The One Lie My Mother Told Me (Part One)

There is a meme mak­ing its way around the blog world: “Ten Lies My Mother Told Me.” When I first dis­cov­ered it, I reada few of the responses. Some of them were really clever and funny. Some more serious.

But the meme itself and those responses got me started think­ing about my child­hood expe­ri­ences and my rela­tion­ship with my mother vis a vis my weight and self-image.

After con­sid­er­ing those top­ics for a few days now, I can only remem­ber one lie that my mother ever told me.

You might be say­ing, “Wow, that’s amaz­ing” or think­ing that senil­ity has set in and I’m sim­ply unable to recall all the lies she told me over the years. Per­haps you’re even think­ing that I’ve repressed the lies — lit­tle, white or other — she told me in the deep recesses of my brain and, per­haps through intense psy­chother­apy, they could be retrieved and examined.

Wrong on all counts.

My mother was sim­ply a straight-up, hon­est — blunt — per­son. “Boy, that apple landed close to the tree,” you’re thinking.

The Lie

She told me only one thing that wasn’t true, but she did so repeat­edly over the course of many years, even when I was well into adulthood:

“You would be so pretty if only you would lose weight.”

I hadn’t thought about those words in a long time, but in the process of think­ing about par­tic­i­pat­ing in this meme, they came flood­ing back to me.

The Plateau

I have been at a weight-loss plateau for awhile now. The weight is still com­ing off, but very, very slowly. Because of that, although I have not reverted to my out­landishly bad eat­ing pat­terns, I have been back­slid­ing just a bit.

No, I still do not eat any form of junk food. I gave all of it up more than a year ago. But I have eaten a lit­tle too much here and there, a lit­tle too late at night, gone out to restau­rants a lit­tle too often not armed with my salad dress­ing and made menu choices that were not the most reasoned.

If you have ever strug­gled with your weight, you know that the inevitable times when you reach a plateau are dan­ger­ous times. Reach­ing a plateau is the point when the temp­ta­tion to revert to old think­ing, eat­ing and behav­ioral pat­terns is the strongest, even though plateaus are com­pletely nat­ural and noth­ing more than your body adjust­ing to its new form and composition.

Your head is simul­ta­ne­ously adjust­ing to your new iden­tity — the mes­sages you are pro­ject­ing to the world and the man­ner in which the world per­ceives you. The rush of ini­tial weight loss has faded. Peo­ple may not be notic­ing as often that you have lost weight which is com­pletely nor­mal because their image of you has evolved. Your cloth­ing is becom­ing looser but at a much slower rate.

When you reach a plateau, you must remain com­mit­ted to the pro­gram you designed for your­self that has worked up to that point. It will con­tinue to work for you. It may be nec­es­sary to vary and inten­sify your fit­ness rou­tine and / or adjust your nutri­tion plan, but if you per­se­vere, you will con­tinue on your jour­ney to opti­mal health and fit­ness levels.

The Ori­gins of the Lie

Intel­lec­tu­ally, I know that my mother did not mean to hurt me. At this junc­ture in my life, I under­stand that fact with the clar­ity that can only be achieved after hav­ing raised chil­dren myself.

I know that moth­er­ing is hard work and some­times, no mat­ter how hard you try to com­mu­ni­cate to your chil­dren in order to spare them the painful life lessons that you sur­vived, you say things you later regret. The irony is, of course, that chil­dren some­times have to endure dif­fi­cul­ties and learn those life lessons on their own in order to develop sur­vival skills. We sim­ply can’t pro­tect them from everything.

So I get the fact that my mother did the best she could with the skills and lim­ited knowl­edge of the world she pos­sessed. She was a mod­est woman who grew up dur­ing the Great Depres­sion in a farm­house on the Prairie that had nei­ther elec­tric­ity nor plumb­ing. She went to a lit­tle coun­try school via a horse-drawn bus. And she grad­u­ated from high school in 1934 only to find that her dream of attend­ing col­lege was unat­tain­able. So she ended up work­ing as a com­bi­na­tion cook, house­keeper and babysit­ter. She used to tell us how her par­ents sent her off to work for some neigh­bors from sun­rise to sun­set. Her wages? “Two dol­lars per week.”

Sounds prim­i­tive, doesn’t it? It was.

It was that prim­i­tive upbring­ing that made her who she was and fueled her to instill great ambi­tion in her children.

Her upbring­ing in that stark, harsh envi­ron­ment formed her out­look on life — always prac­ti­cal. She was adamant that we should fin­ish col­lege and get good jobs. The idea of bypass­ing col­lege to get mar­ried, have chil­dren and become a stay-at-home mother was always for­eign to me because her mantra was “Never be depen­dent upon a man.” That was not a put-down of my father in any way, but, rather, my mother’s dec­la­ra­tion about her lack of self-actualization and achieve­ment. She used to tell us that we should fin­ish our edu­ca­tion and be able to sup­port our­selves so that we would always have options.

She was a fem­i­nist long before the Women’s Move­ment was born.

So how did a fem­i­nist end up telling such an anti-feminist, woman-hating lie to her daugh­ter dur­ing her most impres­sion­able, for­ma­tive years?

To be continued …

Tech­no­rati Tags: Weight Issues, Weight Loss Issues and Fem­i­nism, Weight Man­age­ment

On the Same Topic:

• Read­ing Project: Fat is a Fem­i­nist Issue (Week One)
• Read­ing Project: Fat is a Fem­i­nist Issue
• The One Lie My Mother Told Me (Part Two)
• I Hate My Clothes
• Time to Shop