When I decided to explore my identity publicly via this blog I decided to include a photograph of myself with each post. This makes me extremely uncomfortable but I thought it was an important part of my identity – the entire topic of the blog. And I believed it would be a way to become more comfortable with my appearance and photographs.
I didn’t always hate having my picture taken. When I was a kid I photo-bombed as much as possible before it was a thing. I can remember actually crying real tears when Mommy was taking pictures of someone outside in the backyard and wouldn’t take one of me. She had one shot left on the roll of film when she finished and allowed me to pose. Did she save me the last one? Was it by chance? All of that is irrelevant because I loved the photo in my sundress, arms up and out (which seems to be my favorite pose, even now).
Above: Some of my favorite photo bombs – back when you didn’t know what you had for weeks while you waited for your film to be developed. My height worked against me but I still tried to get in there.
Below: I managed to dry those tears real quick, throw my hands in the air and work the camera.
Mommy’s insistence that I smile a certain way and pose a certain way grew old. School photos became a source of mild anxiety. If my hair was not the same as it was when I left the house that morning she didn’t understand why my teachers didn’t fix it. If I didn’t smile quite right she didn’t understand why I made that face. If flaws were shown – snaggle teeth or squinty eyes – she told me what I needed to do to correct or hide them. It sounds horrible, and it felt that way, but I do understand fully what she was trying to do. You had one shot to get a beautiful picture when using film and she believed I was beautiful. She just wanted the camera to capture what she saw.
Then as I gained weight and became a fat woman, I hated documenting that in pictures. And when I lost weight I still saw that fat woman in photographs and that was usually the end of whatever diet I was trying because why work hard if I couldn’t achieve what I wanted. And today I hate to wear makeup having struggled with acne since I’m 9, contact lenses mostly because pollen and an astigmatism, and anything other than destructed denim and graphic tees for comfort. I wear sneakers everyday and fight to cover my fast-growing gray hair that cruelly started along my hairline, impossible to disguise. I don’t like taking pictures, but I take them for one reason only – family memories. Mommy reached a point in life where she hated having her picture taken, too, and we regret not having enough photos of her to show people documentation of our memories. I know that photos are your source of remembering life events and that it’s important to have them no matter what you look like at the time.
After seeing this photo, I was literally disgusted at the sight of myself. But I didn’t demand a re-take because we were making travel memories (a family member is the blurred and deleted image beside me). And no re-takes were going to make me look smaller. And I was already convinced I could never look better.
I hope to stop avoiding the camera during this phase of peeling back the layers to expose my true self. I hope that I can ignore whatever I consider flawed and begin to embrace the things that are the charm of me. And I hope that I can look back on photos and remember the joy of celebrations, the enlightenment of travels, and the love among loved ones and close ones. For now, the way that I am working on that is by posting as many photographs as I can find and take of myself (click here for the gallery updated often) while I talk about who I truly am as a whole person. It won’t be me in every post but I’ll make a significant appearance.
The women in my life during those tender years when a baby girl starts imagining what she will become when she’s older were my mother and her second child (Sissy). Mommy was 34 years old when I was born, and I was her third child. And in the end she found I had stolen her girlish figure and threw it in the trash when she wasn’t looking. To little girls imagining what she will become when she’s older, a person who hates her own body is not the person you want to become. So this little girl looked to her older sister.
Sissy was 14 years old when I was born. And what I didn’t know then but would soon realize, God didn’t design me to be my sister’s twin. And to make sure I was never confused about His intention, in His infinite wisdom and with His ultimate creative self He made us opposites in nearly every way but gender and race.
Me and Sissy
When I could see that I was already “curvier” than Sissy somewhere around age 5 (19 for her) I wanted to start dieting. Mommy was forever on a diet so I wanted to get started early so I could make sure I grew up to look like Sissy and not Mommy. Well, I don’t know what you tell a mother who understands exactly why her 5-year-old little girl wants to diet – the world was still calling her “healthy” – and also knows that it’s completely unreasonable for her 5-year-old little girl to go on a diet. It would take a couple years but unfortunately, Mommy eventually gave me her blessing and we dieted together well before my first signs of puberty. She was careful to monitor my dieting and modified it according to whatever standards she thought best and we added intentional exercise to the regular roller skating, bike riding, and running I did while playing with my friends. And I always managed to lose some weight but never in the places I wanted and never enough to keep me from being called “healthy”.
Me and Sissy
God was also constantly reminding me that I was not created in the image of Sissy. To really hammer it in that I was not her twin, He showed me just how different we would forever be. She was pregnant when I was 12 years old. In her early pregnancy, you know those weeks where your clothes are just starting not to fit but you’re not quite ready for maternity wear, was the first step toward my resignation of my fat-girl destiny. My clothes were the clothes she borrowed when her own were too tight. In case you didn’t catch it, at 12 years old, my 26-year-old pregnant sister needed to borrow my clothes. My 12-year-old clothes were maternity clothes for my 26-year-old sister. I blamed this one on God even though I was angry at the entire world around me. It just wasn’t fair.
Me and Sissy
Just before I went away to college I weighed myself and started accepting my fate as a fat-girl with less anger. I was what I judged too close to my father’s weight at the time. And then my only goal became to always weigh less than he – a man 4 inches taller than me and slim with long limbs. The day I outweighed him, I went to the “fat-girl” shops to find something large enough to drape my sow-shaped body and found little solace in the fact that the smallest sizes were too large. I was struggling to find my size – how could I be fat at Lerner New York and skinny at Lane Bryant? I couldn’t understand it and hated my body more. I resorted to what I’d done my entire life – diet and exercise and lose a few pounds, giving up after not losing enough weight and not in the right places.
Me and Sissy
I would repeat this cycle until 7 years ago when I just gave up. I don’t imagine I’ve given up forever, but I am still stuck in the give up. Just before I gave up I had lost over 40 pounds and was very excited about my progress. The first blow was that my bloodwork didn’t show enough improvement to match the effort I was putting in. The second blow was when I looked back on some photos of me as a kid and I didn’t see a fat girl looking back at me. I felt betrayed by all the people who had called me “healthy” when I was a perfectly average little girl. It was enough to push me over the edge into a depression that would take nearly a year to climb out of (with medication and talk therapy) having regained all but ten pounds of the weight I’d lost.
Me and Sissy
I had always believed that I was a fat girl. But I also had always been told (and believed) that I could fight it and become what I’d always wanted anyway – slim. And I am not sure if we’re in the middle of that story or the end.
I am a Fat Woman. And I don’t love that Fat Woman.
The first time I heard the word “healthy” as one of my identifiers, it was at the pediatrician’s office. The nurse couldn’t lift me up on the table and said, “Ooh! She’s healthy!” in a very perky everything-will-be-okay voice. She found a step stool so I could climb on the table, and I did so with ease and plenty of side-eye. That nurse truly offended pre-school me.
I remember vividly thinking she was so rude, and I was wondering why she didn’t already have the step stool at the table – where it had always been anyway because I was always already on the table even though everybody else in that office could pick me up to put me on the table. And I thought it was ridiculous for her, a medical professional, to use the word “healthy” when she so obviously meant the opposite. (It’s fun for me to recall my thoughts from before the age of five. They are just flashes, but I was a wonderfully precocious child – much to the dismay of all the adults in my life.)
I would go on to be called healthy by a myriad of characters, major and minor, in my life story. I can remember visiting with my childhood best friend’s extended family and hearing many versions of, “Ooh! She healthy! You sure you don’t want some more white rice with margarine butter and sugar on it?” usually in that sugar-sweet-southern-black-Grandma tone of voice. I was the healthy one and my friend was called skinny, and unfortunately neither of us was celebrated for our sizes.
My childhood BFF’s family offended elementary school me. I remember thinking it was incredibly rude to call me fat – because let’s be honest, that’s what it was – and then decide I must need more food than my friend, not the same amount and not less.
As an adult looking back on white rice with butter and sugar, I shake my head when I think of the poison that she was putting down my throat. Okay, maybe not quite poison, but I’m melodramatic and a bit in my feelings right now so I’m sticking to poison. Among the recollections I have around my being healthy fat include being told that I was too heavy for my father to pick up and the cause of his hernia surgery, hearing as part of my birth story that my size as a fetus was so dangerous to my mother that a c-section birth was required, and having to wear Pretty Plus clothing sizes.
Before I was officially in Pretty Plus clothing sizes, I was close in size to a childhood friend – two years older than me – who was the daughter of one of my mother’s work friends. They would go to a store on their lunch break and buy bags full of matching clothes for us to wear. We tried them on and our mothers would return whatever didn’t fit. Thankfully our entire wardrobe didn’t match but only because we didn’t have identical bodies and different items were returned. That would take me to the most memorable moment of feeling like a fat child and the first time I almost lost my whole life.
There was a dress, I called it the American Flag dress because it was white with red stripes and a blue sash, that both my childhood friend and I owned. We wore it at the same time like Bobbsey twins and continued to grow, as little girls are prone to do. One day I could no longer fit into the dress, but my friend’s still fit her perfectly.
This was taken on my ninth birthday. My friend is wearing the American Flag dress after I couldn’t fit into mine anymore.
One very dreadful day, Mommy gave some sort of lecture about how my friend could still get into her dress as if I should be ashamed that I couldn’t get into mine. I don’t remember everything she said, just the way it made me feel, but I distinctly remember what I said. It was only one word, but it was full of tone and sass and attitude and exasperation – “And?” The look in Mommy’s eyes when she turned her head to look this child dead in her eyes to be sure it was really the one she gave birth to who dared to get smart-mouthed with her. She made eye contact and confirmed that it was indeed her own daughter who dared to utter that word in that tone to her own mother and the room grew very cold. One word almost cost me my whole entire life. My heart is pounding in my chest at the memory. I stammered, “And… that’s good for her. I mean, I … uh …” and finally I just gave in – “I’m sorry Mama. I didn’t mean it.” Because there was no fixing the obvious stank in my response. And once she turned back to whatever she was doing – I think folding the dress to give it away – I ran out of the room and stayed away from her until she looked and sounded like Mommy again.
From the perspective of an adult who can hold two seemingly contradicting truths in her mind at the same time, there was absolutely nothing I could say or do particularly at that age to change the fact that I couldn’t fit into that dress anymore. And the only thing I could have done to change the fact that my friend still fit into hers was to destroy her dress (I didn’t). But silence would have been 100% better and more respectful than “and?” as in “what you want me to do about it?”
I know that I wouldn’t have told that story about the dress if Mommy was still living. I’m not a parent, but I know that no mother would want to know that her actions or words were heartbreaking to her child. And for all my parents’ flaws and imperfections, I know without a doubt that I was loved and loved unconditionally. I’m blessed to have been born at a time when they were at their best as parents – a benefit of being a “pleasant surprise” well after they both thought they were finished with their “multiply the earth” duties. So just in case you are judging Mommy, please reconsider (and don’t you dare tell me, ‘cause them is fightin’ words).
There are many photos of me as a child from the first one in the hospital when I was born to my senior heads in photo albums and boxes. For years I have looked at those pictures and saw a fat girl. But about seven years ago, I really looked at those pictures and wondered what people were talking about – there was no fat girl in those pictures. I had a big ole butt and that was the reason I had to wear Pretty Plus clothes – I just needed room in the hips. I had a big ole butt that astonished grown folks and it was the topic of so much conversation, talking about me in front of my face when it should have been behind my back (or not at all but people aren’t flawless).
I had a big ole butt and shouldn’t have been picked up so much after I started walking. I had a big ole butt that all my childhood friends wanted in middle and high school and I would have gladly passed it on to them all. And I grew relatively fast – everyone thought I was going to be tall. I am 5’4” so not quite tall.
And what breaks my heart most of all is that I believed I was a fat girl and that there wasn’t anything I could do to change it – no diets, no exercise ever got rid of my big ole butt. And then one day as a young adult I saw I had what I called “fat girl” knees. Shirts were tight on the arms. I couldn’t find pants that fit over everything unless they were two sizes too big. Skirts hung high on my butt and dipped low in the front. And I remember the day I had to start shopping in a different section of stores. I skipped all over Juniors which is where my friends shopped. When I saw that I was going to be a fat woman, I stopped trying to be anything else. This was not body acceptance. This is to say that I accepted what everyone else told me as a child that I would be – that I received all of those thoughtless comments and believed I had no other choice but to be a fat girl. I stopped exercising because I was only exercising to lose weight and I wasn’t losing the weight I wanted. I stopped eating with intention and settled into eating for comfort because if I am going to weigh about the same eating kale everyday as I would eating lemon-pepper wings everyday, why not have the wings?
My name is Regina Lynette. People used to call me healthy.
I am Regina Lynette 