Tissues for Body Issues.

Well, you knew I'd weigh in on this. 

First of all, this is absolutely jacked up about twenty different ways from Tuesday, however, it was not that big of a surprise.  Socialite has a child who is clinically obese.  Socialite doesn't want her daughter to be obese, for whatever reasons she has.  Socialite makes daughter lose weight by twisting a popular method with her own brand of guilt and destructive comments.  Daughter loses weight and receives goods and mother's approval plus a picture in the Shape issue of Vogue.  Mother thinks daughter is a new person, a "thin" person.  Seven year old daughter is thinking and verbalizing, "Was I not me before all of this? And was that not enough?"   It's jacked up beyond all recognition and now Mom has a book deal.  Deah Gott in Himmel.

All I can say is at least Dara was honest about what happened.  Yes--it was probably out of some sort of twisted pride but at least she told the pretty hideous truth. And dear little girl:  you are not the same person you were before you lost weight--you have a whole new set of things and experiences that have added to who you are and your understanding of our society's and your family's expectations, because of your parent's actions to bring about a new "thin" you.  I am glad you may be spared juvenile diabetes.  I am, however, very sorry about how your mom went about what she did.  There were other less destructive roads to get there. 

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This article is timely because the topic that keeps coming up for me lately is body image.  I have now determined that I have no rational or objective manner that allows me to understand how I look.

Body image issues can definitely be part of a passed down heritage within families.   If you've been teased as a kid, one of the things you will fear is that your child will have to face the same particular demons you did.  In my case, it was being the fat kid.  I remember actively vowing to myself long before I ever got pregnant that I would raise a child that would have a food/exercise balance so they wouldn't have to face what I had to during my school years.   

Oddly, it is the one thing I never needed to lose a moment of worry over.  Left to his own devices, Pook eats healthier than I do most days. He's naturally active, a decent athlete and I have to encourage him to eat because he's really on the lean side.  (He is, however, teased and bullied by his peers for other reasons.  I am starting to think you don't get to dodge the meanness of children to your child as a parent, be it for weight issues or learning issues or just because they're different.  Kids are pack animals and they can be horribly mean.  All you can do is love your child and try everything you can to intervene appropriately and let them know you think what is happening is *not* okay and that you value them and try to give them some tools to get through it.  Overall, you just try to let them know this, too, will pass.  You hope it does pass  You hope they do move forward and realize, "God, those people SUCKED."  Because they did.)
    
 For the record:  being obese as a child is not fun.  From about age 10 to about age 16, I was the fat girl. Elementary school was the worst, though. Being non-athletic and a voracious reader didn't help either.  I hated to exercise.  Hated it.  I was bad at it, I was slow, I was awkward. Therefore, I was made fun of.  It's the way that works when you're in grade school. 

My parents never berated me because of my size.  They were worried about it, but they never berated me and reading this article brought home my gratitude for them full force.  My mother, who taught me how to shop and dress, did a good job of keeping me looking nice and age appropriate while dealing with the fact I was not a small size.  Still, shopping stung.  I remember shopping in Sears and Pennys and looking at all the pretty little dresses and just going straight to the back for the largest size.  Most of the time, it didn't look right or wasn't big enough for me to wear--this was the 70's.  You had to go to the "hefty" section and there wasn't much of one for girls.

 However, my mother is a rock-star when it comes to shopping.  She never gave up and always found things that made me feel pretty to wear.  It was a long and tedious process which meant shopping was never an "in/out" experience for us.  My mother understood I had to try everything on as she had a curvy girl that was already over-developed by the end of sixth grade.  She had to downplay the rack and keep me from looking like Lolita or like a sack of potatoes.  She got it and thinking back on the creativity and perseverance it took to get me looking as good as I did then,  I marvel at both her tenacity and love.

When the torment of elementary school ended, the conditioning was in place so I picked up the slack and berated myself privately about how I looked throughout high school and college.  I went to both CCHS, UNC-G and NCSA with some extraordinarily pretty people, both men and women.  Thinking about all the pretty on the NCSA campus in particular,  I'm amazed I didn't walk around with sunglasses on all the time from the sheer beauty of you all.  (Y'all bitches were gorgeous!  I mean GORGEOUS.  You still are, too, all of you, always to me, my lovely both inside and out brothers and sisters in the arts.  It was a privilege to serve with you and I blow kisses all of your ways. )

And of course, I picked acting as a career.  I was told by teachers, by peers, by agents I was in possession of both a character body and face--that I would grow into my commercial look.  That was absolutely correct.  At age 46, I am now into my look.  However, at 25  I interpreted that to be, "You're not that pretty and your boobs are too big.  Next."   Then when I got really thin around age 25 over a summer of going vegetarian and not having a lot of money to eat from outdoor drama wages, I did get cast in a few things so obviously, this theory was true.  The years passed--I gained weight and the confidence went and then lost weight and it came back and then gained weight and whoops, back to zero.....and so forth.

And now there is today.  I'm in pretty good shape for me.  I eat well, I exercise.  I am a lot of sizes down from where I was almost 2 1/2 years ago.  Yet......

Recently, I was in a play.  I saw pictures of myself in that play.  Guess what my first response was to those pictures?  Mmmhmmm.  After 33 pounds down, after 21 inches lost, my inbred response was, "Oh my.  I look so fat."

So, the fact is, I have realized there is a strong possibility I will never be satisfied with the way I look.  Ever.  I am not in possession of a lens that allows me to see myself as I am and certainly not one that doesn't do anything but magnify flaws.  Years of distortion--of negating my own looks, of telling myself I am not enough the way I am--it's not going to allow me to really see to have a self-image with any sort of objectivity. 

And what makes this all sort of ironic and crazy is a huge body image changer is in the works.  I'm scared, I'm excited, I'm nervous and I want it to happen so badly yet it is something that is so ingrained in who I am, I don't know how I'm going to look or feel.  You see, I saw the plastic surgeon last week.  He confirmed I'm an excellent candidate and we're moving forward  on pre-certification through my insurance for a breast reduction.

The sole official driver to pursue this surgery was the chronic back issues.  I am dealing with back spasms of some sort every day.  Injuries to the back in recent years are having a hard time healing because of the weight I carry around all the time on the front.  I'm now having some back issues that probably stem from all the tension within my upper back caused from toting these things around all day every day.  The strap creases are to the bone now so my hands go numb when the strap hits the wrong spot on my shoulder.  Since I've had my child, I've done my breast feeding so I don't need breasts as tools any more.  They have become, literally a burden. 
 
Throughout all of the weight loss and conditioning, I've been waiting for the cup to go down. (I thought it had but it was just the fit of the particular bra.) Only the strap size altered--I was measured not too long ago and like most women out there, I found out I was still wearing the wrong size bra.  I went to two places--each result was the same--the cup size was up.  It's either a 36DDD or a 36G.  And you know what?  For someone who's barely 5'4", that's just too damn big. 

And now, if approved by the insurance (and even after the surgeon's and my GP's reassurance that I am a person that will qualify for this , I am not convinced, I am too nervous to even hope, even by writing this I think I'm going to jinx it all) the surgeon recommends that I go to a C cup as I will want to have curves since I'm used to them.   He is thinking he will take at the least 700 ccs of tissue from each breast, or as he said, "In human terms, about a pound and a half each."

I cannot fathom this.  I cannot fathom how I will look.  I cannot fathom how I will be able to move or what I can wear.  I have no understanding of what this really means anymore.  I think I was a C cup for about 20 minutes in college.  Post-thirty, I have no idea what this will be like.

This, of course, leads me to think maybe I am making a mistake--maybe it would be better to live with taking cyclobenzaprine and back pain and numb hands.  Maybe if I get a reduction, I will not be me anymore, much in the way this little girl expresses to her mother her concerns over her "new" identity.  Big boobs are part of the persona.  I have tried for years to love my body for the way it is.  I actually saw a plastic surgeon about this last year and outside of having a horrible experience with the particular surgeon, I just decided I'd lose more weight, I'd accept my body as it was, I'd embrace the need for multiple athletic bras during high impact classes and that my dress size would always be a size or two larger than my waist size to accommodate the up-top freight.  Maybe I should accept the way I was made and love myself for how I am.  Maybe by altering a distinctive part of my body, I will not be attractive or worse, I will be out of proportion. 

And then I remember:  I *am* currently out of proportion. I think about the slipped disc.  And the back spasms.  And the elastic marks at the end of the day.  And the sheer pain at the end of a tri-fit class where we've done a zillion jumping jacks and pounded hard for the past 55 minutes.  And then I think of what it would feel like to do that without that much weight.  I think about rock climbing.  I think about getting a really good swing off a golf driver because I can get my forearms together in front of my chest.   I almost let myself think of a strapless dress--almost.  I cannot bring myself to not think about no more back problems or pain yet. Not until things are more certain because that....that would be.....

I have no words for what that would be.  None at all.  It is too big.  It is too much. 

So to not think about that, what I ponder these days during the early spring twilight are two lines of thought:

1)  When you change your appearance, does it change you?  It shouldn't--but does it?  When you are seen differently by the world, when you perceive yourself differently, are you still the same as you were before? 

 2)  If the miracle occurs and I am really a good candidate for this, will this end the self-image issues for a while?  Or is that early conditioning just too far in place to ever move out further than that?  Is the lens broken forever?

Because here's the thing.  I would like to get a good lens.  I would like to be able to see myself as I really appear and not through the filter I've developed over a good many years of what I liked to think of "tough self-love" which was really just me beating up on myself constantly.  I would like to be at peace with my self-image--good, bad and indifferent.  I would like to be okay with how I look.  And that leads me to the last question:

In this society, in our culture that gives this abusive mother a book deal and a article and picture in Vogue, a magazine that contains ads where impossibly thin and beautiful women are airbrushed to be even thinner than their cigarette smoking/celery licking/near starvation selves are---do we have the ability to have those pure lenses anymore?

I'm not so sure.  Not at all.