Objects In The Mirror May Appear Larger Than They Are

Anyone who has come out of an eating disorder is aware than the mind can play tricks. You may only weigh 90 pounds but when you look in the mirror your eyes are able to double or triple that until you take up the whole mirror. This playing with perception has never really left me though the days of dieting (or not eating) have long gone. Usually I am aware of my brain’s love of playing games and have a variety of tricks that I use to offset any craziness. Then pregnancy happened and that meant all of my little tricks became useless. Mostly because I was larger – 55 pounds larger and my body was no longer mine.

When I came out of the pregnancy in a fit of momentary madness I decided to clean my closet of all of my pre-pregnancy clothes as my hormone laden mind believed that there was no way that my body was ever going to fit those clothes again. So I packed everything up, pointedly ignoring Ryan’s gentle remonstrations to ‘maybe just put them away in the storage locker,’ and dropped the garbage bag off at the Salvation Army. I wore my maternity clothes, purchased some clothing on sale and continued on with my life. That was until the day my pants fell down as I was walking. Fortunately for everyone involved, Imogen and Sabine were the only witnesses and I managed to find a belt to hold the pants up. Cleaning out my closet I found a couple of pants that had escaped the purge and fortunately I had never had the heart to give up my skirts so I had something to wear that didn’t fall off. I was comfortable with the status quo until this week. Tomorrow I am going to a friend’s art opening and realised that I own nothing that is appropriate that fits.  Ryan put Imogen to bed and I went to the mall.

I actually argued with the salesperson who was helping me as she handed me a dress and I said that I needed to have a larger size and then grabbed one that was 3 sizes larger. She grabbed it back from me and gave me another dress one size larger. We continued this pattern as she helped me find a dress to wear. I took the dresses and went and tried them on. In the first one I felt NAKED. It wasn’t low cut, it had sleeves and hit just above the knee but I felt naked and realised that at some point I had disconnected from my body. What it did do was skim my body – a body that I no longer recognised as my own. The dress was SEXY and I am not sexy. I wound up getting another dress because I just couldn’t bring myself to commit to the SEXY dress. I left and went and bought some pants, tops and another skirt that fits me. By me, I mean the one that is actually in front of the mirror and not the one that I have been seeing in the mirror.

Ripping Off the Scab

While I was looking for something else today, I came across my notebook that I had used while working on my Masters. As I leafed through it, I began to cry. That tiny nondescript notebook was a reminder of what I hadn’t completed. While I did walk across the stage to accept my degree, it wasn’t the degree that I had imagined I would accept. I also cried because of the pain that I read behind the words. Not the girls’ pain but my pain, the ache that I had carried with me, held close to me. The anger that made my bones brittle.

“I am having difficulties writing about body and space. I feel like throwing the whole thigs away, walking away from it. Bury my head, my body and disappear.

I feel like I am being held together by tiny webs – I expect to see hairline cracks all over my body, like clay when it has no more water left. One quick step and I’ll fall into a heap of dust. Pieces too small to be put back together. Broken beyond repair. The heat of my anger evaporating my remains. I want to cut into my shin – peel back the top layers – expose the blood, membranes and bones beneath. Feel the rush of pain – the pieces of flesh underneath my nails. The cakiness of blood on my shin, the fresh running blood underneath. I want to tear it open again and again. I want to scream. I want to hit. I want to break down the walls. I can see myself through them – throwing myself against the walls. I can feel the screams, see my mouth open but I can’t hear them. I watch as my body, my hands slide down the wall over and over again. I watch and then I think ‘good girls don’t yell.’”

I read this and realise just how much it hurt to force myself to be continually thinking about girls, body, space, place and identity. How often when I read the literature and the studies I would feel sick. Looking back now, I should have changed my focus. My gaze should have shifted to me rather than an external analysis. At the time, that felt too self-centered, too egotistical.

Ultimately, I did write about myself and my experience researching and writing:

I was eleven when I was sexually abused by my softball coach. For the next two decades my body remembered what my mind chose to forget. I still can not remember fully what happened. All I have is the image of the sun shining through the leaves hanging above the van, the taste of bile in the back of my throat, and the world becoming still. I remember when the other girls mentioned that the police had come to their house but I don’t remember talking to them. I don’t know at what moment I remembered, I can’t place the trigger. It’s as though I woke up one morning and it was just there. I would look at pictures from my childhood and search my younger self’s face to see if I could witness the change. It became painful to read or hear the stories of adolescent girls. How could I listen to other’s stories when I was having difficulties listening to my own? Each time I sat down to write, read, or listen, my stomach would clench, I’d feel the tears well up and I would turn away.

This is a story about my journey.
(“Pandora’s Box” 2006)

I haven’t opened the document since I sent it off. There are only two people who have read it – my advisor and my second. I don’t think that I did myself justice or the topic justice. It might be one of those things that I have to go back to and do it right.

Next Tuesday, I have a meeting with my advisor. I don’t think that I am finished this journey.

Branding the Baby

We decided before Miss Pumpkin was born that we were going to use cloth diapers. We have in suite laundry, are concerned about the environment and its what good parents are supposed to do. However, we also looked at the cloth diapers and knew that they were going to be bigger than her when we brought her home so we picked up some Huggies for newborns. We were appalled to realise that they were decorated with lovely pictures of Winnie the Pooh a la Disney, Pampers were no better with the Sesame baby Elmo and other ‘baby’ Sesame Street characters.

Since then, Miss Pumpkin has voiced her opinion over cloth diapers and it isn’t positive. When we are at home and I am feeling up to it, we will use them during the day. What it has meant is that I have to forage for disposable diapers that do not have advertising directed at my daughter’s subconscious and that don’t make me shudder when I touch them because they feel too much like foam. We buy Simply Kids and Seventh Generation chlorine free diapers. The Simply Kids are awesome and cheaper than Huggies or Pampers but are decorated with some sort of kid friendly characters. The Seventh Generation are equally fantastic and have no decoration on them, they are definitely more expensive. Which ones we buy is determined by where I am shopping when I need to pick up diapers.

Why the long post about diapers? I think it is a perfect example of how branding our children occurs without us really noticing. Winnie the Pooh is cute, adorable and how could Tigger be a bad thing for a baby. It isn’t – except that I am putting this on my child every day, several times a day for most likely 2-3 years. By the time, the toilet training is done and the diapers are gone my child has been fully indoctrinated into Disney’s version of Winnie the Pooh and/or Sesame Street characters. (When we were kids did Sesame Street have all of the dolls, clothing and stuff that they do now? I can’t remember)

Ryan and I had already decided that we wanted to limit the toys that Miss Pumpkin would own. It is amazing how quickly the toys can accumulate and most kids I know don’t really play with all of them. I have always been an aware viewer when it comes to advertising and media in general, in the past 4 months I have become hyper aware. I almost went into an apoleptic fit when I saw the ad for the Dora Explorer cash register which includes a charge card and other great add ons. Bratz dolls are another group of commercials that make me want to throw away the tv and move to the middle of nowhere. What bothers me most about these ads and all of the marketing that is directed to kids is that it creates whiny, mini consumers whose only way of getting what they want is to nag at their parents. Yes, it is the parents responsibility to say “no” but in a culture that is so commodified and where love is more often represented through things as opposed to time, I think this is easier to say than do.

What I find most difficult now is to not simply react to the things that I see, read and hear. It has become harder to step back and analyse my reactions. To ask myself the questions: “what is it that I find offensive?”, “what makes this appealing to children?” and so on.  It doesn’t help that I have read too many articles and books on the marketing to and commodification of children and teens in my past.  More often than not, what I am reacting to is the feeling that we are being controlled by corporations and conglomerates.  Children are being trained to be mindless cogs in the economic wheel of cheap labour and cheap products that make the rich richer and the rest of us and the environment poorer and sicker.

More and more we are becoming removed from what it actually means to make or grow something.  Our sense of what something is worth has been twisted so that items that should be discussed in terms of its quality have been reduced to measurements of quantity.   We process our food so extensively that we have to add back nutrients that are found naturally in it.  We talk about good food being expensive and yet we think nothing of buying Kraft Dinner because it can feed us cheaply and yet the $1 price tag doesn’t truly factor in the cost to the environment not to mention that the processed food is heavily subsidized by governments.  Furthermore, the actual nutritional value of kraft dinner is nonexistent, in that sense it is vastly overpriced.   When asked, I want my children to know what foods are in season, where they come from and more importantly how to prepare them.  We are luckier than most as there is the family farm that they will be able to visit and work on.  I want them to understand that everybody deserves to be paid for their labour, that the environment isn’t something to be pillaged.

In the end it will be about balance and our willingness to say  “no” when so many other people are going to be saying “yes.”  I just hope that Miss Pumpkin and any other squashes we find in the vegetable patch understand that there was a reason behind their parents’ madness.

I write in the shower.  I also write in the car, walking, sitting on the bus and various other places.  The problem is that I am not writing it down physically and when I actually sit down to write it out – I am blocked.  I have always written this way.  My thesis was written and rewritten in my mind.  I would walk away from the computer so that I could get some writing done. So here is my attempt to write what I had already written this morning.

Today, I woke up to discover that I am not pregnant.  This is a good thing.  I didn’t think that I  was but my breast feeding body is not as regular as it used to be.   While I was in the shower I realised that I will never again look at menstruation as a curse or burden to bear.  Somewhere amongst the tissue and blood was a tiny possibility that could have become a reality.  My body felt different – heavier, solid, connected.  There was an ache that throbbed between my legs, pulsing its way up into my uterus where I could feel it expanding, pushing against its walls, searching for something that was no longer there.  I could feel my body pull itself in and then let go – faint echoes of contractions that still reverberate through my bones, carried through my body as a counter tempo to my heartbeat.

My hands moved, tracing the path of the beats as they moved under the surface of my skin.  They rested on my belly.  Its roundness – a reminder of what it once hid.  Tiny purple marks following its swell, tattoos that no artist with their ink could replicate, no symbol found on a wall could evoke the same rich, layered meaning.

I bowed my head in wonderment.  My tears caught by the upturned corners of my mouth spilled down and I gave thanks.