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Fat AcceptanceSample Essay from Journeys to Self-Acceptance: Fat Women SpeakFat Women Speak |
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With those words, it seems my destiny was set.
By the time I was in the first grade, I was a head taller and twenty pounds heavier than all the other children my age. I was the first to reach 100 pounds by the fourth grade, and I experienced my first liquid starvation diet on entering the seventh grade. I felt real proud to have squeezed into a size fourteen. I didn't care that others were wearing a size seven. All that mattered was that in junior high school, I would not have to suffer the humiliation of being weighed by the school nurse in front of my classmates, as was the ritual in elementary school.
My parents were uncomfortable with my large size. Dad was very verbal about it, but my mom tried to help by sewing clothes with straight lines only. No pleats or ruffles for me, only straight lines to give a slimmer look. I wanted ruffles and pleats.
At some point, my father convinced himself (and me) that I should have been born a boy instead of a girl, purely based on my size. As luck would have it, my younger brother was a runt, so I continually heard my father say, "If only Steve would grow as big as Gail, we'd have a quarterback for the football team."
Reinforcing my father's statement that I should have been born a boy, I had to deal with the insecurity of being a late bloomer in puberty. All my friends had their periods by the age of thirteen, so on my sixteenth birthday, when I still did not have my period, I knew for certain that God had made some kind of terrible mistake and that I really should have been a boy. I had read about people being born the wrong sex. My dad had repeated his comment that I should have been a boy so many times that I lay awake many nights worrying about God's judgment. But time proved my dad wrong, and I soon found that I really had only one problem: my weight.
At the start of tenth grade, I weighed twenty pounds more than my father, so it was no surprise when he decided that I would never be asked out on a date. To remedy that problem, dad bought me a car. He didn't want me to have to sit home while other girls went out on dates. But boys did ask me out, and each time I could see the look of bewilderment on my dad's face. He probably wondered, but was afraid to ask, if I was giving away sexual favors to get dates. I wasn't.
Now that I am forty-three years old, and every diet known to man is behind me, I've grown to accept my larger size. It's kind of sad to say that others have not. My current boss is a good example. She is 5'7" and weighs 110 pounds. She never allows herself to eat more than fifteen grams of fat a day. From the first day she was hired as the Chief Financial Officer, she judged me unsuitable for my position as Personnel Manager. It didn't matter that I had already been doing the job successfully for five years. In her opinion, anyone who could not control her weight, could not handle any position higher that paper-clip sorter. With that opinion, she set out on her personal attempt to make me miserable enough to quit.
Lucky for me, my boss didn't understand my personality. The more she tried to dump on me and force me out, the more determined I was to show her how wrong she was to judge me incompetent because of my large size. After a year-and-a-half of meeting every challenge she threw my way, I realized the only way I would win her over was to ask her about her low-fat diet and to try to lose some weight myself. I tried to acquire a disgust for fat. I really tried. Really! I even lost seventeen pounds. But then life got boring. Food tasted like cardboard. So I added a few extra grams of fat to my diet and gained back seven pounds.
My boss use to tell me how embarrassed she was years ago when she weighed 145 pounds. (I should be so lucky.) She just HAD to do something about it because she was "just so fat!" Now, she complains about her fingernails breaking and her hair falling out in clumps. I just smile to myself because I haven't told her about the article I read that said women who lose weight by cutting fat from their diet experience nail breakage and hair loss. I wonder if she'll be as embarrassed about having a bald head as she was about being "SO FAT!" I don't plan to tell her about the article. It's her punishment for being thin.
I do enjoy shocking thin, single women I meet with the number of marriage proposals I've had: twenty-seven. My first marriage lasted seven years. I know now that it was doomed from the start. Anyone who has ever fought the numbers on a scale should never marry a man who falls in love with a seventeen-year-old girl only because she has long, blonde hair. But then, I felt lucky. After all, this was my first marriage proposal and I had to be lucky because my father had convinced me that I should be buying my dresses from "Omar the tent-maker." I thought at the time that I probably would not get a second chance. Little did my father or I know!
My second marriage only lasted five months. I got talked into marriage by a man who needed an instant family for his tax return. But my third marriage of eleven years has been great. I have a husband who finds me very pleasing to the eye. Love truly is in the eye of the beholder.
I always look back in humor at my encounters with the Department of Motor Vehicles, with all the name changes required with each marriage. When I changed my name on my driver's license after my third marriage, the clerk at the D.M.V. said in a grumpy tone, "I hope you found one you like this time. I can't even get one man, and you've had three."
At first I didn't understand men's attraction to me. After all, I grew up being told that I would have no one unless I became thin. How I wish I had the wisdom then that experience and age have given me. Look around, most singles are thin. They practically kill themselves every night in the exercise gyms and don't have a clue to the secret of finding a good mate.
A man doesn't fall in love with a thin woman only because she's thin. Oh, he'll look and give it some thought, but what he really looks for in a life-long relationship with a woman is sweetness. Yes, sweetness. That's the secret. Men call it sexy, but it's really sweetness.
Think about it. My experience has been that most thin women complain more and demand more than large women because they think they look good and are confident they can replace their men with better ones at the drop of a hat. But a large woman is more apt to soothe and comfort a man in hard times because she knows that he has faults just like she has.
Sexy isn't thin. Sexy is cleanliness with a tasteful appearance added to sweetness. Every man who has ever asked me to marry him has named that one quality, sweetness, as a reason he was in love with me. I would counter by asking, "But, doesn't me being fat bother you?" (That's my insecurity speaking out. Remember, I was raised being told I had to be thin for a man to love me.)
Their response was always the same. "You're so sweet. I can't get enough of your sweetness."
But I like my husband's answer the best. He nuzzles up to me and says, "You're like a Cadillac. You're built for comfort . . . and you're awfully sweet, too."
Copyright 1994-2006 All Rights Reserved
About the Author
Gail Picado is a native Californian, with two daughters and one granddaughter. Gail began writing at age 36 and her goal is to write children's stories that adults will find nostalgic. She has also written and self-published her father's autobiography, No One's Son.
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