yahoo.com
diana Mackin, July 1992
"You're not THAT fat," she says, surveying my body with the down-and-up glance so common between women.
"That's not a compliment," I reply. And it isn't. I AM fat. I AM female (how does, "You're not THAT female" sound?). I am, like everyone else, a collection of genetic material with tendencies and possibilities actualized into a unique being, born into a culture, a community, a family with its own rich and ragged story.
There were years in my life where I would have fought within myself to not internalize the message in her words. Where the hiss of the f, the forced passivity of the a, the slash of the t, let me know how fringe was my acceptability before the one surveying me: quickly, as competitor, if female; slowly analyzing my usefulness, if male. Years where I feared growing into my mother, my grandmother. I grew to look like them, anyway.
So much of my fear of fatness tied into my terror at becoming like the women of my family. Allowing the legacy of abuse, of ignoring the daughters' pain and rage in deference to men whose hands began the abuse. Strong women, except they were always daughters among the fathers. Childlike, owing to conditioning and circumstance. Always handing their own power -- their very sanity -- over to the men they loved, always at the daughters' expense.
So much hope came from watching my daughter's life unfold before me. Self-confidence was never something I had to nurture into her. She, like each of us, was born believing in her rightness, in her belonging, in her own unique and amazing perfection.
If great self-confidence is not something we currently possess, then it was taken from us. Stolen, in the brutality childhood so often entails. Lost, in the confusion of overburdened keepers of our souls doing the very vest they could. Or, perhaps, diminished in a world of hostile strangers. Self-confidence is something we held once, among the wealth of infant treasures, and we can reclaim it -- as a way of feeling we once knew completely.
I offer the folloiwing poem as a marker along my journey toward reclaiming myself as my own; I offer it as a fat woman, for my fatness is one legacy of the daughters before me.
I am learning to mother, a legacy I am writing for my daughter, my son, and for myself as well.