A Personal Essay

          My mother used to weigh what I’m sure was well over 200 pounds. Every childhood memory contains, somewhere, the image of her round and freckled face.  Her hair in those years was forever in a ponytail—even on the days she’d washed it, because whatever room she was in was always sweltering.  When we joined family members on their annual excursion to Stockton Lake, my mother spent the weekend in her hunter green folding chair or the temporary hammock, her face as pink as though she’d rubbed it raw.  There were passive-aggressive comments galore about who the hell decided camping the last week of August was a good idea.

            I don’t blame her for thinking of herself.  From what I’ve gleaned, her childhood was rough.  She speaks about it in disjointed, dreamlike anecdotes.  In bursts, she would tell us about the nightly meal of nothing but beans and “shit on a shingle,” about moving at an hour’s notice, about working in her father’s illegally-owned burger stand and how he blew the entirety of their savings on a tractor.  They didn’t even live on a farm.  By no means did she continue the cycle of abuse with me, though.  I was certainly provided everything CPS would look for.  My childhood—especially by comparison—was downright uneventful. I squirmed in my seat when these details fell out and did exactly as I was trained to do—thanked her for sparing us from such a rotten upbringing.

            I remember when the weight started coming off.  She was sitting on the living room floor, not quite cross-legged, having just fiddled with the old-school stereo’s buttons.  The tape sounds just like a televangelist, though the speaker’s message is not about loving God, but about how losing weight is a spiritual journey.  She didn’t bother to get up and resituate on the couch, which was still fully within hearing distance of the speakers, but elected instead to remain on the floor, eyes blankly unfocused.  When she noticed me lingering in the hallway, she shooed me away.

            The softer, squishier woman I knew in my youth began melting.  She tried just about everything in short bursts.  She began at home, shy, the bedroom door shut as she clumsily imitated Jillian Michaels.   She purchased a Zumba starter kit, complete with maraca weights that I don’t think even made it out of the box.  Slowly, with an air of “once bitten, twice shy” that I could never find the origin of, she ventured out, purchasing a membership to the Curves fitness club nearby.  She timed her workouts to coincide with a nearly-empty building.  In between, she flirted with every fitness method available: Pilates, yoga, jogging.  Curves was the only thing that stuck for long.  She became a religious portion controller.  She consumed dinner off of a tea saucer.  She didn’t really eat better, just less.  Sometimes she skipped entire meals; she sat at the table with us, but touched nothing and snapped when spoken to.

I wish I could say that the arrival at fitness meant more time spent playing together.  I wish I could assume that my mother’s motivation for the loss was the desire to be healthier for her family, to live a longer life with her three daughters.   But if I assumed these things, I would be wrong.  I understand that being selfish can be a virtue, and I do not blame her for wanting something of her own in the midst of a life centered on the needs of her husband and children.  To an extent, though, I do blame her for the petty means of marking her progress.  From what I’ve come to understand of weight loss, some of the best, most satisfying indicators of fitness are no longer getting winded going up stairs, lifting every-day objects with ease, and the general dissipation of that sluggish, lumpy feeling.  But fitness was not what my mother wanted.  It was the loss of inches, the narrowing of her face that my mother craved.  Two things motivated my mother, and they both resided in the bathroom—the silvered glass on the wall and the judgmental glass scale on the floor.

            I myself can never decide how I feel about mirrors.  For the longest time, I was all too happy to have earned being called a “stick.”   Though facially, I look like a carbon copy of my mother, my teenage body was just the opposite of hers.  The jury’s still out on how I managed it, though I will say that everything I ate was closely monitored for the first seventeen years of my life.  I never felt entitled to a single thing in the cabinets, and snacking was a foreign concept.  I ate what was given to me, and it wasn’t all that much.    My plates were made for me until around sixteen years old.  My friends wondered at my “fast metabolism,” and I accepted their diagnosis at face value. I emerged from high school carrying 120 pounds on my five-foot-seven frame, scraping just above “underweight” on the BMI charts.

            College and getting married changed that.  My metabolism slowed down significantly—or so I thought.  Without any knowledge of matching my calorie intake to my activity level, I ballooned quickly.  I think my mother was secretly pleased when I came home for a visit some number of weeks before my May wedding and found that my size 4 wedding dress was fitting a little more snugly than when I had purchased it.  She had offered to have her beaded halter-top gown adjusted for me, but at a size 18, I didn’t imagine any seamstress was talented enough to make it fit me.  I stuck with my ruched sweetheart-neckline gown.

            It’s been a good long while since it’s been necessary for her to shop in the plus-sizes.  These days, she hovers between a 10 and 12.  For a brief while, she slimmed all the way down to a six—small enough for her and my sixteen-year-old self to swap clothes.  Those skinny jeans and pencil skirts still lurk in her closet, reminders of what she is capable of and might one day reach again.  The “fat pants” remain in that closet, too.  She laments every now and again that she’s on the path to pulling them back out to cover her unsightly ass until she can get signed up at the 24-hour gym like she’s been meaning to.

            My closet is devoid of such dramatically oversized “fat pants.” Unlike my mother’s closet, where the trophy clothes with the smallest numbers on the tag sit in plain view, I’ve tucked away the clothes I no longer feel flatter my “curvier” shape in a black garbage bag.  I’ve marked the bag with a silver Sharpie: three blocky numbers that warn me not to open it until I’ve returned to my target weight.  I’ve ignored the warning more than once.  On days I look in the mirror and feel like some noticeable progress had been made, I’ll bring the bag down, disregard the shiny “135,” and try on an old sweater or two.  Every time I shake my head, fold the sweaters again, and return the bag to the Shelf of Shame.

            My mother used to tell me (more often than I would have liked) that I was beautiful.  It’s paradoxical to me that I could look so much like her and still be, to her, the unquestionably more attractive one.  Perhaps, in her own strange way, she was trying to prevent me from inheriting her self-image issues.  But pointing out my physical aspects has done nothing for my confidence.  If anything, it has driven me to stand naked in my mirror for hours on end, wondering if this or that feature is as lovely as it once was, if she would still approve of it now.  In those moments, I am worth nothing more or less than the sum of my (body) parts.  She does not congratulate me on my jobs or internships or grades, or if she does, the words are lost amongst the shower of unwanted commentary on my appearance.  Even her “happy birthday” to me this year was marred.

            “Happy birthday to the most beautiful woman I know!”

Not “the most clever” or “the kindest,” not “Happy birthday to the daughter I’m proud of.”  If I am not beautiful, then the message is not for me.  I suppose I should be glad that my mother has something kind to say to me, but I find myself wishing that she valued the same things I value in myself—namely my intelligence and wit.

            My mother lacks neither of these things.  She was, in her academic days, a talented writer, and she kicks ass on her Words with Friends knock-off app.  I gave up playing against her long ago.  It seems that, in the absence of opponents she knows in real life, Word Feud has morphed into a pseudo-Omegle for her, pairing her with strangers and giving her more fodder for discussion the next time I come home to visit.  Her avatar is never an image of herself, but some stock representation of an interest—the Superman logo or a Boston Terrier.  It resembles a social experiment: how much attention can she garner from strangers while maintaining her anonymity?

            Snapchat is another favorite, and though I’m close to abandoning that one as well, I receive snaps from her about every other day.  Many of them include the same compliments I get via text message.  She also chronicles her ongoing weight loss journey for me, relating pound after grueling pound lost.  For the most part, I try to congratulate her, but as I’ve been bitterly embroiled in my own fight with the Freshman Fifteen that became more like forty, my enthusiasm is spread a bit thin.

            It was during a visit in June (an “up” in my mother’s yo-yoing weight) that I related I’d been tracking my calorie intake and had purchased a cheap elliptical.  My efforts had yielded a loss of about five pounds—a mere dent in my goal, but I was proud.  My mother was, in a word, unimpressed.

            “Oh, so now I’m going to be the only fat one in the family, huh?”

            My mind initially rejected the multiple facets of that comment.  I waved a hand to indicate that I had nothing more to say on the matter, though I did briefly berate myself for bringing up the topic of weight at all. 

My husband fumed in the car on the way home.

            “Something bothering you?”

            He sighed.  “It’s hard sometimes to listen to your mom when she’s so full of herself.”

            I cocked my head, indicating he should go on.

            “Why can’t she be proud of what you’ve accomplished?  Why does it have to be about her and her weight?  Did she never learn to just smile and nod when someone shares a little victory?”

            I almost laughed, but my chest hurt.  “That’s just how she is.  I shouldn’t have bothered tell her.”

            “It just isn’t fair, that’s all…to have to censor what you say to her…” He trailed off, eyes steadily fixed on the darkened highway.

Even with all my mirror-gazing, I had, until recently, failed to recognize the imprint of my mother on my being.  Steadily, quietly, my mother’s hands shaped my personality, my perception of myself, until, with a bang, I was entirely my own.  I do not like the finished product.  I find myself rewetting the clay of my being, struggling to tweak my mother’s design and failing; her fingerprints run so deep.  When I emerge from bathroom stalls with mirrors on the adjacent wall, for a split second, it is not my reflection, but my mother looking at me.  I cannot meet her eyes.