I am Mommy, Hear me Roar

If I ever want to pinpoint the start of my struggles with food and body image, I need look no farther than macaroni and cheese. My mother found the unique recipe in one of those community anthologies where recipes are compiled and published for fundraising purposes. Maybe it was the cottage cheese and sprinkled paprika that made me throw up, or perhaps it was the combination of sour cream and sharp cheddar cheese (after all we did live in New England). Regardless, my eight-year-old palate recoiled from the flavors and textures and up it all came every time, fol­lowed by a spanking.

Eventually my parents re­lented and agreed that I didn’t have to eat it any more, which was un­precedented at a dinner table where you ate what was put in front of you no matter what. If the subject ever came up, my mother would say, “Yes, Gretchen won that one.” Eating was about winning and losing, power and control.

Eating also became about comfort and companionship. Soon after the macaroni and cheese wars, my mother went back to work and I was left on my own for long hours every afternoon. I felt lonely and abandoned and sought relief through food and television. And so I grew. My memories about that time are sketchy. All I can tell you is that in third grade I wasn’t the fat kid but by the fourth grade I was. And fifth. And sixth. Being “fat” started to deter­mine my experience of the world and of myself; I may have been at the head of my class, but it didn’t matter because I was still fat. No matter how good I felt on a given day, I could be felled by a single fat joke.

When I was twelve I grew about four inches in nine months. Even my eating habits couldn’t keep up with my body’s increased need for food. My big stomach vanished and I was thrilled. However, generous sets of hips, thighs and breasts had taken its place. And at 5’8” I didn’t feel “womanly.” I felt huge. I started try­ing to disappear. I started hating my body. Before puberty, I hated being fat, but I never generalized that kind of thinking to my whole being.

Middle school and high school changed that. Everywhere I saw petite girls who didn’t look like me. Plus, they looked happy. They had boyfriends, size five jeans, and lots of friends. My body seemed to be all that stood between me and happi­ness, so I went to war with it. Diets were followed by binging, which was followed by purging, then followed by shame and isolation. I found solace for those feelings in food. And on it went for years.

A feminist from an early age, I enjoyed my women’s studies classes at college and was educated in all the ways that society has taught us to look at women as the sum of their body parts. I lived a dual life as I railed against the patriarchy by day and alternately starved and binged by night. I felt like a walking, talk­ing, eating, dieting contradiction, but I also felt powerless to do anything about it.

In my mid 20s I started to replace dieting with exercise. I met some friends who were into running, and when one of them shared with me that every mile of running burns 100 calories, I was on board. I ran 5ks and 10ks and marathons. I was never very fast but I had great stamina. My new friends also liked hiking, so it was up the trails of Yosemite and down into the Grand Canyon we went. I brought along my skewed body image too. When someone showed me a picture of my friend and me at the bottom of the Grand Can­yon, all I could see were my thighs.

When many women my age were consulting fertility specialists and adoption agencies, I got pregnant with no trouble whatsoever at ages 39 and 41. During my first pregnancy I was dazzled by the changes tak­ing place in my body. It was as if an ancient piece of machinery had finally kicked over and then purred like a kitten. This baby-making ap­paratus had been sleeping inside me for all these years and I had no idea that it was going to work so well. I was moved beyond tears by my good fortune and for the first time ever, I experienced unqualified respect for my body. For once there was no “but” as in, “I can run 26.2 miles but I’m slow because of my big rear.”

The real turning point came with the opportunity that pregnancy presented to declare a cease-fire in the war with my body. After all those years of struggle, I was relieved. I knew that weight gain was inevitable, so for once, I just didn’t worry about it. I surrendered to the forces taking over my body and shifted my focus to the baby growing inside me. I gained about 45 pounds with my first preg­nancy and had taken off all but ten pounds when I got pregnant again. Another cease-fire.

After the second baby was born and my hormones had settled down, it was time to confront my appearance. I was tired of maternity smocks and baggy post-pregnancy clothes and was ready to feel like “my old self” again. As I had done innumerable times before, I resumed the war on fat by first visualizing the rigid standard of bodily perfec­tion I had tried to achieve my whole life. And imme­diately the reflex thought was there, “I hate my body.” But this time it felt hollow. Though familiar, the notion that I should “hate” my body suddenly seemed absurd.

“Why?” I asked my­self, out loud. “You hate your body? Really? You hate the body that gave you those two beauti­ful girls at a time in life when childbearing was nearing the impossible? The body that hardly ever gets sick? Those ‘fat thighs’ are actually full of muscle and took you through marathons and (liter­ally) straight up mountain trails that most people never contemplate.”

I have since learned that my family tree is covered with women who had babies later in life, and oth­ers who were active well into their 80’s and 90’s and enjoyed indomi­table health. My great-great-grandfa­ther was born during the Irish potato famine. I inherited this body that I “hate” from my ancestors. It is resil­ient and powerful and better than I deserve, given how I have treated it. Lately I have come to think of myself as an endurance athlete who needs food for fuel, and most days I try to eat that way. As for my girls, they don’t have to eat anything they don’t like, and when they clean their plates I just say, “Wow, you must have been hungry.”

As a full-time work­ing mother, my day starts at 4:30 a.m. and I go non-stop until I conk out around 9:30 p.m. My body hasn’t let me down yet. I can take an infant car seat (fully loaded), two bags of heavy groceries, a brief case, a purse, a tote bag overflowing with lunch boxes and other day care detritus, plus a screaming, writhing two year old, and carry them all up two flights of stairs. Try doing that on an empty stomach.

I don’t hate my body these days and honestly I’m too busy to devote much time to obsessing over my weight, particularly if it means having to meet a standard that I now accept as ridiculous. I’m more inter­ested in staying healthy so that I can take my girls hiking when they are finally old enough. I think they’ll be good at it. They inherited my body.