Eat the Damn Cake

This is going to be an awkward post. I’m going to call myself out on something that’s been really bothering me. I figure that maybe if I shame myself on the internet, it’ll jump-start some action. That has been known to work.

I don’t like my tone when I talk to my parents sometimes. I think I need to stop using it. But it keeps happening.

I remember even as a kid, being over a friend’s house and getting annoyed because she was being rude to her parents. It’s one thing to have a private argument or disagreement, it’s another thing entirely to snap at a family member repeatedly in public.

“Mom!” my friend would snap. “Go away! We’re busy! God! Obviously.”

And it wasn’t just her.  I had so many friends who would adopt a bratty, whiny, frustrated tone with their parents. With their siblings, too, but mostly with their parents. In college, hanging out at a friend’s house, she was still using that tone. She was squabbling endlessly with her mom, who seemed innocuous and friendly to me. Her mom would leave the room, hands up, backing out like she was trying to placate someone with a gun. No sudden movements. Maintain respectful eye contact (“I hear you, honey. I’m listening to your words!”)but adopt a subservient posture.

“She just doesn’t get it,” my friend told me, explaining as she flung open the refrigerator. “This goes way back.”

What? You being mean to her?

I nodded, confused.

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I had this crazy dream last night. In it, I was eating an ice cream sundae. Let me just tell you about this for a second:

It was in a fluted plastic cup. At the bottom were melted heaps of chocolate and vanilla ice cream, buried under a thick layer of hot fudge, which was studded with brownie chunks. Fluffy piles of whipped cream hid cool, slick slices of strawberry and banana.

Someone else was holding the sundae. I don’t know who, but I was probably not supposed to be taking so much of it. And I kept spooning enormous bites into my mouth. It was heaven. Cool and creamy and sweet and textured.

I kept having more. Another bite, another bite. I was trying to eat quickly, glancing furtively around. I wanted so much more, but I was trying to hide what I was doing.

And the whole time, I was thinking, “This is so bad for me. I wonder how many calories are in this thing? I shouldn’t be eating this. This is all sugar. Sugar kills. I am basically killing myself right now. I am doing to gain so much weight if I keep eating like this. I need to stop.”

In my dream, I was embarrassed and guilty. For eating an ice cream sundae that didn’t actually exist.

(source)

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A couple things.

I’m writing a column for The Frisky now. It launched yesterday. This is my first piece for it. It took me around four hours to write, because I was so nervous. I have never written a column before. I started to write a column for Home Education Magazine and then the whole magazine fell briefly apart. I think it’s starting up again soon. So really, this is my first time writing a column. I read some other columns, and they were really funny and clever and involved lists of things. Instead of being especially clever and writing lists, I decided to be myself and write some more about body image. I did that. I hope it’s OK.

Tomorrow I am leaving for the Virgin Islands with my family, because my parents won a week-long trip. I wrote a post about being scared to wear a bikini during this trip. Then I went to H&M and bought a gold one.  It doesn’t have a terrifying face on it, like the really cool one in my post. I didn’t have time to get that one. In preparation for the trip, I decided to get my hair buzzed again (it’s really obvious how fast it grows when it’s so short). Last time, I went with Bear to a fancy salon, where I paid somewhere around $60 (holy shit) for a stylist to unwillingly and disapprovingly buzz my hair. This time I went to a barber. A burly Russian guy was happy to cut my hair off for $15. He did it even shorter than before. I am almost bald. It is a little scary.

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There are all these lists of college subjects you might have foolishly majored in that will eventually lead to your starvation in a gutter. The ten majors that will cause you to starve the fastest!

There are all these lists of things you can do wrong, by accident, just because you thought it sounded interesting, that will end up ruining your career prospects and your life and probably your chance at ever seeming sexy.

There is also a very short list with the three majors that will result in happiness. Or at least enough food to keep you alive.

That list never contains my major. But at the time, I really thought I was being practical. I was going to be a professor, after all. 

(Ha! I can’t remember anything! How was I going to be a professor? You need to know FACTS for that)

Actually, by the time I got to grad school, I was so focused that I only took one class that had nothing to do with what I was studying. And that was the class that changed my life. 

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There it is.

(source)

The latest in the “mommy wars.”

Because everything is a war these days, it seems. Yesterday, we were talking about the “war on obesity.” I even heard that Obama declared “war on marriage.” So “war” means “having a different opinion.” Or possibly “wanting equal rights.” In a moment, it might mean, “Hey, what you lookin’ at? You got a problem?”

But I want to talk about the so-called “mommy wars.” The cycle of articles and news reports and TV interviews and books that argue for the one good way to raise kids, and explain why every other idea is not only terrible, but it will definitely destroy your children’s future.

The mommy wars keep going, and going, and then they’re still going, because they are at their heart about two things that almost everyone cares about intensely: what it means to be a woman, and what is good for children.

So we go endless rounds. Breastfeeding vs. formula, weaning at six months vs. nursing for a year vs. nursing until the child feels done, SAHMs vs. moms who work outside the home vs. moms who draw an income from work they do while staying at home, attachment style parenting vs. hands off, supposed Tiger Mom parenting vs. supposed helicopter parenting. I think there are maybe dragon parents and dog parents too? Eventually we might get to iguanas and giraffes (parents who are always craning their necks to peer over their child’s shoulder?).

I am twenty-six. One day I would like to have a baby. At that point, I would like everyone to shut up. I would like everyone to stop marching around with weapons drawn and armor up, acting like there’s a war where there are only different sets of knowledge, different necessities, and different worldviews. In exactly the way that worldviews and knowledge and necessities are different surrounding other areas of life. Like what career you pursue, who you choose to date and/or marry, how you spend your free time, what motivates you, what makes you feel fulfilled, and, um, just about everything else.

My childhood was, in many ways, just about as alternative as it gets. At least, it was alternative according to mainstream media, which is fascinated by the things that it designates as alternative. My mom is a La Leche League Leader (a breastfeeding expert and mentor). She trained as a midwife for a while. She had home births, and I was there for my brothers’ births (it was loud). We had a family bed when I was little. My mom grew vegetables in her garden and we only ate organic, even before people were really into that. We didn’t watch TV. I didn’t go to school until college.

Wow. You might need to take a breath. That was a lot of alternative.

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I was eleven. I was at a slumber party. Remember those? It was for my friend Amy’s birthday. She’d invited a bunch of girls over, and there were going to be games and punch and cookies and sleeping bags.

She lived in the biggest house of anyone I knew—with bricks on the front and fancy things like porcelain figurines and sculptures of horses inside. I thought her mom was fancy, too. She was very, very thin, with an air of sadness about her, and she always had her hair up, with a few wisps escaping. She had a long, elegant neck, and she wore slim, matching clothes. Amy’s dad had left her mom for one of his college students. I thought the student would be terrible—an empty-eyed girl with round breasts popping out of her pink lacey shirt. I imagined her as a sort of ill-intentioned Barbie. But once they dropped Amy off at my house together and she was confusingly earthy and friendly, wearing cargo pants and Birkenstocks, with a gap-toothed smile. And Amy’s dad was chubby and bashful. I thought he looked ashamed, standing in front of my parents with his girl, who was only nineteen.

I was already nervous in Amy’s house, because I had seen her dad with the girl. And because I felt sorry for her elegant mother, who I imagined was British, even though she didn’t have a British accent, just because I thought that British people were all elegant and liked sculptures of horses. I felt awkward, feeling sorry for someone’s mom. I knew it wasn’t my place.

(source)

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I  look a lot like my mom.

At least, that’s what everyone says. I don’t really see it.

(my dad, mom, one of my brother, and me. I am holding a lot of stuff, for some reason)

Classic daughter behavior.

When I was a kid, I had this book of hairstyles. The photographs were close-ups, shot by some famous fashion photographer. The models were famous models, and the hair stylists were legendary stylists to the stars. I didn’t care about any of that. I just loved looking at the amazing hair. I wanted to paint pictures of the pictures. My favorite was of this model with very dark brown skin and purple lipstick. Her hair was incredibly short, and her face was literally the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. After I flipped through it in Borders,  I saved up my money and bought the book because of her face. But there was one picture in that book that annoyed me. That disrupted the flow of gorgeous faces and fantastic hair.

It was a picture of a woman with her two daughters. The woman was a famous model, now retired. The daughters were maybe fourteen and sixteen. Someone had thought it would be a cute idea to show them all together. The problem was that the mother was so much prettier, I thought, in my childish, unsympathetic way.

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