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Key points
- Mothers who worry—even silently—about their own weight can unwittingly pass their anxiety onto their children.
- Appetite is not a bad thing; learning to accept desire and need is essential to mental and physical well-being
- Weight-shaming can be unspoken or inadvertent, but it is nevertheless powerful and memorable.
- A lack of body acceptance disguised as humor is rarely effective camouflage.
The photograph that my mother liked best showed her in a tight black bathing suit on a beach; she was probably 20 years old when it was taken, which would make it around 1945. It was clearly a professional shot: Mom was wearing heels and sunglasses, blond hair swept back from her face like a cover girl, and at 5'1" she somehow managed to look statuesque.
A cross between a pin-up and a starlet, nobody could deny that she was a head-turner.
By the time I was born, she was 31 and no longer looked like her younger self. She married my father, a handsome Italian man, moved from her native Quebec into a three-family house in Brooklyn with his extended family, had a six-year-old son, and settled into the routine of a working-class housewife.
She became depressed as she saw herself growing older while my father didn't seem to age. He would go out and, increasingly often, leave her at home in the evening. Her hair grew darker, and her cat-green eyes took on a darker look as she grew wary of her life. She insisted that we move out of the multi-family home and into a small house of our own in a suburb.
In that small house, she would sit in the kitchen and eat. She like hot white-bread toast dripping with butter, mashed potatoes, hot dogs, and french-fries. She liked ice cream and sliced American cheese; she liked ham sandwiches and canned salmon.
Food comforted her and putting on weight made her uncomfortable.
She smoked to keep her from eating; she drank endless cups of tea to keep her from eating. She drank Metrecal to lose weight. She hated how she looked. I knew she didn't like her body; she hated shopping. She hated mirrors. I would watch her look at herself, and the faces she made saddened me.
Her attempts to poke fun of women who dieted were hollow. She would puff on her Newport Menthol and say it was ridiculous to try to change your shape once you had children. She compared herself to everyone, whether it was neighbors or women on television. Women who didn't have children were not really women, so she didn't have to compare herself to them. She simply distrusted them.
Her self-loathing was palpable. And it was contagious, because a child will find it hard to learn to love herself if her mother does not actually love herself.
My mother died when she was in her late 40s.
When I think of the time she spent, in those short years of her life, trying to go from a size 16 to a size 10, I am both deeply saddened and fiercely protective. My mother was a woman shaped by her culture and her times. How could she be otherwise? She desperately wanted to be precisely the woman the world expected her to be: cheerful, pretty, trim, upbeat, charming, and kind.
But it was too hard; it wasn't possible for her. Nor was self-acceptance, self-compassion, or self-love possible. These weren't on the menu. If she could have forgiven herself for her imperfections and allowed herself to be loved by others, including me, she might have enjoyed her life more, lived more fully, and approached experience with more gusto.
She didn't give me the same sense of shame she carried, and for that I'm grateful.
Inadvertently, however, she did pass along to me a fear of losing control over my appetites. I'm afraid of being devouring, of going too far, of grabbing too much, of overdoing it: I am always worried that there won't be enough for me once the plate goes around. Only in the last three years have I become able to trust in sufficiency.
It's also taken years of therapy for me to understand that appetite itself is not a bad thing.
Learning to accept and appreciate desire is essential for our mental and physical well-being. It's when we're trying to arouse boundless desires of others that we run into problems; we can feel unfulfilled, go emotionally hungry, when we're trying to satisfy the wrong craving.
Food isn't the enemy; eating is not a crime; weight, like age, is a number; comparisons are invidious; making heads turn can be lovely, but not at the price of turning your own face endlessly towards the past.
