When did you first know you were…that?

I was 12 the first time I heard I was fat.

My mother bought me a new bathing suit from the mall in the town we were visiting. I stood in my dad’s apartment, in the hallway between the home office and his bedroom, showing the suit to my parents and my brother. Then someone mentioned that it was too snug, or it didn’t fit, or you’re too big for that, aren’t you?  We can’t have you looking that way when we visit the country club for the first time, you know.

In 9^th grade I wanted to wear Levi jeans and short shorts. My thighs, however, were too large and so instead I got Lee jeans. Everyone knows Lee jeans are for LOSERS. But they fit the curvy girl whose normal-if-not-small ass isn’t plank enough for Levis. Instead of short denim cut-offs like the rest of the girls had, I got to choose my outfits based on khaki, black, navy or white Bermudas. Those, see, covered up the thighs.

In 10^th grade my mother bought me a beautiful black dress, my first cocktail dress, with pearl buttons down the front and a scalloped sweetheart neckline. I got my first pair of black cocktail heels and I wore my hair in curls. I looked beautiful. But not long after that night with the boy I liked, a neighborhood kid pointed at my calves and asked me why they were so floppy.

And of course, the very last summer I was a camp counselor, two hometown girls were campers that same year. They were about 7 or 8 and I passed by them one day on the way to the dining hall, where they were pointing and giggling in my general direction. I knew these girls and babysat them at home for years, so I walked up and ask them what they were up to. They looked frightened and then one pointed at her friend and said, “She wants to know why your legs blew up.” Horrified, I asked them exactly what they meant by that and then sent them on their merry, sobbing, ashamed little way. I will never forget that moment and I feel sure that they won’t, either.

That same year, a friend called me on summer vacation. My brother answered the phone and yelled to me, “Gallon-size thighs! Somebody’s on the phone for you!”  My friend heard it and reminded me of it years later.

Those are my formative memories of body image. Of course, my mother sat me down far earlier than all of this to explain to me that, despite the fact that my teenage acne was normal – if not mild – we would still be going to extraction appointments at the dermatologist. She didn’t want my childhood to be marred by the memories of a bad complexion. She wanted my childhood to be perfect.

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Now when I talk about my shape or figure or giant ass or rolls and rolls of stomach, I turn it into everyone’s favorite joke. Don’t mind the hippo over here! Or, and this is my personal go-to: y’all, am I as big as THAT LADY over there? My friends, bless them, always roll their eyes and say, “Elizabeth. Of course not. Don’t be silly.”

We all know how my reality TV addiction can be, so it’s no surprise that  these two combined moments that have just come back to haunt the teenager I was.

Stacy London from What Not to Wear always figures out the really insecure girls and what their deal is before even they do. Did they just break up, or are they a haggard mom with too much on their plates? Sometimes she’ll stand in the 360° mirror and look at a woman and say, “Do you think you’re beautiful?” Oh, c’mon, Stacy. Isn’t the obvious answer always no?

On Celebrity Rehab this week, the horse trainer brought in to do a little equine therapy with the addicts talks about seeing something in a horse’s face that should resemble a feeling we already know. After several wrong answers, he finally tells everyone that what they should be seeing in those huge brown watery eyes is devotion and nurturing. All the addicts are like, “Do whaaa?” and then there’s a commercial.

But in those two television BREAKTHROUGH MOMENTS OMG I realized that no, I don’t think I’m beautiful. I try not to think about my size and physical appearance until it relates to my health. (Which is also why I don’t go to doctors, incidentally.) I try to be conscious of negative self-talk, which I learned in therapy is so very hateful to do to yourself. So I don’t talk shit to me, but I think shit about me. And also, no one – I mean NO ONE – tells me I’m beautiful. Not beautiful inside or outside or upsidedown or backwards. I don’t want to hear if it isn’t true, but if there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that I might have something – albeit small and remote – beautiful about me, I wish I had the courage to ask them to share that with me. When I think of my soul, and whether or not it’s beautiful, I qualify that thought with “…yeah, that part would be okay until you remember this OTHER part, which is really bad.”

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How much of this shapes who we are now? I don’t mean like, okay, Susie is shy because people called her fat, I mean like HEY. DO YOU GAIN WEIGHT BECAUSE THEY TOLD YOU THAT YOU COULDN’T? Or something equally horrible?

Are you beautiful because you think so, or because you’ve been told you are, or because it actually is the truth that you wish you’d hear from someone else other than yourself?

I love myself, I really do. But I don’t think I’m beautiful, and I’m damn sure no one else thinks I am, either.  Finally, I do not know what devotion and nurturing look like, but if I had that or practiced that or whatever, would I know if it knocked on my door?

Debbie Gibson never sang about this.

My heart hurts. I’ve been trying not to think about it but sometimes you find yourself alone with your thoughts and then, SONOFABITCH, you’re suddenly pissed off.

I consider myself a pretty decent person, most of the time. I have so very many faults, but in general I’d say the good outweighs the bad. One of my strengths is my dedication to friendships. One of my weaknesses is letting failures consume me. Imagine the pickle I find myself in, then, when I can’t let go of the friendships that have let me go.

Recently I discovered that some friends of mine have just picked up and moved on. Just like that, snap of the fingers, poof, disappeared, no use for anything, GONE. And while the perfectionist in me wants desperately to shift this loss into the big W column, the overly-sensitive part of me is crushed.

This happens over the years; I get that. People change, lives morph into shapes we don’t recognize or expect and you find that the things you thought you had in common probably weren’t every really things to begin with.

Or you realize your former best friend hit on your fiancé. Another story for another time, Internet.

How do you reconcile yourself to the fact that you are no longer needed? Once you were the common thread, the planner, the scheduler, the Look how happy we are as a group! See? See! goddamned Girl Scout leader, and then one day you are the thorn in the side. You are the one other girls would like to pass off on someone else. You are the so-easily-forgotten one. You are, well…nothing. And holy hell, y’all. It’s a hole on the inside that is so painful I sometimes can’t breathe.

Try as I might, I can’t get over my broken heart. I can count on one hand the number of people in my life I knew I could count on, the people I knew would be there for me no matter what hell reared its ugly head. I can count on that same hand the number of people who have let me down.

I don’t always remember to call and wish someone good luck before a big meeting, or send an anniversary card, or email when I should. But I do remember what it means to be decent to someone. I remember to ask about your children and your job and what’s important to you. I remember how it felt to hug and comfort you when you cried. I remember how hard I cheered for you and supported you when I was the only person to show up. I remember dedicating myself to being whatever you needed, whenever you needed it.

And yet here I am, at 32 years old, still wondering how other people forget.

Destruction

We have a family farm about 15 minutes outside of town. This morning, Brian and I rode out to see if there was any damage from yesterday’s storms (on the news here, here and here). Our land and the farmhouse were spared. Others were not so fortunate. None of these pictures I took are of people I know, nor do I know who belongs to these houses. It doesn’t make me any less sad and heartbroken.

This was taken about a quarter mile from the farm. We kept saying that we don’t understand how a tornado behaves, not that anyone does. Why does it tear a path and suddenly stop? Why does it miss large structures and take small ones?

I love that we live in a county that is bordered by a large city on one end and lots of farmland on the other. In 30 minutes we can enjoy restaurants, concerts, museums and all the fun city stuff fun city people enjoy. But then we can take a short drive and be out. Out of the noise, out of the traffic, out of everything. It’s peaceful, like this.

Newcomers to our area come for the weather, ironically. We have warm, mild winters and hot, humid summers. In between there’s not much of either – instead there’s rain, sleet, snow, hail, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods. A famous saying around here is that if you don’t like the North Carolina weather, just wait five minutes. These people didn’t have five minutes.

Everywhere we went today there were old people and young people, all suited up with work gloves, rakes, ropes and chainsaws. We saw a man carry a big blue cooler, wider than he was, across railroad tracks. There were cars on the side of the road for half a mile, with neighbors and family members helping load up what was left of belongings.

We finished our drive around the county and were about a half mile from home, just across the railroad tracks and behind the grocery store. This was a mobile home owned by a man I know, although he thankfully wasn’t living there.

In Raleigh and Sanford, there was damage on a larger scale, if only because the structures were larger and the concentration of people exposed to the storms was wider. There were deaths all over the place and some of those included children. Tomorrow there will probably be more people found. North Carolina hasn’t seen this type of tornado damage in over 25 years.

Death of the American Dream

I feel like a part of us has died this morning.

Yesterday morning, Brian went to work as usual, dressed in his Pepsi uniform, ready for the day with his coffee in a Pepsi mug. He adjusted his Sunkist hat to block out the eastern sun, and he wore his Pepsi winter squall jacket. He was ready for his day.

After a short training video on, of all things, fire extinguishers, Brian was called into a meeting. He was told that as of that minute, his services were no longer needed at Pepsi. He was the turn in his keys, his cell phone and bring back the hats, the jackets, the clothes at his earliest convenience. He was given a sheet of paper outlining the termination of his benefits immediately, as this was the end of the month. They nodded their heads as men do, said they wished him the best and let him go.

After 8 years of never missing a day – EVER – never calling in sick, never taking an afternoon for a doctor’s appointment, they just let him go.

When he told me, I was so stunned I burst into tears. But the small voice on the other end of the line was trying so hard to be brave that I held in my sobs until we hung up. I wanted to be sure that I was here with him when he first came home, so I didn’t leave for work until hours later. My boss understood.

As anyone who has ever lost a job knows, it feels like a continuous kick in the gut. It just keeps happening, over and over. When you are finally able to fall asleep at night, it’s just an illusion of peace. The next morning you are reminded that yes, the death really did happen. It wasn’t a bad dream.

Our first thoughts were of money, of how we can tighten the belt and adjust. Adding up what very little savings we have and subtracting the many bills we have. Regret for buying this and fixing that before it needed repair. Wishing we had made different decisions in the past financially. Being glad – for him, for the first time – we don’t have children to feed.

I’m not sure Brian can see this far yet, but I think of the days and weeks to come, when I will continue to go to work and he will not. His body is conditioned to wake up at 5am every morning and go hard all day long. He’s thinking of what we’ll do this Monday when offices and HR people are back in place. Lists of places to call, people to send his resume to, emails to be sent.

We’re trying very hard to be proactive about this, as much as we can. By dinnertime last night, we’d already purchased new health insurance at about 75% cheaper than what it would have been to add him to mine. We created a Facebook and LinkedIn profile for him, logged him onto websites for companies doing any kind of work related to his.

Everything we could to forget the death that just rocked our family.

Even now, the next morning, we are awake in our den, and he is rattling on about routes, sales, numbers, who’s up and who’s down. Something – anything – to make sense of it all. He is sick from throwing up all night, probably nerves.

We are nervous, we are scared, we are shocked and we are confused.

We are now part of the national unemployment numbers and we are now standing in line with millions of other people, far worse off than we are, fighting for benefits and jobs and the ability to provide income to our family.

We are Americans, and our dream just died.



The one where January bites back

If writing is an exercise, I’m about as lazy and out of shape as one can be. I’ve been practicing a little with logging my dreams (see recent posts) but writing about my life is, well, a bit overwhelming. Many of you reading have blogs yourselves, and most of you have regular schedules of posting. There are Monday these and Wednesday those, and sections and lists that your readers count on. I used to do that here, and then life got in the way.

I vow to try really hard to remember to use my muscles a little more often.

Since Christmas, the house has been quiet but tumultuous, if that’s possible. I had a three week break from school over the holidays, which I really enjoyed but which threw my circadian rhythm off so much so that I worried for days about oversleeping on my first day back. The first week back was a blur of training, registration, lesson planning, putting out fires and getting back into a regular sleep schedule. The second week back was about as awful as I would expect in January. We discovered mistakes we’d made with advising this past semester and had to rectify those quickly, until it snowed and I got the stomach flu and we had extended drop/add and my co-workers were short staffed and OH GOD THE STOMACH FLU.

From what I know, it’s spread like wildfire around this town. From what I’ve heard, it’s all over everywhere. I think I’d rather be shot in the toes than have that again. Not even kidding.

So I guess the point of my story is that my mind has been elsewhere and I’ve suffered because of it. There are so many things that I think Oh! I need to remember to blog about that! and then a day goes by and I forget, or it’s not relevant anymore. I watched some serious TV over both the holiday and The Illness of January, and I’m happy to report that “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is my new discovery. It’s just…genius. I can’t believe I hadn’t found it before, but I owe that show a debt of gratitude for helping me climb out of a panic attack the other day. The thing about a stomach bug is that if I can’t keep anything inside me (I know this is gross, but most of y’all are moms and your gross-o-meter should be tolerating higher stuff than this) I can’t keep my medication regulated. So it stands to reason that without the good drugs, I am a pure-T nutcase. I’m telling you, this week was not pretty.

Catching up on Google Reader was a treat this week, as I’m woefully behind on my reading and have so much more to go. A lot of your posts have given me good ideas and some have even helped me come up with things to talk about in my class this semester. Y’all are so smart. I feel so…inferior.

In other news, things that have been rocky are slowly rocking themselves back right again. I wish so much that I could talk about this here, but the important thing is that you know I am and will always be a shiny, sparkling, extra wonderful, fantastical rock star. I just don’t see how you could argue otherwise. I didn’t make new year’s resolutions because frankly, who keeps them? (not me), and most of them cost money (gym, diet crap, buy a fancy planner, buy organization shit that will sit in a bag for a year) so I just scrapped that plan. Instead I am resolving NOTHING. I promise you absolutely nothing, I don’t guarantee a single thought, idea or gesture, and I surely am not planning to live up to anyone’s expectations.

See what I did here? I lowered your opinion of me so when I do good shit, you’ll be all surprised and impressed. I said it already: I’m a genius.

Finally, this exercise of the writing here has sparked some ideas so I’ll be back in the next few days to write specifically and, perhaps, intelligently. I ask that you stick with me, and I ask that you do this one huge thing for me that would make me happier than all the Doritos on the planet: send your love, your happy thoughts, your prayers for good and your healing powers to my friend. She is an even brighter and shinier star than I, and she needs a few peanuts in her gallery.

Thanks bunches.