I was broken, and to numb the pain of that brokenness, I ate and ate and ate, and then I was not just overweight or fat. Less than a decade later, I was morbidly obese and then I was super morbidly obese. I was trapped in my body, one I made but barely recognized or understood. I was miserable, but I was safe. Or at least I could tell myself I was safe.
My memories of the after are scattered, fragmentary, but I do clearly remember eating and eating and eating so I could forget, so my body could become so big it would never be broken again. I remember the quiet comfort of eating when I was lonely or sad or even happy.
Today, I am a fat woman. I don’t think I am ugly. I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I do live in the world. I live in this body in this world, and I hate how the world all too often responds to this body. Intellectually, I recognize that I am not the problem. This world and its unwillingness to accept and accommodate me are the problem. But I suspect it is more likely that I can change before this culture and its attitudes toward fat people will change. In addition to fighting the “good fight” about body positivity, I also need to think about the quality of my life in the here and now.
I have been living in this unruly body for more than twenty years. I have tried to make peace with this body. I have tried to love or at least tolerate this body in a world that displays nothing but contempt for it. I have tried to move on from the trauma that compelled me to create this body. I have tried to love and be loved. I have been silent about my story in a world where people assume they know the why of my body, or any fat body. And now, I am choosing to no longer be silent.
I am tracing the story of my body from when I was a carefree young girl who could trust her body and who felt safe in her body, to the moment when that safety was destroyed, to the aftermath that continues even as I try to undo so much of what was done to me.
II
10
There is a picture of me. My older cousin is holding me the weekend of my christening. I am still an infant, wearing a long white satin gown. We are sitting on a plastic-covered couch in New York City. In the picture my cousin is older, maybe five or six. I am squirming with senseless baby rage, my limbs at awkward angles.
I am grateful that there are so many pictures of me from my childhood because there is so much I have forgotten in one way or another.
There are years and years of my life I can’t remember a thing about. A family member will say, “Remember the time [insert significant family moment],” and I stare blankly, with no recollection of these moments whatsoever. We have a shared history and yet we do not. In many ways, that’s the best means of describing my relationship with my family, and with nearly everyone in my life. There is the great life we share and the more difficult parts of my life we do not, that they know little about. There is no rhyme or reason to what I can and cannot remember. It’s also hard to explain this absence of memory because there are moments from my childhood I remember like they were yesterday.
I have a good memory. I can remember conversations with friends almost word for word, even years after they occur. I remember how platinum blond the hair of my fourth grade teacher was or how I got in trouble for reading in class in the third grade because I was bored. I remember my aunt and uncle’s wedding in Port-au-Prince and how my knee swelled like an orange after I was bitten by a mosquito. I remember good things. I remember bad things. When I have to, though, I can strip my memory bare, and I have done this, at times, when erasure was necessary.
I have photo albums taken from my parents’ house, albums swollen with fading pictures of my two brothers and me when we were very young. This was before the digital age, and still, it seems like almost every moment of my life was photographed, and then each picture was developed and meticulously archived. Each album has a big number on it with a circle around that number. In many of the albums there are brief notes with names, ages, places. It’s as if my mother knew these memories needed to be preserved for a reason. She raised my brothers and me with iron will and her own kind of grace. The fierceness of her love for and devotion to us is overwhelming, and this fierceness only grows stronger the older we get. When I was a child, my mother kept these albums in a neat, sequential row, and when one album was filled, she went and bought another album and filled it too.
My mother has tried to fill in some of the blanks from my childhood even if she doesn’t realize she’s doing it. She remembers everything, or that’s how it seems, or that’s how it was until I went away to boarding school, at thirteen, and then there was no one there to hold on to my memories for me.
My mom still takes pictures of everything and has more than twenty thousand pictures on her Flickr stream, pictures of her life and our lives and the people and places in our lives. At my doctoral defense, there she was, staring at me so proudly, every few minutes picking up her camera to snap a new picture, to capture every possible second of my moment. At a reading for my novel in New York City, there she was again with her camera, taking pictures, documenting another memorable moment.
People often notice that I take pictures of every little thing. I say I do it so I won’t forget, so I cannot forget, all the amazing things I see and experience. I don’t explain that memories matter more to me now that my life looks different. But it’s more than that. The ways in which I am my mother’s daughter are infinite.