Sister Red

Almost 3,000 words...

I was a fat kid. Not just heavy, or plump or chubby, I was FAT! I don’t know where or how it started. I know that I was a 7lb 7 oz newborn, was an active toddler and youngster but then something happened. I swelled up. I think it was around the fourth grade and as I am writing this it just hit me, the fourth grade, what happened? My parents got divorced. I never thought it really had an effect on me but surely it did. My parents split up that summer, I remember the Saturday morning I woke up to watch cartoons with my siblings only to walk into the room and not see my mother on the couch, which is where she slept permanently, so did not understand that until I was an adult. One of my older sisters was on the floor in front of the television, I asked “where is Mom” and she replied “she didn’t come home last night, she stayed with her boyfriend”.  Being so young I did not fully understand what that meant. When the time came around for school to start, my brother and I were informed that we were going to be living with my Mom and her boyfriend, in a different city going to a brand new school with people we didn’t know. As a child I remember not thinking or feeling that my mother wanted me, but that my father didn’t want me. Again, something I would understand as an adult. So, because our parents made us we moved. We moved with my Mom into a Motel room, a single room with a king size bed smack in the middle and one bathroom. What the hell was going on? Being as my brother and I never had beds before, we were the youngest in a family of 11, we carried our sleeping bags and pillows and decided where we were going to sleep. My brother chose to sleep on the floor along my mothers side of the bed and there was no way I was sleeping next to some creepy dude who I didn’t know and who wasn’t my dad so I choose to sleep on the floor at the foot of the bed.

I remember the weekend before school started. We were sitting in the open hallway of the motel and my Mom told us that she wanted us to live with her and we told her we didn’t want to go to a new school. She told us that if we did not have friends within the first two weeks, we could go back to my dads. The lies that parents tell.

The first day of school at Mojave Elementary, we walked into a completely different environment than we had ever been in. I found my fourth grade class, Mrs. Bowlin and immediately a girl came up and introduced her self. I had a friend and then another. My brother wasn’t so lucky. This was the age that we didn’t associate with one another; we pretended that we did not know one another. I don’t know why but this lasted throughout high school. I guess we just weren’t the family that sticks by each other in a situation where we should have, at recess I would see him standing alone by the volleyball courts, just standing friendless. This wouldn’t always be the case but the image is burned in my memory.

So, we eventually made friends, we still lived in a motel, still slept on the floor in sleeping bags and we never got to move back to my Dads.

We did not have a kitchen in this motel room we ate out a lot, and I mean every night! There was a pizza place, Graziano’s that we would frequent along with Kentucky Fried Chicken which was across the street.  I think about this time I fell in love with food because I felt that food loved me and it was a time I needed some love. My mom was in a new relationship and not that she ignored us but she had a man half her age to boss around and shape into a man. My Dad was 30 miles away and dealing with his own emotions of losing my mother and having to raise the other handful of children who were still in school so food, food became my friend.

In the fifth grade my Mom bought me a shirt; it was a cute shirt I thought at the time. Looking back it was the worse thing to put on a fat girl. The shirt had a grid like pattern on it, and at the top had a line of bears in different outfits and poses, the bears spelled out HUGGABLE. Was I huggable, I doubt it. I wore this shirt on a day we were learning about fitness. Our teacher, Mr. Beale who smelled like coffee and who would always ask if I was huggable when I wore that shirt and then would hug me, took us into the Auditorium to watch a film and to be weighed, WEIGHED, all of us one in front of another. I had the biggest crush on Lance Callahan and did not want this to happen. I was on of the last girls to get weighed, they lined us up by height, and I will never forget the number, 118. I weighed 118lbs in the 5^th grade!

That wasn’t the first time my weight was an issue. I was always considered fat in my family; my nickname was “fatty.” One sister in particular thought I needed some help in t he weight loss department and when I was 5 years old, put me of a coffee diet. I was only allowed three cups of coffee a day. She would prepare them and bring them to me as I played in my fathers yellow VW beetle. I don’t know how she got away with it; my mom may have started working around this time.

Food, food was an escape. As long as I could stuff my face I would be okay. I have a picture of me eating cheese puffs sitting at the table in our town house, yes we finally moved out of the motel into a town home, those cheese puffs came in a bag almost a foot and a half long and I would eat the whole bag, maybe not in one sitting but the bag was just mine! My brother and I would have a contest to see who would make theirs last the longest; I don’t know if I ever won.  There are more pictures of my in grade school wearing my older sister’s clothes, older by 6 or 8 years, obviously there was something wrong there.

My weight would fluctuate through the years depending on what sport I played and usually if I gained weight I would go to my Dad’s for the summer as a makeshift “fat camp.”  My Dad still had the house I grew up in and it had a pool, I would swim, not for fun but for exercise. Usually during the summer in my junior high and high school days, the summer would be a time for my dad to weigh in at work and he had a lot of rice around, I would go on a rice diet.

I don’t recall my exact weight in high school but I do remember wearing a size 18 jean during my junior year. My senior year, I got into running and lost some weight, I would wear my brothers Levi’s which were a 34x34, way too long but they fit me. I would always go to the extreme with my eating though, using my mothers tricks of eating only one meal a day and chewing a piece of Big Red gum throughout to the day to trick myself into not being hungry. Or not eating after 6pm, a friends mom once teased me that if the pizza didn’t get to our table quick I wouldn’t be able to eat. These tricks seemed to work, but how warped is that? Food would always be a comfort, in any situation and I would use it as a crutch. A childhood friend told me that I was funny, jolly even and that skinny people could not be funny.

After High School I moved to Colorado with my best friend. My weight was down at this time, it was a new experience and I had a great balance and felt wonderful.  We ate our way through Denver yet my weight stayed balanced.  A year or so away from home I was lost, I decided to move back and move in with my sister and her family, the same sister who put me on a coffee diet. That was not the best situation and I then had to move in with another sister and my self esteem hit the floor and my friend food returned. I was given a great opportunity to move with another sister, I have seven of them, this time to the island of Maui and I took it. When I got there I was heavy, HEAVY. I was back to a size 18 on an island paradise and I was big. Surprisingly it wasn’t an issue with the locals; they are naturally a larger people.  But the lack of friends and companions sent me on a spiral and I gained more. I finally decided that my isolation in my room could be put to more use, so I dragged out the weights I bought in Colorado and made a mix tape to work out to. I lost weight and got down to a size 12/14 by GAP standards. I wasn’t doing too badly.  Again, after a year or so I needed to get back to the mainland and once again I moved in with THAT sister, this would be the last time.

For the next few years I maintained my weight with exercise and increasingly better eating. I became a vegetarian and was learning the healthy way to eat and not the crazy ways I had in the past. Not that there weren’t times when money did not allow but one meal or I would not revert back to the crazy ways. Habits are hard to break. I think being heavy throughout my formative years made me self conscious and my self esteem so slow. I always felt judged on the size of my ass then the size of my brain etc. and this was something that I carried until my mid 20’s.  If I knew I was going out on a certain night, I would limit my food so that I would not get bloated and look heavier than I was, not always a good thing to do when you will be consuming alcohol, but I would rather be hungry and buzzed than looked at as FAT.

I reconnected with a boy from school that I had a crush on through a different sister. After three years of trying to date and having him stand me up we finally got it together. The ease of this relationship made me comfortable and able to let my guard down. Early in the relationship I would still suck in my stomach when he would hug me but after we moved in together, that went away.  Late night home made chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream lead to weight gain once again along with the adjustment of how he ate. As a single girl I would eat breakfast and a substantial lunch and usually would skip dinner, for more than one reason. But this man (now my husband) ate dinner so I ate dinner on top of what I normally ate in a day. Hello extra pounds! I went from 165lbs and a size 12 to 195lbs and a size 16 in less than a year. In that year, I also became pregnant. This pregnancy was unplanned and unexpected and I reveled in it. I used the excuse of the baby being hungry to eat with abandon. Late nights of playing Spyro the Dragon and eating Del Taco; being on bed rest and eating what I thought was a single serving of  Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream alone in the house; by the time I delivered my first child I weighed 226 lbs. I thought the “pregnancy” weight would melt off after delivery but when I left the hospital I weighed 224lbs and that weight stayed on for a year. It was a tough year of trying to breast feed my son and having difficulty and the main advice I would get from everyone was to eat, you must eat to produce milk. So I ate and ate and ate the wrong thing in the wrong amounts and was still having difficulty producing milk.

When my son turned a year I decided to tackle this weight issue, I was not happy shopping exclusively at Avenue and Lane Bryant and I was definitely not happy wearing a size 20/22 jean. During a promotion I went to the local Weight Watchers and got myself weighed, I was still at 224lbs! I walked out of the cubicle with the scale and straight into the registration office and signed up. It was a wake up call to the way I was eating and what I was eating. I through my self into this program joined the gym and made it work; I lost 39lbs in a year and felt better than I had in a long time. I maintained my weight but stopped going to the gym, I began to utilize the track and stairs at the college where I worked. A year and a half later I began planning my wedding, looking forward to the white dress, the veil; and then it happened I became injured. I fell down a flight of stairs at work and tore the ligament that holds your foot to your ankle, I fell a month before my wedding. I had plans to take in my wedding dress to fit snugly and accentuate the curves that my weight loss had revealed; instead I gained another 10lbs and saved the money on alterations. I was on crutches and then a steady cane when my wedding date approached, I was depressed and still excited about getting married but the thought of a FAT bride and the image of the “stay puffed marshmallow man” would not leave my head. My wedding was beautiful and I did forget about the weight gain on that day.

A few months after my wedding, I got a nice surprise, I was once again pregnant. This pregnancy would be so different from my first with one exception; I was once again at a pre-pregnancy weight of 195lbs. I am not sure if it was my age, the knowledge or the season but with my second child, I only gained 21lbs and by the time I was discharged from the  hospital I was down 10 lbs and after 10 weeks when I returned to work, I was  back to my 195lbs and a size 16 jean. For the first year after my second son, I didn’t really worry about my weight; I was successfully breastfeeding my baby and knew that calories didn’t need to be an issue, well, not a huge issue. I maintained my 195lbs during that year and my size 16 jeans and was happy, but that was due to the beautiful baby I was providing for. Once he turned a year and did not need my milk as much, I decided to adjust my eating. Being a full time working mother I found it difficult to find the time to exercise but knew I needed to make changes. I found some great tips through a website that really turned the light on for me and adjusted my eating and within a year I lost 30 lbs and was down to a size 12 jean.

The weight came off slowly and has stayed off more than a year later; I am currently maintaining my weight of 165lbs.  I feel more comfortable in my body today than I ever have but the scars are still there. I can still remember every time I was called fat and how it made me feel. I will still wonder how many rolls are visible on my stomach when I sit down, if I have a muffin top with my jeans which is so not attractive. I have days where I want to lose another 20lbs and days when I am happy at my weight and size and days again where I want to lose maybe another 10lbs. I don’t think my issues with my weight will ever go away, even as a married 32 year old woman, a mother of two boys I am still that little girl on a coffee diet, the 118lb fifth grader in the huggable shirt and the fat girl amongst her friends.

Coversations with my middle son:

Talking to Connor about Christmas:

Connor:I did a circle map today about Fall. I like Fall.

Me: Why do you like Fall?

Connor: Because it means Halloween and Christmas are coming.

Me: You like Halloween and Christmas?

Connor: I like Christmas

Me: Why?

Connor: Because its cold, it snows and I get presents!

Me: Do you remember why we celebrate Christmas? Do you remember whose birthday it is?

Connor: Grandmas? Grandpas?

Me: No, don’t you remember from The Sonshine Factory?

Connor: Is it someone I know?

Me: Yes in a way, but you can’t see them.

Connor: Ohhhhh Jesus!

Me: Yup!

Connor: Is he watching me right now?

Me: Yes

Connor: Oh crap!

Faith and lack there of...

I don’t know if I commend those who have faith or condemn those who have faith. I have never been a religious person, even when attending Catholic church and functions as I kid, I was never fully there. I am around those with faith and I don’t get it, I just don’t. I read blogs of those who put the fate of their very sick children in the hands of Gods will; seriously? It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for these people and for this sick child, but to say you are okay with what happens to him because it is God’s will and he will be whole in Heaven. I just can’t deal with that! Some may say that I am the one to feel sorry for, maybe I am, maybe not.

Thankful or Selfish

I don’t know which I am, or if I am both and if being both is okay. I have read and am reading blogs of mothers with sick children, some who have lost children and I can’t  help but be thankful that my boys are okay. I have gone through some rough times, especially with Wyatt and the seizure deal but for the most part I have healthy hearty boys who drive me crazy. I can’t imagine being in the place of these women or how I would even begin to handle their situations. Thankful and selfish, that is how I feel. I feel such emotion reading words, updates, tweets;  its overwhelming, completely overwhelming. I can’t stop thinking about them.

Praying is not how I roll, but my thoughts are with them and hope they too can be thankful and not deem me selfish.