FIXING UP THE OUTSIDE IS ONE THING.
HOW DOES THE INSIDE GET FIXED?
STORY BY Marion Winik ILLUSTRATION BY Paige Vickers
I never dreamed I would be the mother of boys. It seemed impossible that my body could manufacture on
e. Having grown up in a house where everyone was female except my father, I never knew much about the opposite sex. I understood them only in terms of their effect on me. They frustrated me, fascinated me, bored me, eventually drove me crazy with desire. I set up paper dolls of them in my head and they ran my life.
When I gave birth to two sons at around the age of 30, I gradually realized the job I faced was less complicated than if I’d been tasked with raising a girl. I was not afraid to pass on the things I knew about what makes a decent man in this world. If I had a daughter, I thought, I would be terrified of stuffing her full of all the sick ideas I grew up with, of poking and prying and picking and not letting go. If I had arrived at womanhood, I wasn’t sure I could give directions.
From the very beginning, many things were wrong with me, and my parents engaged an army of specialists to help. A podiatrist equipped me with various devices to correct my flat feet and pigeon toes, most memorably a belt with long rubber hoses that attached to plates on the bottom of each shoe. I had surgery for my amblyopia, weekly shots for my mysterious allergies and occasional trips to what I thought was called the New York “Ioneer” Clinic – only years later I realized it was the eye and ear. Tuesday mornings I visited the speech therapist’s office in the basement of the school. We played card games that involved pronouncing words with the letter S. Snake. Scissors. Sorry. Friday afternoon was the orthodontist: a perverse torturer with hair poking out of his nostrils.
My other shortcomings paled beside my tendency to chubbiness, my most intractable flaw. It seems now as if I was born on a diet, as if I drank skim milk instead of formula, as if the first book I ever read was a calorie counter. I was brought up to think of Ring Dings and Ho Hos and Yodels as pleasures beyond all conception. “Would anyone like dessert?” the waitress asked, and the look my mother shot me could have iced coffee.
By the time I reached pre-adolescence, I had embarked on an extended tour of the weight loss regimens popular in the 1970s, including Weight Watchers, Stillman, Atkins, Scarsdale, Beverly Hills. Certain foods veered crazily between OK and not OK, like pistachio nuts and grapefruit. You peeled the skin off the chicken, ate the hamburger without the roll, consumed nothing you didn’t weigh, count or measure. Eight glasses of water a day, a whole watermelon, gluey baked concoctions made from cottage cheese and egg yolks and Sweet’n’Low.
My mother took me to a diet doctor who gave me boxes full of red and yellow and blue pills, of which I was to take a dozen a day. I raced through school with a dry mouth, a pounding heart and a personality that was already hyper and brittle enough without amphetamines, thank you. They didn’t work for losing weight, so I tried to get boys to like me by giving them away. They didn’t work for that either. The sturdy little boxes they came in, however, were good for burying dead goldfish and turtles.
In any case, I had given up on ever looking decent, much less beautiful or thin. In about fifth grade I started purposely neglecting my appearance, and when my parents offered me a nose job for my 14th birthday, I refused.
One day in the car my mother told me that overweight girls sometimes make the mistake of sleeping with boys too easily, because they think it will make them popular. Yeah, Ma, and if that doesn’t work we just give them our diet pills.
But as thoughtless as her comment was, it was not completely off-base. Ever since Glenn Willis French kissed me on the golf course, I had been chalking up sexual experiences as evidence of my physical OKness. As if they would add up to pretty.
Sometimes a boy would say I had beautiful eyes or nice shoulder blades and there would be nothing in the world like that joy. Like when my father used to admire my pinkies. Well, my pinkies are pretty amazing, I must admit.
By the time I was raising the boys, I had pretty much stopped having bulimia (it started around the time I entered college and it took me years to believe it was psychological) and I didn’t hate my body so much anymore. I don’t know if it was my gorgeous husband and babies, the cute clothes I bought at the Gap or the nose job I finally had after it was broken during my brief career as the only woman in an all-male ice hockey league. I lost some weight along the way, I ran and did yoga, I grew up and got used to myself.
How did I look? I looked fine, but I kept checking to make sure, sucking in the flesh under my cheekbones, standing at a certain perfect angle when I faced my reflection. There was still some pain in there, some desperation I couldn’t touch. If the woman I had become looked all right, the girl I once was never could. Her time was up. She was stuck in there, staring at herself in the mirror, wanting and wanting.
AFTERWORD
In the years since I wrote this essay, my sons grew up, my mother died, and I now have a 13-year-old daughter I named after her. Of all the essays I ever wrote, this was the one I most feared showing my mother; how would she react to the anger and blame bubbling through it? But she wasn’t upset by it much at all. She had only been trying to help, she said, everything she’d done was for me. Out of love.
It is scary to think how much you can mess someone up out of love. My course correction has involved a lot of cooking and Jewish-mothering though I, of course, am always on a diet to one degree or another. As for my fears about raising a girl – my daughter, Jane, is beautiful and doesn’t yet have a boyfriend.
So far so good, but so far it’s been easy.*
