disappearing

"I fell for the American dream, female version, hook, line, and sinker. I, as many young women do, honest-to-god believed that once I Just Lost a Few Pounds, somehow I would suddenly be a New You, I would have Ken-doll men chasing my thin legs down with bouquets of flowers on the street, I would become rich and famous and glamorous and lose my freckles and become blond and five foot ten. I would wear cool quasi-intellectual glasses and a man's oxford shirt in a sunny New York flat and sip coffee and say Mmmm and fold my paper neatly and He would come up behind me and look at me with an adoring gaze. I would swing sexily into my red coupe, and the wind would blow through my hair as I drove into some great big city, stepping off the elevator and striding (with a feminine but authoritative step) into my office where everyone would be impressed with my every feminine but authoritative word. In the evenings I would go home and make magical gourmet meals and eat three bites, and He would look at me in the candlelight and I would be a superwoman 1980s goddess, yes indeed. As soon as I left my hometown and lost a few pounds."

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a book at my local used bookstore. I didn't know I was looking for it, but it pulled me in so thoroughly, I finished it in a weekend. It was called Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher. Partly it hooked me in a train wreck kind of way: I couldn't look away from its horror. But also, if I'm honest with myself, I identified with a lot of what Hornbacher said. I've never had an eating disorder, but I think most women in North America have disordered eating and fucked-up body images. Hornbacher is an extreme example, but she makes it pretty clear that, as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with thin.

When I was at the peak of my illness and anxiety, I didn't eat much. At one point I was down to only a very few 'safe' foods that I could eat - foods that wouldn't make me sick. I could only eat in strictly prescribed situations and times, mostly at home. Although I wasn't motivated by weight loss, I did lose weight. I got angry when people congratulated my weight loss, because, intellectually, it wasn't something to congratulate -- I was sick. But I secretly enjoyed being thin. I enjoyed that when I laid on my side, I couldn't let my knees touch each other because they were so bony. I enjoyed my jutting hip bones. And I remember times when hunger pangs meant power, they were good - they meant I had nothing in my stomach to piss out my ass, that I would be safe for a little longer. Hornbacher also enjoyed the emergence of her skeleton and the power that she wrought over her body, the power she felt in hunger.

* * *

"And when you decide you are tired of being alone with your sickness, you go out seeking women friends, people who you believe can show you by example how to eat, how to live -- and you find that by and large most women are obsessed with their weight.

It's a little discouraging."

* * *

"Now that I think of it, most of the women I worked with talked about diet and weight."

* * *

The cafeteria at my work offers several varieties of yogurt for sale. However, they are ALL zero-percent fat, the kind with ingredient lists the size of the container, all those ingredients to make up for the fat. I prefer my yogurt with more fat and fewer ingredients.


* * *

"Women use their obsession with weight and food as a point of connection with one another, a commonality even between strangers. Instead of talking about why we use food and weight control as a means of handling emotional stress, we talk ad nauseum about the fact that we don't like our bodies. When you decide not to do that, you begin to notice how constant that talk is."

* * *

I work in a woman-dominated field. Most of the women I work with are either dieting or actively managing their weight. Most of the time I don't participate, but occasionally I'm drawn into discussions. And several times various women have indicated an assumption that I must want to lose weight, that I'm struggling. Often the assumptions remain unspoken but they hang in the air, in a moment of silence, or a pointed question about my wedding photo - when did you get married? (When were you last thin?)

Yes, I'd like to lose some weight, I'd like for my body to become familiar again. But my self-worth isn't tied up in it. And I resent that others assume it is. And I'm just as willing to just accept my new(ish) shape as I am to try to change it. Frankly, diets scare me.

* * *

"When a study was done on a group of young, healthy men whose daily caloric intake was cut to just under a thousand calories, they began to: stash food surreptitiously, talk about food constantly, chew gum and mints perpetually, read recipes for dishes they couldn't make. As the study went on, they were frequently caught digging through garbage cans, sneaking into the hospital kitchen to binge. They began to purge, and -- interestingly enough -- they became incredibly worried about their weight, the shape of their bodies, and began to diet. They worried about getting dirty, got disgusted with their own biological functions, and didn't want to touch food anymore."


* * *

In university I once wrote a paper for Women's Studies comparing eating disorders and plastic surgery with female circumcision in other cultures. I got a lousy grade but I still stand by the comparison. A woman I know recently asked me if I noticed a difference in her skin. I looked closely, but couldn't really see any difference, or at least not one I felt comfortable noting. She confessed that she'd gotten a chemical peel and it really, really hurt, but she couldn't see a difference. And if there wasn't any difference, she definitely wouldn't do it again because it was so painful.

I reacted all wrong. I felt so badly for her, for how awful it must feel to hate your body so much that you would choose to corrode your face just to reduce your pores and look younger. But I didn't convey my compassion very well... instead I ranted about how that is self mutilation, how nobody seems to realize how violent plastic surgery is. How you don't solve body image problems by changing your body, how that just pulls you in further, pulls you into more and more extreme acts against your body.

I think the only thing she learned from the conversation was to never again tell me about any treatments she gets. About a week later, I did notice her skin seemed smoother, and again a few weeks after that. I guess it's working for her.

* * *

"Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times. In the 1920s, women smoked with long cigarette holders and flashed their toothpick legs. In the 1950s, women blushed and said tee-hee. In the 1960s, women swayed, eyes closed, with a silly smile on their faces. My generation and the last one feign disinterest in food. We are "too busy to eat, "too stressed" to eat. Not eating, in some ways, signifies that you have a life so full, that your busy-ness is so important, that food would be an imposition on your precious time. We claim a loss of appetite, a most-sacred aphysicality, superwomen who have conquered the feminine realm of the mind. And yet, this maxim is hardly new. A lady will eat like a bird. A lady will look like a bird, fragile boned and powerful when in flight, lifting weightless into the air."

* * *

In high school, one of my best friends was anorexic. She grew fur over her cheeks and arms while the hair on her head fell out in clumps and left bald patches. Her eyes were sunken and hungry-looking; she watched us eat like some kind of predator but I mostly only saw her eat apples. She ate them down to nothing but seeds and a stem.

I remember a girl in my chemistry class commenting that she wished she could be as thin as my friend. My telling her how sick my friend actually was didn't seem to revise her opinion. And, much as I never admitted it, there was a small part of me that, separate from worrying her heart would just quit, kind of admired how good her Guess jeans looked on her skinny arse.

* * *

"This is one of the terrible, banal truths of eating disorders: when a woman is thin in this culture, she proves her worth, in a way that no great accomplishment, no stellar career, nothing at all can match. We believe she has done what centuries of a collective unconscious insist that no woman can do -- control herself. A woman who can control herself is almost as good as a man. A thin woman can Have It All."

* All italicized text is from Wasted.

Tonight's the night

Tonight's the night I bare my muffin top for all to see. Well, everyone who comes to the Cooperator's Hall at the River Run Theatre tonight. The skirt I'm borrowing for my costume is a bit snug and really accentuates my muffin top. Oh well, I think everyone agrees that the muffin top is the best part of the muffin. I always save it for last.

And I have a perverse desire to show my belly in all its post baby glory, to say to the world, yeah I had a baby and I'm still carrying 25 extra pounds, and I'm proud of it. (Well, I'm not really proud but the audience doesn't need to know that, and I refuse to feel bad about it and hide.) I am making a concerted effort to love this pouchy belly, to love that it housed the most amazing thing to ever come into our lives for nine months, to love that this belly can really shimmy and undulate.

There is one part of the choreography where we dip chest half-moons while moving to the side, and we have to look at our chests while we do it. But it's not enough to just look at our chests; Ishra says we have to love our chests while we look. That was our homework on Wednesday night. To love our breasts. And I gotta say, it's kinda hard. They are just so pendulous since I started breastfeeding, and I'm still not used to seeing them in the mirror. But during that move, I think of the success I have had breastfeeding Swee'pea, and that makes me love them. I know that not everyone can breastfeed, despite what La Leche League may say, and I am grateful that Swee'pea knew exactly what he was doing from the beginning, even if I didn't. Mad Hatter has written a beautiful piece about the pain she experienced breastfeeding, both physical and emotional, called Milk let-down (I love your titles, Mad). I don't think I have any readers who don't also read Mad, but just in case, you should read it. I think there's a fine line between supporting and encouraging breastfeeding, and alienating mothers and babies who can't, and making mothers feel like failures.

Anyways, wish me, my muffin top and my breasts luck tonight.

Who's Afraid of a Feminist?

Gender, like religion and politics, is a subject that I try to avoid in the workplace. Because you can't choose your workmates. If I can't avoid it I try to tread as gently and inoffensively as possible and I'm tempted to do that here. But you can choose the blogs you read. I rather like the attitude that this is my blog and I'm gonna say what I think; if you disagree, start your own blog. Comment if you must but please do it respectfully.

I have already hinted on this blog where I lean with regard to feminism and with the label feminist. Like HBM, I have had times when I didn't want to identify myself as a feminist. But generally, I think those were times of ignorance. When I went to university, I learned that there are all kinds of feminisms, not just the combative, yelling, man-hating, ball-breaking, bra-burning, women must have high-powered careers or otherwise prescriptive type. But the perception remains Out There. Maybe that type has never existed except in the imaginations of people in favour of the status quo or threatened by change. I suppose I could even move towards a conspiracy theory of the origins of feminist as ball breaker. But I won't. Oh wait - I did meet one or two of that type of feminist at university. But I met so many others too.

Last night I asked Sugar Daddy if he would call himself a feminist.

SD: "Well, that depends on how you define feminism."

Me: "Well, how do you define it?"

SD: [after some thought] "Believing that women have equal rights, should have equal opportunities, and be judged by equal standards. So yes, I would call myself a feminist. Because if you're not a feminist, what are you?" (And he didn't even read any of the blogs I did or Gloria Steinem's quote at HBM.)

I find it interesting that neither HBM or Mad Hatter mention the issue of body image in their discussions of feminism and raising daughters. Maybe they haven't struggled with their body images. But if I have a daughter, this will be a hot topic for me.

When I was 16, one of my best friends was severely anorexic. When I went to bed at night, I would wonder if her heart would stop that night, if she might not wake up. Every night. Her eyes sunk deeper in her sockets and her skeleton emerged more clearly through her skin, her hair fell out of her scalp in clumps and downy hair spread across her arms and cheeks. One girl in my chemistry class once confided in me that she wished she could be as thin as my anorexic friend. I told her, “No you don't.” She insisted she did. And I told her that my friend was very sick and could pretty much die any day because she refused to be hospitalized.

Another friend of mine secretly purged, and we all cut ourselves, or burnt ourselves, some of us more than others. We all wanted to make some of our emotional pain physical and therefore easier to deal with. None of us felt pretty enough or thin enough or, as a result, good enough. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf started to help me heal. Years later, Fat!So? by Marilyn Wann helped too. And when I was around 20 or so, I started to make a conscious effort to be ok with my body as it was. To focus less on changing my body and more on changing my mind. To remind myself, when I caught myself saying things like, “You're a whale,” that I was ok. I was just fine as I was. It took a lot of effort and time but I became ok with my body; now I can enjoy what my body can feel and do (like sex, belly dancing, walking in the woods, grow and nourish another life), more than what it looks like. It still takes conscious effort from time to time though.

I learned how to hate my body from my mother. I don't mean to sound like I blame her. I don't. We all fall prey to unrealistic images of female beauty. She spent most of my childhood and adolescence on one diet or another, and I know she always felt too fat. I think we all would have been better off to spend more time enjoying the great outdoors than thinking about calories, or grams of fat or sugar. So if I have a daughter, that's what I would like to teach her. That there are many ways to be a woman, many ways to be a mother, many ways to be a feminist, and many ways to be beautiful. That beauty comes in many shapes and sizes and colours, and the beauty is in our differences.

The posts I have read in the last few days have really got me thinking and remembering things that I related to being a woman or feminist, or learning how to be those things. But too many to put in one post. So I think I will start a Flashback Friday: Feminist Edition to get these observations and anecdotes out there. I hope Sunshine Scribe doesn't mind me stealing her flashback Friday thing but these are stories I want to tell.

On Being a Mom

There is something so magical about watching Swee'pea fall asleep in the sling, at least one of his hands wrapped around at least one of my fingers, his eyes fluttering, adjusting his head slightly to get comfortable, until finally he settles into stillness. It's moments like these that make me feel like the first mother ever. Yet I take comfort in the fact that I'm not, that women have had babies for millennia and that there are elements that must be universal: the heart-stopping jolt of anxiety when our babies are sick, the overwhelming warmth of love that envelops us when we hold them sleeping or nursing.

I have been thinking about Metro Mama's post about women's work. I remember when Swee'pea was just a few days old and I was talking to my friend about the high craziness of the whole birth/motherhood thing. This was the woman who told me that childbirth hurts like hell but who I didn't really believe. I naively thought when I was pregnant that she just wasn't doing the right things. Maybe that's true and maybe my labour wouldn't have hurt so much if I hadn't been strapped to a bed the whole time because every time I sat or stood upright the baby's heartrate plummeted. (I have recently been musing about just how naive I was when I was pregnant. I believe those books that said that women don't have to feel pain giving birth. Maybe that's true for some but definitely not for all.) Anyways, I was talking to this friend and she asked, "So is Sugar Daddy a complete git around the baby?" And my answer was an absolute, unequivocal No. If anything he was more comfortable around Swee'pea in those early days than I was. I was too sore from the c-section and couldn't do anything more than nurse him. And even while I was nursing, Sugar Daddy took his role, as laid out by the lactation consultant, very seriously. He duly stroked Swee'pea's cheek and or legs to wake him if he fell asleep; he even took over the prescribed breast compressions when my hand cramped.

There were so many other c-sections in the hospital that day that I had to share a room with another woman. In fact, her c-section had been scheduled for that morning, but my emergency had bumped her back to 4 in the afternoon. The upside of the roommate situation was that it was actually a room for 4 patients so Sugar Daddy got his own bed instead of a folding cot. This roommate was up walking that night (!) and going to the bathroom and everything. For some reason her husband didn't stay at the hospital. He even worked while she was there. I imagine they figured they would save his time off for when she was home and didn't have nurses to help her. But I think this ended up being a mistake. For one thing, the nurses were helpful in the middle of the night when Swee'pea had hiccups and Sugar Daddy got nervous, but for the most part, we were solely responsible for Swee'pea once he was out of the nursery. So she ended up walking the corridors at night trying to settle her little one while I slept and Sugar Daddy held Swee'pea. Her milk was slow coming in and they had to supplement with a little feeding tube attached to her breast. I believe she needed more rest than she was getting for a good milk supply. But I'm coming to my real point. Her husband visited early in the morning before he went to work and at the end of his work day. Then he would go home to sleep uninterrupted so he could be fresh for work.

We were all really nervous handling our first newborns. But my roommate, Sugar Daddy and I just muddled through it. We didn't know how to settle these creatures but we figured it out by trial and error. But my roommate's husband didn't have the benefit of observing this trial and error. He just saw his wife handling their baby with confidence. And I believe he felt incompetent. I overheard her on the phone, talking to a friend, lamenting that her husband didn't really want to hold the baby or change his diaper because he was too nervous. "I keep telling him," she said, "I don't know what I'm doing either. I just keep trying. But he won't. He's too nervous." I often think of this woman. I didn't exchange details with her so I have no way of getting in touch her now but I wonder if her milk ever came in and if she was able to breastfeed, if her husband managed to get past his nerves.

I have another friend who says she's in charge of all things baby and she likes it that way. Her husband asks her before he does anything related to the baby. He sleeps in a separate room so that at least one of them is rested and he can cook dinner. This woman is so together I don't believe he even took any time off work. But he does the grocery shopping and other chores when he gets home at night. I really admire just how together this woman is, although that division of labour doesn't suit our family. I think it might be related to the fact that she is the one in their family who goes with the flow on most other topics.

In my family, Sugar Daddy mostly goes with the flow and I make many of the decisions. I find this role tiring, and often try to encourage Sugar Daddy to participate in decision-making. Obviously, his participation has increased with the arrival of Swee'pea. Here is something that really matters to him (bathroom tiles and long distance plans and mortgage payments don't really do it for him). But still, he almost always asks me what to dress Swee'pea in; and he forgets to change his diaper before putting him to sleep for the night; and I find myself reminding him to put him in pajamas and change his diaper as I'm leaving for my belly dance class.

Sugar Daddy has many wonderful qualities: foremost among them, he tolerates me and my neuroses, even loves me. He is a great dad and you can see that Swee'pea adores him. He cooks most meals, does all the cat care, and he puts out the garbage without me having to remind him. But there are many times when I have to tell myself that it really doesn't matter if he washes the mugs before the plates, if he folds pants differently, or if he puts Swee'pea's clothes on a different order. But I do wish he would stop asking me what to dress him in. Or where his clothes are.

Last night was my third belly dance class since I was 7 1/2 months pregnant. Swee'pea apparently was great and mostly slept while I was gone. This is a great improvement from the screaming that ensued when I went out for a couple of hours a few months ago. And I think it is definitely essential for Sugar Daddy to have time alone with Swee'pea, even if he is mostly asleep for it.

I gained nearly 50 pounds during my pregnancy. And I loved the ripe look. I lost nearly 35 of those pounds within the first three weeks post partum. Then I started putting the weight back on. I think it mostly happened in July when it was insanely hot and I was very unhappy, feeling sorry for myself that Swee'pea wasn't remotely close to sleeping through the night, or even in his crib. My unhappiness lifted when I started this blog, and when I accepted that he wasn't going to sleep in his crib so I may as well just make the best of it. Anyways, here I am, still 25 pounds heavier than I was before I got pregnant.

There is a wall of mirrors that we face in my belly dance class. I am still surprised when I see myself in it. The time of me dancing pregnant has faded in my memory so I don't expect to see a pregnant belly. But I also don't expect to see my pendulous breasts, whose momentum throws off my rhythm when I do a shoulder shimmy, or the larger belly and hips. Sometimes I start to feel disappointed in my body. But I've noticed something happening over the course of the class the last two weeks. By the end of the class, my body looks slimmer. Maybe it's because through the dance I lift my shoulders, chest and chin, and engage my abdomenal muscles. But maybe it's because the dance allows me take joy in my body and its movements, a different joy from the joy and surprise of providing sustenance for my son with it. And even though I'm desperately out of shape, even with the pendulous breasts and new ripples of flesh, I gotta say, I still got some moves. I am still capable of sensual undulations and hip circles, and playful shoulder twists and chest circles.

One school of thought holds that belly dance originated as a way of teaching girls how to be women and preparing their bodies for childbirth and labour. I certainly found shimmying helpful during my early contractions before they strapped me down (I don't mean that to sound resentful; I believe all the interventions were absolutely necessary in my case, especially the c-section, and you can read Swee'pea's birth story for more details if you like); and I was disappointed that I didn't get to do more belly dancing later in my labour. I think it most appropriate that this form of dance is also allowing to me to enjoy my body despite, or maybe because of, the changes motherhood has wrought on it. As Sugar Daddy said when I was pregnant, "Your life will never be the same again; it makes sense that your body won't either."

10 Things about this weekend

1. We went back to school shopping for the whole family even though we haven't been in school for years.
2. Regular stores only carry women's jeans up to size 32 or sometimes 34.
3. Men's sizes go bigger, at least to 36 (Dave's size), probably more like 40.
4. Dave's lost weight since Ezra was born.
5. I've found it.
6. I bought a pair of jeans and a pair of cords at a plus-size store (they call them encore sizes?) that fit and look nice.
7. Dave bought a nice pair of jeans too.
8. We bought a cute pair of green cords for Ezra and some diaper shirts on sale.
9. Ezra cut another tooth.
10. I think Ezra's sick; he had a mild fever last night and has a rash. I feel guilty because we went to a bbq with other babies before I clued into him being sick. I thought it was teething.