My cousin Ellie's parents divorced before I was born. Her father was my uncle who got his high school sweetheart pregnant and then dropped out of high school at age sixteen to get married and take a steady union job (the only job he ever had, as far as I know) at the local steel mill like his father before him. He had a cocaine problem as an adult and ultimately died of a heart attack in his fifties, a few years after the steel mill laid him off. Her mother was my uncle's high school sweetheart who got pregnant with Ellie at age seventeen. We all went to the same shitty high school in the same small town where we all grew up, albeit decades apart.
Ellie's mother went on to remarry, and that marriage lasted for the rest of her husband's life. I didn't know this until recently. She had another child too -- a son -- several years older than me but a decade younger than Ellie. I hadn't known this either. I only know this now because Ellie started posting on Facebook last week that he was missing. She said he was 40 but, due to a car accident and traumatic brain injury, mentally closer to 12.
His body was found in the woods yesterday; he had been murdered. I don't know the details, but apparently someone does because the police have already arrested two young men for the crime. Their photos are in the news. Their faces look like they were made for punching, and I hope they get everything they deserve. I hope they are scared. That's the worst thing I can imagine personally -- being scared and cut off from anyone who might be able to save or comfort me. It's what I imagine most people would experience while being murdered. I hope they feel it through a lengthy trial and a multiyear prison sentence. I hope they can't live with themselves but have to for a really long time. I've looked them up on Facebook, and they're both very much poor, uneducated white trash, so at least they shouldn't be able to buy their way out. I don't think the currency of being a white male extends far when your victim is an equally white male.
It was when I was thinking all these thoughts that I realized I did know my cousin had a younger brother. We went to elementary school together. I met him once, but I had forgotten. It was the time my mother and I were watching Ellie's daughter, Wendy, for a few days. I remembered bringing her to school one morning while my mother was dropping me off. I remembered being approached by an older boy and girl who inexplicably knew baby Wendy. My mother told me they were Wendy's uncle and cousin. When I asked if they were my family too, my mother told me no. I was confused and disappointed. I always remembered the cousin's name because it was the same as my own, but it occurred to me today that I remembered the uncle's name too. I think he had been in fifth grade when I was in kindergarten. If I could go back in time and watch events unfold, these are the sorts of mundane things I'd want to see again. I'd want to know what else I missed, who else I met without realizing. It was an awfully small world I used to live in.
His mother doesn't know yet that he's dead. She's in the ICU recovering from surgery. I met her once too when I was younger. She was really nice. She worked as a stagehand in the costume department for the US tour of Phantom of the Opera, and she showed me around backstage as a favor to my mother, even though we weren't technically family anymore. I hope she's okay. Ellie is having a hell of a time.
I don't understand murdering people. I understand the allure of committing violence -- I've been made powerless too many times not to want to do it to someone in return -- but if your life is going badly and you feel worthless, I expect you either to learn to cope or simply to internalize it as a quiet shame like the rest of us. You don't get to kill someone just because you feel bad. And reading these murderers' Facebook pages, one of them appears pathetic and self-pitying to the point that -- had he not been a violent criminal -- I would have simply felt sorry for him. He battles his weight, he doesn't have many friends, and his own father doesn't seem to care much for him. The more I learn about someone, the more I tend to relate to them and the less I can be angry, but this piece of garbage person also killed someone who could not defend himself and whose family now has to live with the fallout. He should kill himself. If he were to kill himself, my only regret would be that he didn't do it before murdering someone who actually had friends and family who loved him. (I kind of want to write that to him in a letter.) The other murderer just sounds like a really stupid sociopath who is bad at not getting caught. I understand feeling violent and wanting to hurt someone else. It's what I feel about these murderers, for instance. It's what I've felt when people have physically hurt or restrained me and made me feel powerless. It's a horrible feeling. I get it, and it doesn't ever go away completely. And I have zero empathy for the people who act out their violence on others. There are too many other options for that one ever to be acceptable. Violence is the act of a despicable coward who cannot sit with his own feelings.
Showing posts with label weight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weight. Show all posts
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Sunday, July 26, 2015
The Terrible Eating Habits of My Childhood Home
When I was little, I remember being yelled at on a fairly regular basis for not eating all the food on my plate at dinner. Actually, I remember this being a thing for as long as my mother cooked, which ended around the time I was in middle school, to be replaced with dining out, takeout, and fast food. My dad would sit with me and tell me I couldn't leave from the table until I "cleaned my plate," and I remember sitting for a few minutes until he would give up in a string of curses and scream at me to get out of his sight.
When I got older and moved out on my own, my mother told me about how she hadn't understood serving sizes when Dante and I were kids. She laughed about how she used to cook a roast or a casserole, divide it into fourths, and serve us each a quarter of the meal. From the time I was able to eat solid food, she had expected me to eat the same amount as my morbidly obese dad and mom, each of whom was eating at least two adult sized servings, often more.
She also laughed about how fat Dante had been as a toddler when she fed him two adult portions of sugared instant oatmeal every morning because one packet of oatmeal "just didn't look like that much." Toddlerhood was the only time the naturally thin Dante had been chubby in his life, though his eating habits never improved. His regular meals as a 20-year-old man consisted of hot dogs and lunch meat, potato chip sandwiches, a variety of Little Debbie snack cakes, and candy from the limitless supply my mother kept in baskets around the house.
I, on the other hand, spent my childhood wondering why I was heavier than most of the kids at my elementary school. The candy around the house didn't help, but it was a comparatively mild problem. My mother encouraged me to eat cake or cookies for breakfast on the frequent occasions that we had them on hand because "they have eggs and flour in them, just like breakfast food." In retrospect, she probably just wanted me to leave her alone so she could go back to sleep, but I took this logic so far that I ate Cadbury Creme Eggs for breakfast in the weeks surrounding Easter because I thought they were made of real eggs, not just chocolate and colored fondant. I knew nothing. No one corrected me.
I knew I was chubbier than I wanted to be, but my mother insisted I had inherited my figure from her and it could not be altered. "We're big boned," she said. I didn't get made fun of to my face often, but I do recall being called "Fatso" by a boy I didn't know and being asked by one of my best friends in elementary school if I oversalted my food because I was "overweight and had trouble losing weight," and I guess it didn't occur to her these problems could also come from eating mostly junk food.
My mother forbade me to drink low-fat milk with my school lunches because, as she explained much later, she had fed me skim milk as a new baby and been scolded by my pediatrician for doing so. I drank full-fat milk with every meal thereafter, blind to the fact that I eventually got older and had different dietary needs. We drank a lot of soda too. My mother kept a Big Gulp full of 7Up or Pepsi on the table beside the couch and drank from it all day everyday. I don't remember having a glass of water before the age of eight or so, when Dante started drinking water with his meals and I insisted on having the same because anything he did was "cool."
When I was ten or eleven, I had my first cholesterol test, and it was already over 200. For reference, an adult's total cholesterol should be below 150 for optimal health. My pediatrician told me I needed to lower my cholesterol, but I didn't know what cholesterol was, let alone how to lower mine. He was shocked to hear I was still drinking full-fat milk at my age, so we switched to low-fat and eventually to skim. My mother encouraged me to reduce my saturated fat intake -- another cause of high cholesterol, my doctor said -- by buying me countless boxes of Snackwells fat free cookies.
We were a "meat and potatoes" household at mealtime. And casseroles. Casseroles featuring Miracle Whip and cheese. We didn't eat a lot of vegetables. Sometimes we had salad, which consisted of iceberg lettuce, croutons, and a bottle of creamy salad dressing. Sometimes we had a warmed up can of vegetables, or a can of spinach dumped into a bowl. I lost a little of my chubbiness when I hit puberty and had a sudden growth spurt, but it got even harder to control my weight when we started having exclusively restaurant food for dinner. One night per week was devoted to McDonald's, one to delivery pizza, and one to Chinese takeout, which mostly meant crab rangoon. I tried to make up for the calorie dump at dinner by eating plain shredded wheat for breakfast and celery sticks for lunch. I was generally starving by dinnertime, which I knew wasn't good, but I didn't know what else to do.
When I moved out to go to college, I lost weight. I had starting reading books about nutrition after that first cholesterol test -- they became something of a hobby for me -- so I knew more by then. I also went back to eating normal breakfasts and lunches since my dining hall dinners were significantly more reasonable. I also walked a lot because public transportation cost money I didn't have.
I gave up meat, just because it had disgusted me for years and I finally had full control over my diet away at college. When I came home for spring break, my mother asked, "Why are you doing this to me?!" She said I was ruining spring break for her because now she would feel like she couldn't eat anywhere she wanted (she could and did -- I could find something to eat at any restaurant, and she didn't cook anymore anyway). She also said it was too expensive to eat vegetables so much. She said her own mother had stretched meals for their large family by adding ground beef to canned spaghetti. Her logic was presumably that, since her family had been poor and her mother had done this, it must have been the cheapest way to eat. And cheap was good. Especially if it was something for me. Also, my mother hates vegetables. Also, I think she wanted me to be like her.
I didn't know how to cook until I got a campus apartment. From the time I was in grade school until I moved out for college, our oven was mostly broken. My mother used a pair of pliers to turn it on and off, and it burned the bottom of any food she cooked in it. We couldn't get it fixed because we lived in a hoard house and she wouldn't allow a repairman inside at that point. My dad taught me how to boil pasta and scramble eggs when I was in high school. Beyond that, I learned to cook from the internet when I was 20. I turned out to be good at it. When I came home on break and wanted to show off some of my new cooking skills by making a simple side dish for my dad to try, my mother burst into tears. She said I'd make a mess, I'd ruin everything. I was taken aback at her crying. I had rarely seen her cry in my life. She normally defaulted to screaming or guilt trips. I promised to clean up after myself -- something I also started figuring out how to do in college -- and cooked my dish. I washed everything I'd used too. The kitchen was still a filthy, sticky mess.
I want to put a happy ending on this, but I don't want to sound like I'm gloating, so here: I'm in my 30s and healthier now than at any point in the story above.
When I got older and moved out on my own, my mother told me about how she hadn't understood serving sizes when Dante and I were kids. She laughed about how she used to cook a roast or a casserole, divide it into fourths, and serve us each a quarter of the meal. From the time I was able to eat solid food, she had expected me to eat the same amount as my morbidly obese dad and mom, each of whom was eating at least two adult sized servings, often more.
She also laughed about how fat Dante had been as a toddler when she fed him two adult portions of sugared instant oatmeal every morning because one packet of oatmeal "just didn't look like that much." Toddlerhood was the only time the naturally thin Dante had been chubby in his life, though his eating habits never improved. His regular meals as a 20-year-old man consisted of hot dogs and lunch meat, potato chip sandwiches, a variety of Little Debbie snack cakes, and candy from the limitless supply my mother kept in baskets around the house.
I, on the other hand, spent my childhood wondering why I was heavier than most of the kids at my elementary school. The candy around the house didn't help, but it was a comparatively mild problem. My mother encouraged me to eat cake or cookies for breakfast on the frequent occasions that we had them on hand because "they have eggs and flour in them, just like breakfast food." In retrospect, she probably just wanted me to leave her alone so she could go back to sleep, but I took this logic so far that I ate Cadbury Creme Eggs for breakfast in the weeks surrounding Easter because I thought they were made of real eggs, not just chocolate and colored fondant. I knew nothing. No one corrected me.
I knew I was chubbier than I wanted to be, but my mother insisted I had inherited my figure from her and it could not be altered. "We're big boned," she said. I didn't get made fun of to my face often, but I do recall being called "Fatso" by a boy I didn't know and being asked by one of my best friends in elementary school if I oversalted my food because I was "overweight and had trouble losing weight," and I guess it didn't occur to her these problems could also come from eating mostly junk food.
My mother forbade me to drink low-fat milk with my school lunches because, as she explained much later, she had fed me skim milk as a new baby and been scolded by my pediatrician for doing so. I drank full-fat milk with every meal thereafter, blind to the fact that I eventually got older and had different dietary needs. We drank a lot of soda too. My mother kept a Big Gulp full of 7Up or Pepsi on the table beside the couch and drank from it all day everyday. I don't remember having a glass of water before the age of eight or so, when Dante started drinking water with his meals and I insisted on having the same because anything he did was "cool."
When I was ten or eleven, I had my first cholesterol test, and it was already over 200. For reference, an adult's total cholesterol should be below 150 for optimal health. My pediatrician told me I needed to lower my cholesterol, but I didn't know what cholesterol was, let alone how to lower mine. He was shocked to hear I was still drinking full-fat milk at my age, so we switched to low-fat and eventually to skim. My mother encouraged me to reduce my saturated fat intake -- another cause of high cholesterol, my doctor said -- by buying me countless boxes of Snackwells fat free cookies.
We were a "meat and potatoes" household at mealtime. And casseroles. Casseroles featuring Miracle Whip and cheese. We didn't eat a lot of vegetables. Sometimes we had salad, which consisted of iceberg lettuce, croutons, and a bottle of creamy salad dressing. Sometimes we had a warmed up can of vegetables, or a can of spinach dumped into a bowl. I lost a little of my chubbiness when I hit puberty and had a sudden growth spurt, but it got even harder to control my weight when we started having exclusively restaurant food for dinner. One night per week was devoted to McDonald's, one to delivery pizza, and one to Chinese takeout, which mostly meant crab rangoon. I tried to make up for the calorie dump at dinner by eating plain shredded wheat for breakfast and celery sticks for lunch. I was generally starving by dinnertime, which I knew wasn't good, but I didn't know what else to do.
When I moved out to go to college, I lost weight. I had starting reading books about nutrition after that first cholesterol test -- they became something of a hobby for me -- so I knew more by then. I also went back to eating normal breakfasts and lunches since my dining hall dinners were significantly more reasonable. I also walked a lot because public transportation cost money I didn't have.
I gave up meat, just because it had disgusted me for years and I finally had full control over my diet away at college. When I came home for spring break, my mother asked, "Why are you doing this to me?!" She said I was ruining spring break for her because now she would feel like she couldn't eat anywhere she wanted (she could and did -- I could find something to eat at any restaurant, and she didn't cook anymore anyway). She also said it was too expensive to eat vegetables so much. She said her own mother had stretched meals for their large family by adding ground beef to canned spaghetti. Her logic was presumably that, since her family had been poor and her mother had done this, it must have been the cheapest way to eat. And cheap was good. Especially if it was something for me. Also, my mother hates vegetables. Also, I think she wanted me to be like her.
I didn't know how to cook until I got a campus apartment. From the time I was in grade school until I moved out for college, our oven was mostly broken. My mother used a pair of pliers to turn it on and off, and it burned the bottom of any food she cooked in it. We couldn't get it fixed because we lived in a hoard house and she wouldn't allow a repairman inside at that point. My dad taught me how to boil pasta and scramble eggs when I was in high school. Beyond that, I learned to cook from the internet when I was 20. I turned out to be good at it. When I came home on break and wanted to show off some of my new cooking skills by making a simple side dish for my dad to try, my mother burst into tears. She said I'd make a mess, I'd ruin everything. I was taken aback at her crying. I had rarely seen her cry in my life. She normally defaulted to screaming or guilt trips. I promised to clean up after myself -- something I also started figuring out how to do in college -- and cooked my dish. I washed everything I'd used too. The kitchen was still a filthy, sticky mess.
I want to put a happy ending on this, but I don't want to sound like I'm gloating, so here: I'm in my 30s and healthier now than at any point in the story above.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
The Clothes My Mother Bought Me When I Was Eight Don't Fit Yet
When my mother bought me clothes, they were over-sized. When I was a child, she said it was so I could grow into them. When I was an adolescent, she said the bagginess was slimming. "I'm not saying you're fat," she sometimes said when I bought my own clothes, "But those clothes make you look fat." A few times when I came home from high school she showed me baggy, knee-length sweatshirts she had bought for me, enthusiastically explaining how, when she lost just a little more weight, she'd be able to wear them too. She outweighed me by approximately 100 lbs at the time.
The last time I stayed in my parents' home, I went through some of my old clothes. I tried on a set of velour sweats I remember my mother buying me when I was eight. I had been a plump-but-not-technically-overweight child. I was a healthy-but-not-particularly-skinny adult woman. I could still pull the waistband of the pants up past my breasts, just as I could when I was eight. Worn properly, the crotch of the pants hung at my knees, just as it had when I'd worn them to elementary school. I would never grow into those velour sweats -- or the almost identical set she'd bought in another color -- and that felt encouraging.
One of the last times I saw my grandmother, she said it was a good thing I'd had so many clothes I didn't wear or else she'd be naked. She gesticulated towards the shirt and pants she was wearing. They looked similar to the clothes my mother used to buy for me in both size and style, but they weren't familiar. They hadn't been mine. I presume my mother bought them for her and said they'd been mine, for whatever reason. Or quite possibly she'd bought them, loaded them into my childhood bedroom with many of the shopping bags and unopened HSN boxes she'd filled the room with since I'd left, and given them to my grandmother when she ran across them later, genuinely assuming they'd been mine. She sometimes confused the things I'd owned and left behind with the things she'd bought and forgotten.
The last time I wore something she bought me, it was a cheap, black, acrylic sweater she'd bought in every color available -- about nine in total -- when I was in high school. I liked it because it could survive the dryer. It was good grocery-shopping, errand-running attire, or so I liked to think. It also worked years later as extreme maternity wear, flowing comfortably until the day I gave birth, after which point I forced myself to give it up. I had a nightmare that it was so threadbare it was see-through, but I hadn't noticed until I wore it for a photograph. I was afraid that might happen in real life. I didn't want to be a person who could wear threadbare, see-through clothes without even realizing it.
I took my last knee-length sweatshirt she'd bought me -- a men's XL from my college bookstore -- and let my husband keep it. He likes it, and it's only a little too big on him.
The last time I stayed in my parents' home, I went through some of my old clothes. I tried on a set of velour sweats I remember my mother buying me when I was eight. I had been a plump-but-not-technically-overweight child. I was a healthy-but-not-particularly-skinny adult woman. I could still pull the waistband of the pants up past my breasts, just as I could when I was eight. Worn properly, the crotch of the pants hung at my knees, just as it had when I'd worn them to elementary school. I would never grow into those velour sweats -- or the almost identical set she'd bought in another color -- and that felt encouraging.
One of the last times I saw my grandmother, she said it was a good thing I'd had so many clothes I didn't wear or else she'd be naked. She gesticulated towards the shirt and pants she was wearing. They looked similar to the clothes my mother used to buy for me in both size and style, but they weren't familiar. They hadn't been mine. I presume my mother bought them for her and said they'd been mine, for whatever reason. Or quite possibly she'd bought them, loaded them into my childhood bedroom with many of the shopping bags and unopened HSN boxes she'd filled the room with since I'd left, and given them to my grandmother when she ran across them later, genuinely assuming they'd been mine. She sometimes confused the things I'd owned and left behind with the things she'd bought and forgotten.
The last time I wore something she bought me, it was a cheap, black, acrylic sweater she'd bought in every color available -- about nine in total -- when I was in high school. I liked it because it could survive the dryer. It was good grocery-shopping, errand-running attire, or so I liked to think. It also worked years later as extreme maternity wear, flowing comfortably until the day I gave birth, after which point I forced myself to give it up. I had a nightmare that it was so threadbare it was see-through, but I hadn't noticed until I wore it for a photograph. I was afraid that might happen in real life. I didn't want to be a person who could wear threadbare, see-through clothes without even realizing it.
I took my last knee-length sweatshirt she'd bought me -- a men's XL from my college bookstore -- and let my husband keep it. He likes it, and it's only a little too big on him.
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