The Irish Go Green
I don’t remember each meal replacement mom gave me. I just remembered that I named them after different articles of clothing. She had a refrigerator full of fashionable tinctures. The Skinny Jean Juice. The Mini-Skirt Milkshake. The Cold Shoulder Slurpee. To be taken with specific body part exercises: The Sally Squats, the Dimple Dips, the “Honey, it’s either Downward Dog or Divorce.” All this to be learned from the pastor of suburban mothers, Dr. Oz, and the Bible of The South Beach Diet.
I had a bare closet, and the only items left behind were what mom took of the skinny clothes: Asinine Apple Bottoms, Big Girl Blouses, Parachute Period Pants, and the empty coat hangers that once held the You’ll Get These Back Once You Look Like Lolita Pencil Skirts and the knockout gowns of Too Sexy for Stepdad.
It wasn’t until I began to lose weight in High School did the forced diets stop. I got a boyfriend, and my fear of appearing too big on top made needing a meal replacement null and void. But by then, books like South Beach Diet were going out of trend to internet forums. Instead of watching Dr. Oz, we observed girls like Paris Hilton.
Years later, when I was well out of High School and a regular at my local gym, I went to Georgia to visit my mom. She beamed at my thin physique and went in for a hug, but that is when she noticed my flat chest. She suggested that dad could pay for me to have a breast augmentation.
I brushed off the comment and proudly told her I quit using sauces in my salads and only drank clear liquids. Instead of Slimfast, I had gotten to carrying Skinny Girl Vodka in my handbag. My BAC was always higher than my self-esteem.
I’ll be on my phone these days, and a YouTube notification pops on my screen reading something like 8 Silken Brocades or Yang Short Form. I know nothing of Tai Chi, and I’m not sure how much history mom knows, but Buddha does sit proudly in her gym basement. She said goodbye to Jesus and to calorie counting and rings the gong when she prepares a new vegan meal.
I stopped going to the gym. However, I do grant myself a nice bike ride to the corner store. I love to sit in the community park with a small paper bag. Like the Buddha, I’ll have my legs crossed on a park bench as moms and daughters feed the ducks some bread. The bread isn’t good for them, but who bothers to tell them that.
She calls me, and I don’t answer. Her new husband and her go on camping trips and take long hikes. We don’t talk about working out. She asks me how I’ve been and what I’m doing. I say I’m fine, I lie, and say I’m going to AA.
She says, “You know, I went to EDA meetings before I had you. The steps were pretty much the same.”
I imagine my mom talking about buttered bread in a room full of hungry women. She was all but 110 pounds when she got a c-section. I was told I came out 9 pounds, a head full of red hair, and crying my fucking ass off.
Ulrike Schmidt over at King’s College London explained it simply when she observed that the maternal restraint subscale predicted negative vibes between mothers with eating disorders and their infant children in the first two years. I clutched a handkerchief to my eyes as I read the damning: (b coeff = 0.27 95% CI (0.09-0.45). Finally, there was some math to explain all those salads we ate without long island dressing and the damage it caused!
ED status, negative affectivity, effortful control, extraversion, petri dishes, carrot sticks, crackers, and calling on cauliflower in the catastrophe of craving candy. All this to say: my mom named me after my grandmother.
My grandmother once used a vibrating belt machine.