Mommy and Me and the Fat Dance
By Rebecca Kendall
clearly remember my first binge. My mother had worked all day baking and decorating these beautiful cookies for my cousins’ Christmas gifts. Each cookie was a letter of their name: M-I-K-E, P-E-T-E, J-O-H-N, M-A-R-Y, P-A-U-L, T-I-S-H. Mom piped them from a cookie press, and decorated them with homemade icing and sparkly sugar crystals. Each letter was bigger than my hand. I wanted my own name cookie,
R-E-B-E-C-C-A so badly, but Mom said they were too much work. At the end of the day all I got was a lousy letter “R” made with some left over dough.
I went to bed, but couldn’t sleep knowing the cookies were just sitting there in the kitchen. I awoke sometime during the night, still thinking about those cookies. I tip-toed into the dark cold kitchen, slid the chrome and vinyl chair over to the counter and hoisted myself up to retrieve the cookie-filled Tupperware from atop the refrigerator. I sat on the kitchen floor against the cupboards with the container in my lap. I planned to eat only one letter. As I pried off the lid, the sugar sprinkles caught the moonlight and took my breath away. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. In a blissed-out haze, I ate every single one of those cookies.
Here’s the thing. I was a very good girl, a rule-follower and people-pleaser. But something in me snapped on that cold December night and never went back to normal. When it was over, I knew I’d done a really bad thing, yet I was happy my cousins wouldn’t be getting those cookies. When I was being punished the next day, a part of me felt pleased. Even a little powerful. I was four years old.
My mother’s greatest fear was that I’d grow up to be fat. She was a charter member of Weight Watchers and measured female wellness by weight.
“I ran into Kathy the other day.”
“Oh yeah? How’s she doing?”
“Not good. She’s up.”
Or
“We saw Aunt Sue on Saturday, she’s down.”
It didn’t matter if something wonderful had happened in the “up” woman’s life or a tragedy had led to the dramatic weight loss of another woman’s “down” period. “Up” they were bad, “down” they were good. No matter the cause.
Twice a year my mother’s anxiety about my growing body would peak when she and my aunt would get “the girls” together for a hand-me-down session. Mary (one year older), Tish (eighteen months younger) and I would gather in the aforementioned kitchen, stripped down to our undies as the mommies choreographed an elaborate dance of inspecting and trying on clothes. Each season some of Mary’s clothes wouldn’t fit me. My aunt would quickly attribute it to my being a fast grower, although I couldn’t miss the terror in my mother’s eyes. The year I was seven, some garment I’d outgrown was ridiculously large for Tish and on a whim my aunt had Mary try it on. It fit her beautifully. Mortified, my mother shamed me in front of everyone. That was the end of our semi-annual clothes-swapping get-togethers.
At fifteen years of age I started taking diet pills and was abusing them by sixteen. By twenty I’d graduated to illegal amphetamines. I survived an overdose at twenty-three.
After years of dieting, binging, starving, over-exercising, and therapizing, I left my chosen career of acting and immediately gained a significant amount of weight, growing from a size six to sixteen. On one hand I felt liberated, but on the other, I had fulfilled my mother’s worst fear. I’d grown up to be fat.
In the meantime, my mother had gained enough weight to be at her top. We were both up. She spent several years asserting she’d “never be thin again,” then one day she got back on the wagon and over the next ten months lost sixty pounds.
One Sunday that October I called my mom to tell her I’d received the family photos she’d sent me. I told her she looked amazing in them, not just thin but truly happy and beautiful.
“Rebecca, you’re beautiful too.”
“Oh but Mom, I’m so fat.” I expected her to agree, as she normally would, then give me a pep talk about getting “back on track.” But instead she sighed and said, “Oh Rebecca. If I’ve learned nothing in this life, it’s how little that matters.” She sounded like she actually meant it! I was speechless. I wanted to say, “Who are you and what have you done with my mother?!”
I couldn’t stop thinking about the change in my mom. She was bright, glowing and peaceful – adjectives one would not normally associate with my sharp, witty, and wry mother. It couldn’t be because she’d recently lost weight, she’d been doing that her whole life. Something was different this time. It kind of freaked me out. What if she just left me doing the fat dance all by myself?
Five days later she was killed in a car accident.
I wish I could say that once I got over the shock of my mother’s death, I had an epiphany that lead to a healthy relationship with food and improved body image. I haven’t.
I miss her. So much has changed since she died. At forty I became a first time mother, and at forty-one did it again. There are so many things I want to ask her. Was she happy as a mother? Did she have any tips for getting beach sand out of tiny tushies? And if she had known she was going to die, would she have spent the last ten months of her life on a diet?
