Who's that Girl?

There was a time, not that long ago, where I spent about a year eating in a way that felt controlled, calm and principled. I cooked a lot and enjoyed it. I walked about 3 miles a day and LOVED that in a way that I never thought I could. During that year, I lost about 40 lbs. There were certainly many benefits to that--snazzier clothes, more energy, fewer aches and pains, many compliments from others. But the coolest part, to me, was that for once I felt as if I were in control. I keep coming back to the word calm. I felt calm, unharried, optimistic...and I began to enjoy being in my own skin for the first time since maybe ever. I started paying more attention to makeup, started getting my eyebrows done and wearing toenail polish...all these little things that just made me feel female. Feminine.

And that was really, really cool.

Me and the whole femininity thing…we have kind of a troubled relationship. When I was in kindergarten at age 5, I remember trying to get the little boys to play with me by telling then that my name was really Tiger. (Somehow, they didn't buy it.) I have this absurdly traumatic memory from around the same time of this little Springtime pageant we had to put on, where all the kids had to pair up, and the boys got to be vegetables and the girls got to be flowers. You and your partner decided what kind of flower/vegetable to be and then you (and your mom and dad) made costumes for the show. No other little girl would pair up with me, and the teachers wouldn’t let me be a vegetable with the boys, so some adult had to intervene on my behalf and talk two other happily paired up little flowers into letting me crash their twosome. I was a poppy, and the tallest flower on the stage. It sucked.

I was always tall, always chubby, always more into shorts and sneakers than dresses and barrettes (though, sadly, I was not athletic). I was also one of the earliest girls in elementary school to hit puberty, and oh! The agony. Tall, curvy, bezitted me, with the braces and glasses everyone else got two years later. Odd how my premature female-ness made me feel even more at odds with femininity.

By high school I was dressing so androgynously that I got in trouble once for not responding when the assistant principal addressed me as “young man.” It was the early 1980s, which meant I could and did take refuge in polo shirts, Shetland sweaters, loafers—what all the preppy girls and boys were wearing.

Finally in college I started steppin’ out a little…a jazzy new wave haircut, makeup, even daring to experiment with the clothes a little. But I still wanted to feel girly, and I didn’t. I didn’t, in fact, until my mid-thirties, when I lost the weight mentioned in the first paragraph. Suddenly it began to work for me…and I began to claim it and nurture it. But then, I got into a relationship and started to gain again. I think, much as I enjoyed feeling feminine for once, there was some pressure there too. I felt conspicuous and public. People commented on my weight loss, looked at my body, began to expect things from me. Like more weight loss, for one. And I wasn’t prepared. This time, however, I know what to expect. I hope that knowledge will be enough to keep me from retreating to the comfort of my fat and my invisibility.