{"id":43,"date":"2010-05-07T10:00:23","date_gmt":"2010-05-07T10:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/?p=43"},"modified":"2015-03-12T11:19:40","modified_gmt":"2015-03-12T18:19:40","slug":"i-am-mommy-hear-me-roar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/2010\/05\/07\/i-am-mommy-hear-me-roar\/","title":{"rendered":"I am Mommy, Hear me Roar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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, fol\u00adlowed by a spanking.<\/p>\n

Eventually my parents re\u00adlented and agreed that I didn\u2019t have to eat it any more, which was un\u00adprecedented 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, \u201cYes, Gretchen won that one.\u201d Eating was about winning and losing, power and control.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t the fat kid but by the fourth grade I was. And fifth. And sixth. Being \u201cfat\u201d started to deter\u00admine my experience of the world and of myself; I may have been at the head of my class, but it didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

When I was twelve I grew about four inches in nine months. Even my eating habits couldn\u2019t keep up with my body\u2019s 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\u20198\u201d I didn\u2019t feel \u201cwomanly.\u201d I felt huge. I started try\u00ading 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.<\/p>\n

Middle school and high school changed that. Everywhere I saw petite girls who didn\u2019t 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 happi\u00adness, 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.<\/p>\n

A feminist from an early age, I enjoyed my women\u2019s 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, talk\u00ading, eating, dieting contradiction, but I also felt powerless to do anything about it.<\/p>\n

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 Can\u00adyon, all I could see were my thighs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>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 tak\u00ading 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 ap\u00adparatus 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 \u201cbut\u201d as in, \u201cI can run 26.2 miles but I\u2019m slow because of my big rear.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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 preg\u00adnancy and had taken off all but ten pounds when I got pregnant again. Another cease-fire.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmy old self\u201d again. As I had done innumerable times before, I resumed the war on fat by first visualizing the rigid standard of bodily perfec\u00adtion I had tried to achieve my whole life. And imme\u00addiately the reflex thought was there, \u201cI hate my body.\u201d But this time it felt hollow. Though familiar, the notion that I should \u201chate\u201d my body suddenly seemed absurd.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d I asked my\u00adself, out loud. \u201cYou hate your body? Really? You hate the body that gave you those two beauti\u00adful girls at a time in life when childbearing was nearing the impossible? The body that hardly ever gets sick? Those \u2018fat thighs\u2019 are actually full of muscle and took you through marathons and (liter\u00adally) straight up mountain trails that most people never contemplate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I have since learned that my family tree is covered with women who had babies later in life, and oth\u00aders who were active well into their 80\u2019s and 90\u2019s and enjoyed indomi\u00adtable health. My great-great-grandfa\u00adther was born during the Irish potato famine. I inherited this body that I \u201chate\u201d from my ancestors. It is resil\u00adient 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\u2019t have to eat anything they don\u2019t like, and when they clean their plates I just say, \u201cWow, you must have been hungry.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a full-time work\u00ading 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t hate my body these days and honestly I\u2019m 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\u2019m more inter\u00adested in staying healthy so that I can take my girls hiking when they are finally old enough. I think they\u2019ll be good at it. They inherited my body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest writer and Scripps staff member Gretchen Maldonado examines how her perception of self changed during and after pregnancy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,232],"tags":[46,45,48,47],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-perspective","category-vol-2-issue-2","tag-gretchen-maldonado","tag-guest-writer","tag-motherhood","tag-pregnancy"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}