she never (as much as I can recall–remember, this is coming from age 11) called me fat. She was my first experience with a mean girl (and by far, the worst I’ve ever encountered in life) and I had so little awareness of what to do and so little actual self-confidence at 11, I had no choice but to believe her. She never called me a fat girl but did make it known what girls she considered fat. One of the nicest 8th graders, and one who became my friend in high school when she joined me in the percussion section from the trumpet section (interesting correlation there), T.A., was a taller, bigger girl too. Not in my wildest dreams would I have considered her fat. She was beautiful, with her Charlie’s Angel flipped hair and bright smile. But Deidre commented nearly daily when T.A. got on the bus at her stop about T.A.’s “thunder thighs” and “wide hips”–a comment I remember Deidre making out loud in high school band.
No, Deidre and The Evilettes never called me fat or really brought my weight into question. But with her/their constant, continual barrage of insults and bitch-rants (I was such a threat in my Wranglers, plaid-snap shirts, purple penny loafers and bad Toni-home permed hair), I soon became aware that one way to stem the tide of tears I’d cry about three times a week into my Care Bear pillow case was to be a step ahead of the hatred. I would lie in bed in the mornings before boarding the bus and dream up what new, fresh hell these meanies would greet me with. It was easier to take their hatred if I hated myself first–and hated myself worse than they did. I ran through every possible disgusting, mean, ugly, uncouth truth about me that I could muster, feeling slightly triumphant as I clomped down the bus steps each day in my uncool Converses if I had come up with a way to rag on myself that they hadn’t realized. It was a game, a challenge, a puzzle: hate yourself worse than others then they can’t hurt you. That became the lesson of the 6th grade, more so than learning how to read novels and pre-algebra equations.
It worked like a charm. I don’t remember when I first came up with the belief that I was a fat girl–no doubt a subliminal creation aided by their commentary on T.A. and other innocent bus-riders–but it was my go-to answer. I could start with that one and work my way down, hoping against hope that they didn’t call me fat because I’d have to really do some searching that night in addition to my science homework. Reflecting back, it really was a sick state of mind to think that I took pleasure in “knowing” I was fat but not having them call me fat. Like I was hiding a secret in my size 10 Wranglers while they sat perfectly unaware in their size 6 Jordaches. I had something on them and they weren’t going to get it.
Even if they didn’t call me fat, the thought started me thinking of myself that way. Boys didn’t dance with me at the Jr. High dance–not because I was a shy wallflower afraid to talk to them but because I was fat. I got a tiny role in the school play not because I didn’t try out for the lead, but because I was fat. No one tried to kiss me behind the baseball dugout because I was fat–not because the boys always went for the easy girls and I wasn’t one.
The name-calling began early and it began hard and continued unrelenting, not from someone outside myself, as I’d like to think. It came from me. Indirectly I can blame the bullies, for without their chiding, I wouldn’t have had the need to scrounge up the worst parts of myself and highlight them for future reference. But directly, the advent of viewing myself as a fat girl and living life as such has but one sole point of reference…myself.
So I got to thinking about all the anger and bitterness I still hold, to this day, toward Deirdre. I know, I should get over it since it started back in the days of cassette tapes and Farrah Fawcett hair flips. Mind you, this is about more than the bus trip and bullying. This girl was a flat-out snotty rich, mean bitch from my first memories of her. Not just toward me but toward anyone who didn’t meet her standard. And there were lotsa sub-standards around.
