Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

January 14, 2009

I gobble down the book FEED ME: WRITERS DISH ABOUT FOOD, EATING, WEIGHT, AND BODY IMAGE, and my own stories come flooding back. Beginning with my comments this morning to a girlfriend that “I’m fat,” and her response “You’re too hard on yourself.”
The first two stories in FEED ME are by women who feel big at size two. At a size four, I now feel really big, thank you, but also angry at the men who call those writers fat.
This time, instead of the weight gathering around my hips and thighs, it’s spilled all over me — making me, dare I say it, almost voluptuous. The pounds — nine of them — piled on in the post-Halloween M&M craze. About that time, my doctor insisted I take more insulin each day, which means I can eat the M&M’s without being afraid I will die, but it also means the extra fat won’t pee out of me, which my pre-insulin, diabetic self would do. I’ve been diagnosed as type two for three years now. Last night, as I was going through a pile of papers, I found a snapshot of me in a bathing suit from about that time — at about the weight I now say I want to be. I looked skinny.
I don’t know what I want.
I read stories about women whose families suffered incredible deprivation, Holocaust survivors, or those to whom family love meant food. In our house, my five-foot-eight mother was always on a diet and always about forty-pounds overweight. My mother confused drinking with cooking, so we frequently ate at midnight — if we ate — or we would snatch bits of food from the stove when her back was turned. In the refrigerator, the only food was jars of olives and celery sticks. I was five-foot-one then, and felt invisible.
In my thirties, I grew to nearly five-four. A few years later in my thirties, I exercised fanatically and gave away all my tampons and pads because I suddenly didn’t need them anymore. I got rejected during a blood drive because they said I was anemic. I didn’t believe it. And I didn’t realize I was anorexic. That’s in the book, too, stories about women who are bulimic and anorexic. The things we do to ourselves. I have to buy boxes of pads again, but now I’m poking at the extra flesh that billows out of the top of my lycra top, wondering how to ride this insidious see-saw.
There’s so much on my don’t-eat list, it makes me angry. And that anger dissolves as I share it with the woman writer who tells how her boyfriend yells at her for eating chocolate cake. She dumps the guy, gains a few pounds, and loves herself now.
There’s a story of a model who didn’t want to be a model and a flight attendant who didn’t want to get fired, whose careers forced them to go bulimic or take diuretics. And I remember when I was thirteen, coming home to find that my stepfather had modeled my own nude torso out of clay with his hands. He was a good artist. And my hips and thighs were full, my top small. I felt wretched and embarrassed, and maybe that was the moment — under his roof — that I stopped growing. And maybe that’s the fearsome image in my head, so many years later.
We all have our stories.