Facebook has shown me some real surprises. I have found out a lot of people want to be friends with me and I have reconnected with some old schoolmates. It has been fun finding myself in old school pictures. Today someone posted this picture from sixth grade. I am the very pretty girl in blue seated between the two girls in yellow. I see the boy, the most popular boy in my class, who used to call me Smelly Smoller and I see he really was trying to get my attention. It sure as hell was not the way to get it, though.
Scott came home and I asked him to pick me out. He pointed to the girl in the headband standing behind me. He pointed out a happy, but fat face, Shelly Berger. He doesn't remember me as the thin girl he married. Why should he? I have been overweight since Eri was born it seems. And it seems that thin pretty girl is a lifetime away. And when I see just how lovely I was, in this picture and the one from ninth grade, I want to slap my father.
He could not tolerate fat people. He disliked my best friend because she was chubby. As I developed my hips got bigger and he would call me a big ass bird or fat fat the water rat. What a stupid asshole. If he had any kind of memory he would have remembered that his first wife had large hips and a flat chest. It is his second wife that has slim hips and a big chest. Idiot. But he is not the first or last man to mess up his daughter's self esteem. I had a boss who told his daughter all kinds of things he thought were joking about how she shouldn't eat this or that or she would get fat. Here was the kid, on vacation, worrying about every bite she took, and she was perfectly beautiful.
Should I be thinner? You bet. My health would improve. But does my self worth balance on the scale showing a particular weight? No, it doesn't. Either I will lose weight or I won't. Who I am, and the kind of person I want to be are separate from what I weigh. And as Maharaji said, all those years ago, there has never been a fat skeleton after you are dead. Everyone loses weight eventually.
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