Wear and Tear by stark. raving. mad. mommy.

Really, shouldn’t I be past all this?  The looking in the mirror with critical eyes?  I don’t look at strangers this critically.  Okay, maybe sometimes I question a person’s judgment when I see a grown woman wearing sweatpants with “DIVA” stamped in rhinestones on the butt.  But I don’t care what the size of her butt is.

And I certainly don’t look at my friends this way.  When I look at my friends, I see kind eyes, warm smiles, bodies that have survived and sustained life.  I don’t look at my friends and think, gee, if she were a size smaller she would be even more awesome.

Why can’t I treat myself at least as well as I treat my friends?

Most of the time, I’m pretty nice to myself.  I brush my teeth, wash my hair, and use SPF 110 every day.  I can look in the mirror and think anything from “you look okay,” to “meh.” Sometimes, the stress piles up and I’m less kind to myself, even when I need kindness the most.  Then I feel worse because I realize how dysfunctional I still am.  I’d like to at least get to a point where I stop beating myself up for beating myself up.  When I’m stressed out, I slip into old though patterns.  “You’re getting out of control,” I think.

My first recollection of being aware of my weight is from around age 10, when my mother made some pointed comments that I was beginning to put on some weight.  My mother lived on cigarettes, coffee, vodka, and half a can of soup a day, so I guess that will keep you slim and trim.  As I became a teenager, she would make sarcastic comments if I had a second helping of chicken, but looked the other way when I went out drinking.  Clearly, my weight was of more interest to her than my behavior.

Food became an ongoing wedge in my relationship with my mother.  Despite the fact that my mother was functional enough to show up for work every day, her lack of planning meant sometimes there was not enough food in our house.  As my mother’s alcoholism spiraled, my need for control increased.

When I was fourteen, I was working enough to be able to buy my own groceries.  I bought very specific groceries.  I had a limited menu: frozen vegetable pizza, tofu, rice, and Granny Smith apples.  Eventually I decided the vegetable pizza was too crazy, and whittled the menu down to tofu, rice, and apples. Then even that seemed excessive, and I began purging the rice and tofu after I ate.  Soon, I was purging after most meals, whether it was a slice of pizza with co-workers or my tofu-and-rice dinners.

My eating disorder was more a manifestation of my depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive behavior.  We didn’t own a scale, so I don’t know if I lost weight or how much I did.  I definitely thought I was over-weight, and am still surprised to look at photos and see that I very clearly wasn’t.  I did eat some normal meals.  There were long stretches of time when I lived with another family, and I ate normally there.  At school, like many of my classmates, I often skipped lunch.  It’s a hazy memory, but I think we had a salad bar in our school cafeteria, and I think I ate that for lunch.  A salad bar in a high school cafeteria seems very fancy to me now, but it was the 80s, so I guess salad bars were the thing.  I do remember that the school store stocked Velamints, which I would munch constantly.

With stops and starts, it ended, eventually.  I would sit on my hands after eating to keep myself from jamming my finger down my throat. Once, after lunch with some co-workers, we were all commenting on how good the meal was.  I blurted out, “and I’m not even going to throw it up.”  Three jaws dropped.  “Oh,” I said.  “I thought everyone knew.”

That right there is testament to how deranged I was.  I assumed that everyone in my life knew what I was doing.  Did I think they were Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends?  Even more strangely, I believed that all my friends were fine with me jamming my finger down my throat and vomiting on purpose.

Most of the rest of it, though, I don’t remember.  It’s probably a good thing.

I try to be kinder to myself now.  My body is older and has some wear and tear. After having four babies in three pregnancies, I have stretch marks, which my husband sweetly calls my “racing stripes.”  My breasts are positively deflated.  I wear just about the same bra size as always, but I swear if there wasn’t so much stretched-out skin, I’d be a cup size smaller. I have scars on my abdomen from two c-sections, and some shaky-looking skin there that is never going to go back to normal, even if I do stomach crunches ‘til the cows come home.  I have lightly-etched lines around my eyes.  And I have a scar on my right hand where my teeth scraped my knuckle repeatedly.

stark. raving. mad. mommy. is the mother of four children, aged four to nine.  She writes about parenting, insanity, and the Lego obsession known as Asperger Syndrome at www.starkravingmadmommy.com.

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