A Deck of Daughters

My mother has two interesting characteristics when it comes to the weights of her seven daughters:  she has complete myopia for any weight gain, and she has supernatural, xray vision for any type of weight loss. 

I've been both fat and thin, or rather, I've been both thin then fat, then thin, then fat, then thin.  Multiply that times ten, because this went on for twenty-five years, so I know what I'm talking about here.  When I was fat, my mother saw only the good in me, which was very, very nice.  She was complimentary, encouraging, and accepting.  Rather than see me miserable, she'd go out shopping with me for a fat wardrobe.

But if I lost a microscopic fraction of one pound, she was all over it like a wolf.  In my twenties I'd slunk in the house from my weekly torturous weigh in at Weight Watchers and I don't really think she had a spycam on my house, but let's just say that somehow the phone would ring immediately.

"How'd you do?" No beating around the bush for my mom.

"A pound, Ma.  I lost a pound."

Then I'd hear her real estate amortization calculator clicking and clacking in the background as she did the complicated math.

"If I average your gains with your losses and amortize that out over 52 weeks, by this time next year, you'll be down thirty pounds. Can you imagine?"

And I'd kind of get a little caught up in the fantasy. "Thirty pounds?"

"Just in time for the wedding!" For awhile there in the 1980s, our family seemed to be having a lot of weddings. "Maybe we should buy a dress now. Saks is having a sale. You don't want to wait till the last minute." And then, caught up in the excitement of that one pound weight loss, I'd buy a dress that never fit me, ever.

But she's not fooling me, what she really loves is thin.  Not too thin, like not anorexic. She doesn't want to worry about us dying, after all.  But to have a bevy of daughters to brag about, to brag about the size of clothes we wear, this is what really lights her fire.  Forget the personal accomplishments!  Forget the college degrees, raising our children, forget everything.  Let's get down to the important stuff:  what size are our pants?

And, of course, that's what happens to me.  I'm at our Thanksgiving Day party and I hear the yell across the room, "Linda!  What size are your pants?"

I glare at her wondering if she'd like me to take them off so she can examine the size label herself? 

But I know that to my mother, her seven daughters are like her resume - our beauty or lack thereof, or thinness, or lack thereof, are a direct reflection on her.  She wants to have a card deck of beautiful thin daughters to fan out in front of everyone she talks to to show what she made.  A full deck, a straight flush, a deck of daughters.

Apple of My Eye

My daughter is very thin. People look at from Husband to me and back again and then declare without any qualms that she gets her thinness from Husband.  Apparently, my body is teeming at its restraints, just waiting for me to overeat one day at which point it will suddenly bulge out and I'll be wearing a wardrobe of circus tents.  When I was fat I used to go to Weight Watchers - twelve years in a row without ever achieving Lifetime Member status - and the leader would say, "You didn't gain it in a month, you're not going to lose it in a month!"  But she didn't know me.  I did gain my weight in a month, each time.

But not my kids.  Daughter's weight, for example, hasn't changed in a couple years, and it's a weird weight, 59 pounds.  Every time she gets on the scale, exactly 59 pounds. And her hunger is odd.  She's not just hungry before meals, that would be too normal.  Instead, she stands up after meals full but then immediately announces that she's hungry again.  I say, "What? You just told me you were full!"  And she says, "I'm full of what I just ate, but now I'm hungry for something else."  The strange, twisted labyrinth of the ten-year-old mind - both full and hungry at the same time.

In the immigrant household in which I grew up, there were none of these nuances.  We sat and ate with our only desire being how quickly we could escape from our mother's constant food pushing.  She stood by the table, waiting for a plate to empty - like a vulture perched overhead - and then swooped in to fill it immediately.  This is how a few of my sisters ended up chubby; the skinny sisters ran from the table as her spoon was descending. And it didn't help that dinner was the standard Eastern European Jewish diet:  anything made out of rendered fat, or out of animal parts that we weren't sure were actually edible.

There was no eating after dinner was done. Mom shut down the kitchen, like it was a store. And anyway, being an immigrant, she didn't understand the concept of desserts.  In her small town in Eastern Europe there were no such fancy concepts as "desserts."  You ate or you starved, nothing in between.  If she was feeling extravagant, fine, we could have an apple.  Wildly extravagant?  Fine, she'd bake some apples.

So Daughter finishes another meal tonight, announces that she's full.  Stands up.  Walks over to me a second later and tells me she's hungry.  What can she eat?  I don't even try to offer her more of our dinner.  I say, "Baked apples?"

Weight Watchers Drop Out

There was this fantasy that I had during the twelve years I went to Weight Watchers. It was pretty elaborate and, ultimately, kept me joining and rejoining the program for all those years despite the fact that all I ever did was get fatter and fatter.

It went something like this: one day I would finally not only have hit my goal weight, but I would have maintained it for 6 weeks, and this fantasy day would be the one when I was finally going to become a Lifetime Member. So there was going to be a special meeting to celebrate this with lots of clapping, my fat pictures, my family in attendance to celebrate with me, and some kind of pin or whatever they were giving out at the time. Some trinket. The best part of the fantasy would be when I'd get asked for my dieting secrets to share with everyone. I'd be the star for the day, or for the hour of the meeting anyway.

That day never happened. All that really happened was that over those years I became more and more sneaky with my points and sneaky with Weight Watchers and sneaky with my weigh-ins. I plotted everything out before I'd even join, starting with how tall I'd tell them I was. Because at 5'6 Weight Watcher guidelines said that I had to weigh between 122 and 143 pounds and that was really never going to happen. So I would add inches to my height when they asked for it so that they'd set the goal weight higher. Really, if I could have gotten away with it, I would have told them I was 7 feet tall, but I obviously wasn't.

I had more tricks than this up my sleeve. I wore my heaviest clothes to the first weigh-in and my lightest clothes to the second, so I'd have an enormous weight loss the first week, and I built bingeing into my program. I'd go to my weigh-ins early on day seven and spend the rest of the day eating everything in sight.

Over time time this got more and more elaborate: "before" pictures on the morning of each new diet; graphs to chart my weight loss; list after list of the reasons why I needed to lost weight, from the serious to the trivial, like that I couldn't play with my kids, I had destroyed my knees, that I had missed twenty-five years of fashion. One time, in a fit of honesty, I even made a list of the reasons why I didn't want to lose weight.

I tried many times to accept myself as I was. I believed, and still do, that women come in all shapes and sizes. But I was sure this was the wrong size for me.

I guess in my own convoluted way I finally got that fantasy day. Of course, it wasn't at Weight Watchers. I gave a speech but there were no diet tips to give, no family beaming nearby. There was certainly no trinket. I was the speaker at my 12-step weight-related meeting today and it got me a little maudlin, thinking about all those years struggling. So here I am today, happy and maudlin.