The Shape of Me

I remember the first time I realized I was “the fat kid.”  It was in the first grade and we were practicing reading aloud in small groups at a crescent shaped table.  The story that day was about pigs and how they “sniffle and snort and are fat and short.”  Timothy Higgins chortled and said, “Fat and short – just like Angelika!”  If only the author had said “pigs sniffle and snort and have bucked teeth and knobby knees” my charted course as the chubby one could have been altered at least temporarily and perhaps little Timothy would have realized his need for head gear and long pants.

Genes are a bitch sometimes.  Growing up my older sister was the quintessential string bean, while I was shaped more like an eggplant.  After school her snack would consist of high calorie (and delicious!) junk food and she never gained a pound.  I’d so much as a get a whiff of the Cheetos as she ripped open the bag and my already ample bottom would swell in response.

Dear little Timothy might have been the first to draw my attention the unfortunate fact that I was lacking in the metabolism department, but he certainly wasn’t the last.  The list of my lithe tormentors is exhaustive.  In addition to my classmates, there was my own sister, my cousins, family friends, neighborhood kids, teachers and in one gut-wrenching moment my own beloved mother.  We had gone jean shopping on the eve of my first day of middle school.  As I stood in the JcPenny dressing room trying to hoist a pair of jeans over my thighs, my mom said the cringe-worthy, “Maybe you need to exercise something other than just your hand to your mouth.”  As my sister snickered outside the dressing room, I will never forget standing there looking at the pants encasing my thighs like sausages, pushing my belly fat over the top of the pants, the zipper straining to contain my gut.  The shame I felt at that very moment washed over me in a wave of pain and resentment.  I wasn’t *that* big was I?

I continued to wage my battle against my weight; valiantly toiling forth in the war of Chubby Aggression.  I started packing my own lunch; no more Little Debbie snack cakes and chips.  I stuck with saltines and a piece of fruit for lunch, and locked myself in my room at night doing jumping jacks and lifting light weights while I watched Beverly Hills 90210, dreaming of the day that I would saunter along the beach in a polka dot bikini like Kelly Taylor.

But really, there just is no pleasing people.  The teasing continued despite the fact that I had begun to see results.  One night I was in my room trying to crunch my abs into submission and my sister meandered in and folded her thin frame across my water bed – barely making a ripple in its gelatinous form.  “You know, ” she said ” You can get really skinny, but you will never be pretty.”  After she went out to call one of her many boyfriends (and mock her fat little sister behind my back I am sure) I laid on my back in the dark staring at the ceiling fan.  Sticks and stones my ass – words do more damage…they chip away at something much more important than flesh and bone and the scars create a deep chasm on your self esteem that can never be healed; instead you have to figure out how to build a bridge across it.

As the years ticked by, the teasing let up some .  I took up running and tennis and learned more about food and nutrition.  And then my high school best friend had to go and develop an eating disorder.  At the time I thought she did it  just to spite me.  (Self-absorbed much?)  In the span of a summer she managed to purge herself into a size 2.  Ah how I envied her ability to make herself wretch ~the fact that this envy made me sick in my own right was lost as the green-eyed monster of jealousy possessed me.   It just didn’t seem fair.

In college I managed to avoid the freshman fifteen, but gained that plus 20 more pounds right after college as I descended into a medical hell I would rather not relive in words.  In June 2002 I became engaged and realized that I did not want to be overweight for my wedding and started losing the weight through running and eating healthy, something I still try to do almost six years later.  When I went to try on wedding dresses for the first time, I had just started on my quest to lose weight.  I remember standing in The Bridal Collection in Greenwood Village, CO trying on a sample size Reem Acra gown made of beautiful ivory silk.  My “consultant”, a girl in her mid-twenties with skunk stripes in her hair and entirely too much foundation on her gaunt face, came into my dressing room and said (and I only wish I were kidding), “I think you are a little heavy for any of our gowns.”  I was too embarassed to tell my mother, so I just told her that I was ready to go and held back the tears until I was safely ensconced in my bathroom at home.  There I sat on the toilet and sobbed – I felt like my weight  had robbed me of a lifetime of happy moments.  But after the melodramatic moment had passed I realized it really hadn’t…the good has far outweighed the bad in my life, even if I outweighed my older sister by the time I was in the 1st grade.

When I think back about what shapes me as a person today, on the cusp of my 31st birthday, I realize that it is the shape of me that has most defined my life.  Self-geometry I guess you could call it.   I am feeling this overwhelming urge to put my self compass and protactor away and stop analyzing the curves and angles that create the shape of me.   Honestly, I never really like math all that much anyhow, so summing myself up in numbers and measurements has got to stop.