Where Body Positivity and (My Own) Fat Acceptance Conflict

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to meet with a group of women I share some traits with.

These women were bold, and each had their own fierce style. They were charismatic.

And they were fat.

First, let me talk about the joy it was to be among other fat women. I've had the occasional fat friend, coworker, or acquaintance. This was different. This was a coalition of the clinically obese. This was an association of the adipose. This was a flummoxing of fatties.

For the entire two hours we were gathered, it was constant chatter. Maybe I'm projecting, but it seemed like everyone wanted to talk about the fat issues they've been dealing with, had worked through, or had newly experienced. So much conversation! Mah gawd.

One such conversation revolved around body positivity vs. fat acceptance.

So, agreed. Everyone who has a body should be a body positive activist. As one lady said, everyone has their own body issues. No matter what you look like, there is some part of you that you have issue with.

Truth. Be body positive.

Fat acceptance goes down a layer. Basically, even a fat body is a good body that deserves love.

That one's hard.

So, first: Does my body deserve love? Like, really, does my body deserve love? I guess. I mean, it's the only one I get. So, I love it like I loved my mom. She had her flaws, but I loved her; she was mine. I also hate it like I hate my mom; I can't help but pick at it to expose layers upon layers and many years of disappointment.

I have bad feet; I'm diabetic; I don't have endurance; I have asthma. My thighs not only touch, they keep my feet from touching. My arms are disproportionately big. My breasts are large, but not large enough for my body. I'm not good fat, where I have a scaled up hourglass figure. I'm clumsy. I can't dance because my body and I aren't very good friends.

The problem with fat acceptance is that I'm not only fighting myself, but also public opinion. None of us knows whether I deserve to love my body.

For most people, body positivity is learning to accept yourself. For me, it's that plus trying to get people to stop being disgusted by me.

In my mind, I'm never pretty; I have a pretty face. I'm not sexy; I'm acting sexy. I don't look good; my makeup or outfit is cool. No one can convince me differently because I know how I'm viewed by most of the world.

I honestly don't know where I'm going with this.

Maybe just... It's a constant battle. Sometimes I win, and sometimes I lose. If I win the battle with myself, then I still have one to fight in the world. If we ever win over the world, I'll still be battling myself.

Regardless, if you ever find yourself with an opportunity to participate in a flummoxing of fatties, I highly recommend it. It's so choice.

Happy Birthday

So, somewhere along the line, this thing just became my cry file.

Yesterday, my daughter would have been fourteen.

When I was 22, I had an unwanted pregnancy. It was unwanted for so many reasons, not the least of which was the father - an unmedicated schizophrenic who nearly killed me and ultimately stalked me from New York to Michigan in an attempt to be close with me.

I was also my own sort of messed up, still recovering from childhood, still recovering from being hurt in my first serious relationship, still recovering from being in a relationship with a schizophrenic. On top of that, I was living in a shack with my ex's family.

Regardless, I didn't get an abortion. I wanted one, but at that time in my life $300 was no different than $3,000,000 in terms of attainability. I considered adoption again, but my sister wanted the baby.

Something in the way it was presented changed things. Where I was able to distance myself from the first child I had given up for adoption as a teenager, this baby was still sort of mine. She would be in my life, and we may even have ended up with a loving parent-child relationship. Yet, I still didn't want her. It was all jumbled up in my head, with a major dose of pregnancy hormones as a mixer.

However, that didn't happen. Instead, when I was two weeks overdue and being induced, the worst happened. She died and I had multiple weeks in the hospital and months in recovery.

I spent years and years self-medicating and avoiding myself. I'm still not great at being by myself. Even through it, she was just part of what was wrong with my life. She wasn't something I told even the people closest to me. The conflicted feelings about it (and everything in the world) almost define me.

Somehow, probably through missing a few days of my thyroid meds as well as age and having pregnancy and lack of it consistently in my view, I'm having a bad time of it. Maybe it's just the idea that she'd be a teenager, and that seems so real. My brain did that ridiculous, self-torturing device of imagining what she'd have looked like over the years.

This is one of the big things I don't talk about. No one wants to hear about it. People don't know what to do with that information.

Calliope would have been 14. She would have been an eighth grader. She'd probably not be interested in makeup and clothes, since I am. She would have been close with her cousin Angel and probably obsessed with Angel's son. When I met her sister, Kelly, she would have come with me. Maybe we'd spend summers together. Maybe she would have forced me into sanity earlier.

When a baby dies, all you're left with is the bitterness of what might have been.

Ugh - Mortality

Something bad happened this week that has tied into the idea of my dad dying and my mom's death.

I had the worst fever I've ever in my life had (which is impressive - I've been hospitalized twice in my adult life for scary infections). Hallucinations, convulsions, chills, lasting for hours. No apparent reason.

And then my period started.

That's so not normal. I've been Googling stuff ever since, and I'm half-convinced I have cancer. At the very least fibroids. SOMETHING ISN'T RIGHT.

Guess who has two ovaries and hasn't scheduled a doctor's appointment.

There's something comforting in the ignorance. While I know something isn't right, I don't KNOW something is wrong. I'm housing Schrodinger's uterus.

While I was squeezing 10 more minutes of bed time out of the morning, I realized I'm going to be 37 soon. Then 40. At some near future, people will stop thinking I'm in my twenties. I should dye the blue out of my hair because it might be ridiculous at my age. My face won't be oily forever. My skin won't always be soft.

Or maybe it will. Maybe I was off by a decade when I thought I'd be dead by 30. Maybe it's 40 I'll never see, and won't have to worry about old age.

I don't have a will; I need to make a will. I need to get out of debt so I have something to have a will about. At least I have life insurance. Does my father have life insurance? I guess it doesn't matter because he's a veteran. I have life insurance for Jon, too. He's going to outlive me. I hope he gets over the idea that he'll never love anyone else.

So, of course that ruined the last ten minutes of almost-sleep that's better than the entire six hours before.

Does anyone have a life-changing eye cream to help prevent wrinkles? I don't want to look old.

I thought I came to terms with getting older.

My Dad is Dying

On a good day, I call myself introspective. On a bad day, I'm self-centered.

Regardless, even through my empathy toward my father and imagining what it must feel like to be facing his own mortality at only 64 (the thought of it takes my breath away, it's so incompressible), it's all getting filtered through my own mind and experiences and how I feel about it.

I met my dad about a year and a half ago. So, I already have many years of abandonment issues after my mother died of cancer when I was 13 and I became a ward of the state. I have issues and issues and issues, that I felt like I had come to terms with and was able to recognize and work around in my day to day life.

Meeting him was total fantasy fulfillment. My dad was a race car driver and a soldier and cerebral. He'd used his time to become some big-shot chemical engineer project manager, traveling the world setting up power plants for different governments.

He also gave me insights into myself - my tendency to disconnect with people who I don't have enough contact with, the low desire to build a family unit or traditional life, being almost sociopathic in my ability to read and manipulate, my avoidance of that label because of my empathy. Basically, meeting him made me understand why I was an alien in my family. Because he was a cuckoo who laid his egg and flew.

Since meeting, we've spoken a handful of times, texted, and done some emailing. We had plans to meet up once he was fully retired and settled into North Carolina. He was going to get a house in the woods and have my husband, dog, and I for a long visit.

We were supposed to have years to know each other.

But instead, my father is dying of cancer and has months. And he doesn't want me to visit. And I'm 13 again.

It's weird, because I can see myself so clearly now. I can see the ways I deal with this and how it's been programmed into me by my previous experiences with trauma. I have friends and an aunt and a husband who want to talk to me and be here for me. Instead, I don't want to talk about it at all. I have this little ball of sad/rage rolling through my body and occasionally finding its way out through my eyes. Normally, though, it's just something I bat away. I don't want to talk about it because I'm not a sad-girl.

My sad/rage ball keeps bouncing around, and the outside world is irritating it. I feel like I just need a respite, but work needs doing and I don't want to tell my boss I need a personal day to get my head together because I don't want to be seen as anything other than together. Together-girl doesn't need a personal day to get her head together. She works through it, makes a delicious dinner, and has many laughs after a hard day at the office.

But I am sad-girl. I'm pretending to be together-girl, and if I act like together-girl, and if everyone thinks I'm together-girl, does that make me together-girl? Is this imposter syndrome?

Regardless, my dad is dying of cancer. In the future-perfect tense, both of my parents will have died of cancer. My dad is dying of lung cancer, my mother died of uterine cancer (though it made its way to her lung, and half of one was removed). I need to schedule an appointment with a gynecologist because now I have cancer trickling its tendrils into me from both sides of the family tree.

I'm going to be an orphan again. Makes sense, since I was one for so long. Things return to their natural state of being.