7

Sex and the Fat Girl

DECEMBER 31, 2006

I’m hiding again. This time I’m not sneaking around in order to eat (although let’s face it—that is sure to come later). No, this time I am hiding from my husband. Michael wants sex. He’s been dropping hints all day: an extra long hug from behind as I wash dishes at the sink, a whistle and a grin as I walk by with a load of laundry. After thirteen years of marriage, I know the signs, and my husband is letting me know that today is the day. He will wait no more. He must have me now.

Every time I think about it, my stomach turns in knots so big I can’t breathe. My skin crawls, like ants setting my flesh on fire. I want to cry, but my sobs stick in my throat.

I should be dropping to my knees, thanking God profusely for giving me such an unbelievably wonderful husband. Why he didn’t leave long ago, when the weight began to pile on and my psychosis really started to fester, I will never understand. Any other man would have run for the hills. Not only is the weight gain a physical turnoff, but the accompanying behavior is also unbearable. Mood swings, crying jags, defensiveness up the wazoo. And the lies! Lying about what I’m eating, where I’m going, how I’ve spent our money. How could he remain by my side when I am pushing him away with all my might?

But stay he does. And he still wants me. This I will never, ever be capable of comprehending. I weigh more than three hundred pounds. I am revolting. My body is a disfigured mess. I am covered in stretch marks—some a silvery, translucent color, others bright purple and rough to the touch. My swollen belly has so many layers, you could lose small appliances in it. My breasts, never anything to brag about in the first place, are now unrecognizable blobs that hang due south. I haven’t seen my vagina in years. I assume it’s still there, but I have no firsthand account of its existence, let alone its appearance. My skin is scaly, my hair is ratty and thinning, and I have questionable body odors.

Yeah. I’m a lover boy’s dream.

When he touches me, I can’t sit still. I want to jump out of my skin. I change the subject. I create an emergency that I must tend to right away, anything to get away from being held. How can Michael not do the same? How can he desire me? Is his love that blind?

Or is he pretending for me? Yes, that must be it. How could it be anything else? There is no way he wants to make love to such a horrible beast of a woman—no way he could choose to be with me—if it weren’t for his sense of duty, of obligation. He’s taking pity on me. He’s honoring our marriage vows, even though he must want desperately to find the out clause. We have children, after all; he can’t leave now. He’s too much of a stand-up guy for that. And I do believe he loves me, based on what we used to be. He’s making the most of a bad situation, I suppose. He is still a man. He still has needs. And I am his wife—I should meet those needs. I should want to meet those needs.

But every touch reminds me of what I have become. When he tries, and fails, to wrap his arms around me, I think of what an odd-shaped pair we make: I am more than twice his size. That’s not right! It isn’t natural! I am supposed to be the dainty wife, the little woman. Sadly, I’d have to date Goliath in order to fit that description.

When I’m with him, I can’t concentrate on my love for him or on trying to rekindle that physical desire. All I can do is wallow in self-pity, wondering how I allowed this to happen. Images of what our physical relationship used to be engulf me, and I push away even harder. I know those days are gone because I can’t get a grip.

I have ruined us.

He’s still here. So finally, when I can’t avoid it any longer, we have sex. About once a month I grit my teeth and force myself to go through with it. It’s like facing a firing squad. I try to pretend to like it, and sometimes for a little bit I manage to fool myself. When he kisses me, I faintly recall the burning desire that enveloped us in the early days of our relationship. We were insatiable. We made love anytime, anywhere, all the time. Because I knew how much he loved me, I was confident and uninhibited, and our sex life was as active and as satisfying as it could be. Now I close my eyes and try to think of that time, and I momentarily get lost in the memory of what we once were. I return Michael’s passionate kiss and, for that brief moment, I can’t wait to consummate our love once more.

And then, like a bolt of lightning slamming into the summer sky, I remember the cold, hard reality of my situation. I can’t make love the old-fashioned way. My self-consciousness takes over, and I won’t allow my husband to climb on top of me. My big belly is too much of a distraction; I’m way too ashamed to allow it to come between us. I stop Michael so that we can reposition ourselves. He reluctantly complies, and remorse and regret threaten to pull me under yet again. Good thing I’m not facing him. Even in the pitch-dark bedroom, he would detect the tears that have sprung to my eyes. If he were allowed to hold me properly, he would know the grief I feel. It’s better this way, I tell myself. Better for all involved.

For the last ten years, we’ve had sex in only one position. I won’t be so crass as to come out and say which one that is; you can probably figure it out. It’s the one where my huge stomach is the least obtrusive.

Our intimacy suffers. There’s no kissing, no stroking of each other’s faces, no holding him in my arms. It’s a purely mechanical move, a physical means to an end. Yes, the outcome for both of us is a biological victory. Climax is achieved, usually on both sides. But I miss the closeness that used to accompany our passion, the togetherness we felt alongside the physical pleasure. The minute, no the second, it’s over, I’m racked with silent sobs. I feel so guilty for allowing this to happen to our marriage. I am solely responsible, and it is devastating.

What kind of woman am I? I binge eat, stuffing myself with so much food that I am sick. I don’t try hard enough to find clothes that fit me, and look like a royal mess most of the time. And I can’t maintain a proper physical relationship with my husband. I am a failure in every sense of the word. I try to do something about these things; each day dawns with a new plan for me to take control, trying to implement ways to get back to the woman I once was. But I always fail, doomed to suffer in this seemingly self-imposed exile for what feels like eternity. I am trapped, and I am suffocating.

Love is supposed to hurt. That’s what I have always believed, no matter how hard Michael has tried to change that for me. Growing up, I didn’t have the greatest example of how men are supposed to treat women, what girls should expect from boys. My dad, while not outright abusive to my mom, was an absent husband. He worked hard and provided for his family, but he fought his own demons and they kept him away from us most of the time. He drank heavily and would “go to bed” early in the evening, which I would later learn meant he would pass out in his room. He never took Mom out, never maintained a social life with her as a couple. She hardly ever took vacations; she rarely attended events with friends. She was ashamed to show up without a husband, so she simply didn’t attend. He wallowed in whatever drove him to self-destruct, and she paid the price, year after year. Boy, does this sound familiar.

My dad never treated me unkindly. He always picked me up from school when he was supposed to, and he provided for any need or want that I had, whether it was clothes for school or a new bike for my birthday, even a car when I turned sixteen. But he was, for the most part, emotionally absent as a father. I knew that he loved me, although he rarely said so. He grew up with parents who showed virtually no affection, and so he never felt comfortable doing so himself. I remember one time telling my mother that I didn’t know if my dad loved me because he never told me. The next morning, there was an awkward silence as he drove me to school. You could tell he was trying to find a way to say something but was having great difficulty. When the car stopped, he looked down at his hands and very softly said, “I love you.” Even at such a young age, I could tell how hard it was for him to say it, and it meant so much to me, I have never forgotten. A couple of years later, I was leaving to spend two weeks with my cousin in Virginia Beach. My dad had to leave for work before I got up, and he wouldn’t see me before I left. There was a note from him on the kitchen table, in his gorgeous handwritten script. He told me to be safe and to have a good time. And he wrote, “I love you.” I saved that little piece of ruled notebook paper for years, finally losing it when I went away to college. I was devastated when I couldn’t find it; that note meant the world to me.

I loved my father with all my heart, and we did have a closer relationship when I became an adult. He died several years ago, and I miss him every day. But if a young girl learns how to expect a man to treat her from how her father treats her, then I was sorely lacking. Yes, he loved me and provided for me, but I had to work so hard to get even a scrap of real demonstration of that love. I was constantly trying to wring it out of him, impress him enough so that he would be bowled over by me. I was too young to understand that he gave me all that he could, that he was incapable of showing me how much he cared. All I knew was that he never told me I was pretty, never acted as though he thought I was very smart or very good at much of anything. He never shared any of my interests—or pretended to—as most parents are forced to do from time to time. I was his daughter, and for that he loved me, but there was nothing about me that terribly impressed him. That’s what I took from growing up, and it was devastating for my self-esteem.

What didn’t help was that I had two older brothers who did have my father’s attention. My father loved sports and my brothers excelled in sports, so they bonded endlessly over baseball and basketball. I sucked at sports. I had no coordination and no real desire to try and learn. While I was being dragged to every youth athletic event in the state, you would find me on the bleachers with my nose in a book. My dad could not relate to this, and that was a fatal flaw in our relationship. I would watch him connect with my brothers, and I would feel hurt and confused. Why couldn’t he talk to me like that? I was always trying to get his attention, connect with him with one thing or another, but it never worked. Once, I remember him taking me and my brothers to a store and letting us pick out whatever we wanted. I felt giddy riding in the car, not only from the pending purchase, but from being included with the boys, spending some bonding time with my dad. I picked out a baby doll that drank a bottle and wet her diaper. My brothers picked out a basketball goal. We went home and my dad and brothers spent the rest of the afternoon in the backyard, building the goal and putting it into the ground. I stayed in my room and played with my doll, alone. My window overlooked the backyard, and I could see them working together, laughing, and then playing once they were finished. I felt like a complete outsider.

If I thought my relationship with my father was somewhat lacking, my relationship with my brothers was downright destructive. They were mean, and they were cruel. They admit that now, although they question if it was quite as bad as I make it out to be. It was. We were never, ever close, and I really don’t know why. My mom grew up with four brothers, and she says when she saw my brothers tease me, she chalked it up to normal sibling rivalry. It was not normal. They called me “fat bitch” on a daily basis, probably from the age of eight. I was hit and punched quite regularly, by two older brothers who were always bigger and stronger and who often ganged up on me. They made a sport of embarrassing me in front of others, whether it was to call me names in front of their friends or physically attack me in front of mine. Yes, I called them names. Yes, I tried to hit them back. But I was outnumbered and out-powered. They called me ugly, fat, smelly, bitch, dumbass—you name it. I heard every insult imaginable and then some.

As adults we have somewhat mended fences; I’m closer to one brother than I am to the other. When my niece was about nine years old, she came to me at a Thanksgiving gathering, her eyes big and brown and brimming with tears. She said her grandmother, my mother, had given her one of my books from when I was little. In the back she found a message written in pencil: “Jennifer is a big, fat roach!” She tearfully told me that she asked her dad who wrote that and he admitted he had, and he deeply regretted it. As I wiped her tears and told her I was okay, I wondered if I ever would be.

When it came time for me to become interested in boys, I had the following knowledge: My father, though never cruel, had never once told me I had anything of value to offer—that I was pretty or smart or possessed any other redeeming quality that the male species would find attractive. And I had two brothers who never missed an opportunity to tell me I was fat, ugly, disgusting, repulsive, and dumb.

What kind of men do you think I hoped to attract?

When I was fourteen I became involved with a seventeen-year-old who was emotionally absent and pretty indifferent to my existence. This, unfortunately, didn’t deter me. I was used to this; this was normal. Why would I expect more, why would I think I deserved better? No one ever told me or showed me that. No, I became convinced that my fate was to turn this boy around, convince him that he loved me, that he wanted me, and that I was enough for him. I was forever trying to impress him, to win him over. It’s so obvious to me now what I was doing—trying to re-create my failed relationships with my father and brothers, but with a happier, more successful conclusion.

Of course it didn’t work. This boy, much like my father and my brothers, couldn’t be changed, at least not by me. I spent five years with him, and the damage took my already fragile self-esteem and pulverized it beyond recognition. He used me, cheated on me, and rarely acknowledged me in public as his girlfriend. He also had a very hard time showing affection, and he rarely gave me compliments or told me I was in any way important to him. I knew he treated me poorly, and I knew about the other girls. I didn’t like it, of course; I fought him, cried, begged, and threatened to leave him constantly. I always came back, though, after every public embarrassment, every humiliation. I thought if I tried harder—if I bought him things, if I lost weight and looked better—I would finally be enough for him, I would win him over for good. Of course that didn’t happen.

It’s so easy to look at this situation from the outside and say, Why didn’t I just leave him? Why did I put up with someone who clearly didn’t want me? When I was thinking rationally, I would ask these things of myself. But most of my thinking was not rational. I generally thought that I couldn’t do any better, that this was the kind of man I was destined to have and it was my lot in life to make the best of it. Every night I would cry over a missed phone call or a forgotten date, begging God to please get me out of this nightmare. But the next morning would come and I would have thought of a new plan to try to win him over, to get him to realize I was the one for him. It was the same destructive pattern I would later use when it came to my weight.

I knew what a god-awful situation I was in. My parents were furious and demanded that I end the relationship. I couldn’t. My friends, tired of hearing me cry for years and years, told me I had to dump him or I would lose them. I wouldn’t end it; I felt like I couldn’t live without him. I lost friendships. I knew it was wrong, but I felt powerless to stop it. It was a situation I wanted to end, most of the time, but I felt too weak to let it go.

That New Year’s Eve in 1990, when my bingeing was born, was all an effort to finally convince him that I was worth loving. I had had enough. I broke it off with him, and I managed to stay away for a few months. I lost weight and looked great. He heard about it and sought me out, saying all the right things to get me back. Of course I went back—he was the reason I’d lost the weight in the first place. But I was surprised when he started trying to get me to eat more. He never came out and said it, but I figured out he didn’t like the fact that I had lost weight. I think it threatened him and the hold he had over me; suddenly he realized I could be attractive to others. Does this sound like a man who loved, cared for, and wanted the best for me?

I was still in this destructive relationship when I went away to college. I thought the distance would make our relationship stronger, that he would realize I had other things going for me and he better get smart and appreciate what he had. What I didn’t count on was meeting the man of my dreams—and having him like me, too.

Michael had a girlfriend, and I had a boyfriend. But that didn’t stop us from finding each other. When he showed interest in me, I literally couldn’t believe it. He was cute, smart, funny … and he was really, really nice. How could he like me? What was the catch? I was head over heels for him, but I knew he was involved with someone else. He was clearly torn: He liked me and wanted to be with me, but he had been with her for a long time and felt obligated to her. Their relationship was not a good one, but he didn’t want to hurt her; he never wanted to hurt anybody. I (stupidly) told him that if he wanted to stay with her and still see me, I would understand and do whatever he wanted. This really speaks to my low self-esteem and what I thought I was worth. I just assumed that no man would find me worthy of a sacrifice. Thank God Michael wasn’t the kind of man to take advantage of a girl who didn’t think much of herself. He broke it off with his girlfriend and pledged his love for me. I was over the moon, but I still couldn’t believe it. He did that for me? He wanted to be with me, just me?

Needless to say I kicked my destructive boyfriend to the curb. I had to laugh to myself at how hurt he was when I told him I had found someone else and that I was leaving him. It was like he chose that moment to realize I was a good catch. Talk about too little, too late. I marveled at how easy it was for me to say good-bye to him after all those years of hurt and struggle. I viewed it as Michael saving me from that bad situation; he was the one to give me the strength that I had needed for so long.

I never gave myself any credit for ending the relationship. On the contrary, I viewed myself as weak and unable to help myself. It was only after Michael loved me that I found the strength to cut the abusive boyfriend out of my life. This warped way of thinking would repeat itself later in my life.

To say I was on cloud nine with Michael is a huge understatement. I finally had what I had been seeking for so long: a man who truly loved me and cared about me. And he was quite demonstrative of that love. He called me “pretty” several times a day, and I blushed profusely. He constantly stroked my face or put his arm around me. I loved the affection, but I had a really hard time with it—I wasn’t used to someone showing me how much I mattered to them. I craved the attention, but I had a hard time returning the love. I didn’t really know how. I could count on one hand how many times my father had hugged me. The destructive boyfriend could be somewhat affectionate in private, but never, ever when we went out. When Michael grabbed my hand and held it as we walked across campus, I squirmed. I was embarrassed. Did he really want people to see him holding my hand? Wasn’t he worried what others would think? Of course he wasn’t, but that was the low opinion I had of myself. Michael recognized my struggle, and he assured me constantly that I was someone he could be proud of being with. I tried really hard to believe it.

Ours was a whirlwind romance. We were married a year and a half after we got together. He was funny, we shared the same interests, and he loved me unconditionally and unabashedly. I never, ever thought I would be so lucky.

Gone was the everyday struggle I’d had while in that abusive relationship. I had known I was in a very bad situation, but I was unable to get myself out of it. With Michael, that no longer existed, and I felt so very happy. For the first time in my life, I was constantly reminded how much I was loved.

And all of a sudden, the weight started to pile on.

I quickly gained back all the weight I’d lost in high school. At first I wasn’t too worried about it; I chalked it up to my being in love and focused on Michael and not as vigilant as I should be about what I was eating and how often I exercised. But for the first time, it didn’t stop there. I kept gaining weight, and as our wedding approached, I was tipping the scales at 180, bigger than I had ever been. If Michael noticed, he didn’t mention it, but I could sure tell. I couldn’t figure out why I was having such a hard time. I’d finally gotten the love and affection I had always so desperately wanted. Why did I feel the need to overeat?

Looking back I truly think the weight gain started as a way for me to self-destruct. There is something in my makeup that wants me to be unhappy—something inside me that is convinced I don’t deserve good things in my life. Low self-esteem led me into that destructive relationship and kept me there for five years. When I finally managed to break free from that and find someone who truly loved and wanted to be with me, I had to find another way to self-sabotage. I had found true love, I was on an exciting career path, and things in my life were going swimmingly. All these good things didn’t sit well with the little voice deep within me, the one that constantly reminded me I was worthless and stupid and ugly. I had to try to find a way to ruin it all. The beast started to rear its head.

Of course it took me years to see the pattern and figure out what was happening. At the time, I panicked over the sudden weight gain and tried desperately to stop it from getting worse. I failed. On our first wedding anniversary I was well over two hundred pounds, and it only grew worse from there. The giddiness I had over my relationship with Michael was replaced with a sinking, quicksand-type existence. I was desperate to stop the downslide, but powerless to make any real change stick. My career dreams were dashed, my relationships with friends and loved ones suffered, and, most devastatingly, my marriage struggled. I had fought so hard to get a man who treated me wonderfully, and all I could feel was misery. Trust issues popped up and our intimacy took a beating. And it was all my fault. Not only was I powerless to fix it, I couldn’t even explain the problem. Why was I so hell-bent on ruining every good thing in my life? And would I ever be able to stop it? I never completely lost hope, but optimism was a rare and fleeting thing.