Fat fat fatty fat fat!

 I was reading a blog this morning about a young woman who has dieted most of her life since puberty. It broke my heart when I read about her coming to the realization that she will never be 'a slender perky blonde'. A comment from her sister made me even more sad, and reminded me of the abuses I suffered because my half Italian/half German mother wanted to be Twiggy, and a fat child made her look bad.

 When I was 9 the diets began, and I was forced to share them. Weight Watchers during the fish and liver years, the banana-and-water diet, the cabbage soup diet, you name it, if it was out in the 70's, my mother forced it on me. When diets didn't work, she started trying to starve me which caused me to steal and hide food, and at 12 she took me to a doctor who gave me speed and vitamin injections. When an incompetent nurse put a shot into the nerve cluster in my lower back, it caused me such pain for weeks that I hysterically refused to go any more. Probably a good thing on my part, otherwise I probably would have stroked out from all the speed by the time I was 13. Being born with hypoglycemia, I was sick and miserable most of the time. It didn't help matters that a good friend of my mother was a tall thin woman who had tall thin blonde girls. The one who was my age was held up to me all through my youth as the epitome of ideal feminine beauty, she was thin, blonde and a cheerleader. This girl and her friends were allowed by the parents to bully and abuse me in the hope I would be fat shamed into becoming like her. After being beaten up by some of them, I stopped socializing pretty much at all, preferring my pets and books to having to deal with those little brat bastards. Their mantra all through elementary and jr high was the old standard, "Fatty Fatty 2 by 4, can't get through the bathroom door."

 Entering high school, I saw others beginning to date. As we were in a small town, my sister told me "Never date a boy from your school, if you sleep with them, you'll be called a slut, and even if you don't, he'll still tell all his friends you did." So I didn't date until I started driving, and through a friend met his cousin, a blond blue eyed Aryan boy from a 'good' family (Meaning they had money.) who lived in a larger community a few miles away. When I brought him home the first time, my mother turned to me and said "I don't know how you got such a good looking boyfriend, you're so fat!" Let me point out at this point, I was not fat, only about 20 pounds overweight. Lovely thing to say to your 16 yr old daughter.

 As I got older and entered college, the abuse didn't end there. Like many abused children, I had a perverse need to please my parents and spent way too much time trying to make them proud of me or even love me. I was an unwanted child to begin with, and such a huge disappointment. When I married at 19, I picked an abusive man, so it continued. I spent most of my young adulthood being told how I was lucky to have such a 'good man'. When I was 30, I finally cut off most of my family. I had moved to Austin, and found a community of like-minded people who didn't give a damn what I looked like, what I wore, what my hair looked like, what gods I worshiped, or anything else. I began to heal with help from friends who had been though similar abusive relationships.

 When the Internet when online, I began to meet more and more people who had similar experiences. In the early 2000's the Fat-O-Sphere came into being, and HAES, Health At Every Size. The bullshit BMI has taken a toll on even more people, causing them to harm or even kill themselves in search of the Myth of Thin. BMI was a formula written by an astrophysicist to measure the mass of planetary bodies in space. Not sure what idiot decided to could be applied to humans, and does not take into account that muscle weighs more than fat, making most athletes 'obese'.  I got rid of my abusive ex, and met a wonderful caring man online who later became my husband.

 I have since learned that I do matter, I'm not a failure, or any of the things my parents or the other kids used to call me. It was a long hard road. I do slip up sometimes and slide into that way of thinking, and have to remind myself that those people, like the blonde cheerleader and her fucked up friends, don't matter to me or my sense of self-worth. I am a happy person now with a satisfying social life and great friends, a fabulous career as a baker, a wonderful husband, and a son who could not make me any prouder. He too has had to overcome abuse from his biological father and severely mentally ill step siblings, but we have worked through it, and he is a happy well adjusted teenager fixing to graduate high school and head off to college. For those still living in the hell that is fat phobia and fat shaming, take hope, you are not alone.