What if No One's Watching?

I come from a long line of "full-figured" women. As they themselves would say it, fat women. Not fat just because they love to eat (although they do, and they eat with a voracity and lust for life that I admire and aspire to), but fat because they were meant to be that way. Fat because thousands of years of Dutch peasant stock built them sturdy; fat because they have worked for generations in fields and on concrete diner floors; fat because there is nothing waifish about their personalities; fat because when you grow up poor, you never, ever leave food on your plate. Mostly, though, they are fat because their mothers were fat, their grandmothers were fat, their aunts and cousins were fat, and fat is their way of life.

The language of being fat has surrounded me all my life. You are "built like a brick shithouse," you have "arms like a blacksmith," or "your ass is wider than an ax handle." Only typing those words now do I see them as insults, which in the society where I live, they most certainly are. And yet at home it was a family reunion contest between my grandmother and her sisters to see whose ass really was as wide as an ax handle, and I've never felt anything but pride at the sight of my mom's "blacksmith arms."

Our society tries to make us believe that fat should be associated with laziness, sloth, indolence. Growing up, though, fat women were associated with competancy. My mother and aunts are the most competent women I've ever known. They can and do take care of themselves, and take care of their kids, just the way I imagine my grandmother took care of (and still takes care of) them. Being fat doesn't just mean they can lift heavy things, move you if you are in their way, slap the shit out of you if you mouth off, it also means that they have the best laps in the world, that no matter how bad things are, there is always something soft about them, something that means home.

It is clear to me, at 25, that it would not be at all difficult to follow in my mother's footsteps where body weight is concerned. It's still kind of a shock, because I was a really skinny (and embarrassed about being skinny) kid. And it has taken me years to realize that yes, I do have "child bearing hips," and they aren't going to go away no matter how many times I say I don't want children. But now that I am ten years away from skinny, skinny is the biggest compliment I could get. I can't capture the sense of competency and female completeness I see in my mother and her sisters, no matter how high the number on my scale gets. When I see it in myself, being big isn't about being competent and able to take care of myself, and being soft isn't about being rounded and feminine and feeling like home. I am horrified by my own blacksmith arms, and I would never in a million years lean over and let someone measure my ass against an ax handle, much less do it laughingly year after year. For me, coming from this long line of beautiful, strong, fat women is a curse. I resent them because their genes and their inherited eating habits have cursed me to a life of sucking in, counting calories, being ashamed to shop in a plus-sized store.

So what has changed between them and me? It would be easy to blame living in the city, or blame the generation gap, but that's not it. The simple truth is that I got vain and greedy. I thought I could have my size 10 body and still have their competence, their joy, their love. And now I have none of it. I'm fat, but I'm not part of their tradition. My arms may look just like my mom's, but she wears her's without a thought, as part of who she is, while I try to hide mine. I don't revel in the things my body can do, and I certainly don't use it to make my living. I eat with shame, guilt, petulance, but never gusto. And I wonder, since I'm never going to be skinny, if I can learn to be fat like them?