Mental & Emotional Health

Just so you know that my thoughts about my size didn’t come strictly from my mother.  My father was a small man.  He was about 5′7" and when he wasn’t smoking and was instead nibbling on every thing in sight, he weighed maybe 130.  So, by the eighth grade, I was bigger than my dad.  I out-weighed my dad early in my life.  That alone wasn’t easy to accept. 

My paternal relatives are all small.  My grandmother at a whopping 95 pounds, and my grandfather probably 130 or 135.  My dad’s sister probably doesn’t weigh 100 pounds either.  So, it isn’t like I necessarily have the gene of being a big woman.  However, my maternal grandfather pushed 300 pounds most of my life.  But, my maternal grandmother and her family, little people as well.

It was kind of like when the dice were rolled to choose my gene for my size and I had a one in four chance of being a large woman, I lost. 

But, back to the fact that my mom isn’t the only one who left me with bad memories of my weight.  I’ll be the first to say that I started being very conscious of my weight by the age of 13.  I had entered puberty way before most of my classmates and I had curves that no one else had.  Once in high school, I fit in a little better and it wasn’t to bad.  I would run from 120 to 130 depending on the time of year.  I played fall and spring sports with the spring sport carrying over through the summer.  But the winter?  Oh the winter was hard.  I would always gain weight during the winter, but once spring rolled around, I could shake it off.

It was a never ending see-saw.  So, since I’ve told you way more stuff that is pertinent to this story, I’m going to try to get to the end.  My father passed away when I was 19, so you know that the comment from him had come my way basically from the age of 14 til 19.  What comments?  It was as if he was a parrot on my shoulder, watching what I ate, watching me gain weight and lose it and while I paid no attention in any way to what was happening.  I didn’t try to lose the weight any more than I tried to gain it.  It was just the part of the cycle of my activities.

But, I remember my father telling me one time, "you know, when you have your eye on a certain guy you lose weight, when you catch him, you put it back on….just like your mother"  I was almost 17 when he said that and I’ll never forget it. And, as it is, he was right.  Those bikini wearing 140 pound days were when I was single…the ballooning up was during times of a relationship, teeter-totter, teeter-totter. 

A memory…yea, probably said without much thought, just a simple observation made by a  father of his daughter.  But it stung, it stung bad.

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