Surviving. Fatness. Part 1

During the early years of my life my Grandparents lived on a fairly secluded street in Southern California. Their home was not always safe for me, but it was steady. And for a long time steady felt like the closest thing to safe that I could hope for. It was a time when I was moving at least every six months. Usually in and out of the same homes. Frequently in and out of my Grandparents home.

Adaptability became my most useful tool. It made it so that chaos was always secondary. It made it so that I still got to do some of the normal kid things. My best friend and I set up a lemonade stand and tried to sell our toys to the other neighborhood kids. We would wear our side ponytails on opposite sides for symmetry’s sake. I traded X-Men cards and pogs with some of the boys in the neighborhood and had to give up three of my best slammers to get the Storm card I coveted for weeks. I ran and jumped and climbed things and got bloody knees. I was exuberant and maybe even a little bit daring.

Because I moved so frequently I didn’t form a lot of close relationships with kids my age. My best friend who lived down the street from my Grandmother was my one of my most important relationships because it was one of the most consistent. There were other kids in the neighborhood too. Mostly boys. Some I had crushes on and some I made cry by twisting their arm behind their backs after they called one of my girl friends a nasty name. And then there was Anthony.  

Anthony was an older boy who never had to go to school and walked around the neighborhood with a broken walkie-talkie and a faded thrift store security uniform. He would break up our games of wiffle ball or kick the can in the interest of safety or noise regulation. There was a shared and unspoken understanding that he was different from us and that something was wrong with him. Which meant we both humored him and paid very little attention to him. Sometimes if he would steal our ball we would plead with him or encourage him to join the game. To which he always responded with a threat to tell our parents that we were misbehaving. We were never quite sure if we were actually doing something wrong, confused by his absolute confidence in his authority, so we frequently would break up the game and go our separate ways.

As a younger girl I was fairly athletic. When I was able to I played softball and would swim wildly in any pool I had access to. I got dirty, loved the feeling of my skin baking in the sun, and thought of myself very much as a tough girl. With rare exceptions I preferred being outside on my bike to watching television. But at some point that all changed.

Nobody asked me why I began refusing to play out in the street or why I would only play in the backyard alone. I started to sneak Fruit Roll Ups and whole tins of Pringles. I sat and watched cartoons and locked myself either in a room or behind the backyard gate. I still wanted to see my best friend but would have full melt downs if she refused to spend the night at my house and instead asked that I walk seven houses down to where she lived. As my chubby body got fatter my intense anxiety was mistaken for laziness and still nobody asked me why the change.

The change came underneath the pine tree in the front yard. That was the day Anthony dug his knee into my stomach after pinning me to the ground. He told me he needed to search me for stolen goods and put his hands in places that no girl child would think to hide. I hissed and kicked but he was not a boy that I could make cry. And when he was done probing the corners of my body he stood up nonchalantly and walked away mumbling that he would catch me next time.

My 7 year old self walked into the house through the garage and stood waiting for somebody to see what happened. I imagine myself quietly standing next to my Grandfather or Grandmother, mouth slightly agape in shock and horror. And nobody noticed. So I walked upstairs, remembering I’d heard this silence before and I knew what it meant. It meant danger. It meant I was on my own. I remembered my 4 year old self and the banister I was walking past at the top of the stairs. I remembered how I’d been hung from it and how that cheap chandelier hung in my focus, upside down, as I waited to find out whether he would choose to drop me or not. Somewhere in me I remember the deep sadness that came when I realized that I would have to forego so much of what I loved to avoid feeling that fear of falling once again.

From ages 3-5 one of my Mother’s boyfriends beat me regularly and severely. It was why I was put in foster care, it was why I was in court mandated therapy for the earliest years of my life, it was why I knew home was not safe. So I had the streets. Not even all of them. Just this one in front of my Grandmother’s home. And then it was gone. And once it was gone it was like it had never been there at all. That adaptive skill tricked me into believing that I preferred being alone, I preferred being inside, I didn’t like those kids anyway. My fear of being caught by Anthony once again made it so I would travel only with the thick shield of a car around me. I was a smart girl.

By age 10 I began to buy into the idea that I actually was lazy. That I didn’t ride my bike anymore because my now fat body wasn’t capable of it. Riding my bike in public and walking down any street alone filled me with a panic that I mistook solely for body shame. And the reality is that fear is and was a swirl of things. Yes it was a way to avoid the insults hurled at me from moving cars, yes it was a way to hide my heavy breathing from those who would taunt me for it, but it was also based on a well-founded fear that being visible in a way you could not control was dangerous. It could get you caught, it could get you hurt.

At some point my Mother asked me if Anthony ever hurt me. I told her I think so and she asked me what I wanted to do about it. My Mother had a way of walking that fine line between empowerment and forcing me to be overly responsible at too young of an age. I think I told her that I wanted her to tell his parents. Which I don’t think she ever did. There was a common understanding that Anthony was not capable of controlling himself or his actions. I watched him never get in trouble for things other kids got grounded for. Because he had a disability he was treated as if he was incapable of control, sound decision making, remorse, or feelings. Which meant that he couldn’t possibly be held responsible for the harm he caused me, because well he just didn’t mean it. People’s incorrect assumption about what he was capable of meant that he never got to be a whole person and I never got to feel safe on the same street as him.

21 years later and I still do not ride a bike. I still am sometimes gripped with intense anxiety when I cross the street at a busy intersection. I still prefer to be at home instead of playing outside. I still navigate intense fear that my adaptivity has named normal. But I am just now realizing that the root of this fear is not the shame or anxiety that my fat body would be seen or noticed. In fact I may not even hate my body at all. No, the root of the fear is violence. Decades of it. And it is so much harder to adapt to relative safety than it is to adapt to danger. And this new realization, it makes some room. Some room for risk and compassion. It offers a sliver more space for that daring girl to come back and walk the streets again. Knowing that her grown self, her fatter body, is stronger now. Is safer.