Always Too Much and Never Enough

by Jasmin Singer

  It seemed I had finally found something that was just the right size.

  TWENTY

  the best she knew how

  As I lost weight, one person who paid a significant amount of attention to my body was my TM, my darling mother, who was over the moon—truly ecstatic—to finally have a thin daughter. I was now the real-life manifestation of the dolls she’d played with as a kid, the ones to which she assigned the role of the perfect daughter. (Though I’d surmise that her dollies weren’t covered in tattoos, nor were they of the homosexual persuasion.) I felt, perhaps unfairly, that thinness was, for my TM, the final puzzle piece in me becoming exactly (or, let’s be honest, sort of) the kid she had always wanted.

  Not that I wasn’t close to that before—I was darn close. And my TM had always loved me—unconditionally and frenziedly. There was certainly more to Mom’s excitement about her now-thin daughter than just her own vanity. On the contrary, Mom clearly wanted what was best for me and found genuine happiness in the fact that I would be facing less adversity now, that I might finally stand a chance at being accepted. She naturally found comfort in my drastically improved health, and she noticed with pride that I was finally becoming comfortable in my skin.

  Still, I felt that my TM’s reaction to the concluding chapter in “Adventures in Fat Land”—my journey from fat to thin—was, shall we say, over the top. Maybe I wasn’t fully giving her the benefit of the doubt, and was being too influenced by a lifetime of trying to squeeze myself into her skinny shadow, but even though some of Mom’s kvelling came from true-blue happiness for me, I experienced her overall response as suspect. It was perhaps equivalent to what the appropriate parental reaction would be to one’s child receiving a PhD from Harvard.

  Even in public—like in the produce department at the grocery store—I would turn and notice her holding a head of kale and just staring at me, grinning ear to ear: a proud mama. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a tender moment, but feeling as though the impetus was that I had magically become the TD—“Thin Daughter”—I couldn’t help but feel a little resentful. And in department stores, she would feel free to yell out across the Juniors section (where, as a thirty-something, I could finally shop), “What are you now, Jazz? A size six? A four?” I felt I was her trophy.

  The day my mother told me that she thought I was thinner than her, I wanted to put my hands over my ears and scream, “Lalalalalalala!” There was so very much packed into that little comment. I felt as though the previous thirty-plus years of my life had been this very odd game that I didn’t even know we were playing, and which—until that moment—she had clearly been winning.

  At the time she said that, we were standing in her bedroom and she was presenting me with an offering—four bags of clothes she no longer wanted, some because they were too small. I desperately needed clothes. Losing nearly one hundred pounds in a two-year span meant changing up my wardrobe repeatedly. (This was another reason why thrift stores came in handy.) And though I ultimately took my TM’s barely used clothes—and was actually extremely grateful for them—a tiny part of me couldn’t help but feel as though accepting them meant I was giving her permission to obsess about my new size, the size of a perfect daughter.

  By taking her clothes and her compliments, I wondered if I was somehow validating her satisfaction of having everything she had ever wanted for me—or, more likely, for herself—by way of my smaller waistline. Finally I was thin, and though she’d loved me before, and thought I was beautiful before, her lifelong struggle with my weight had come to an end. If I took her clothes—which I did, because I needed them, and my mother certainly has an excellent feel for fashion—was I letting her off the hook? Was I somehow implying that the bullshit she’d put me through as a kid, when she shuffled me from weight loss program to weight loss program, and unendingly obsessed about her own much-thinner body in my presence, was somehow acceptable?

  Though I’m sure a part of my mother felt the earth shift beneath her when she proclaimed that I was thinner than her, she nonetheless beamed when I succumbed to the clothes, when I tried on her jeans and indeed looked smashing in them. And even though the fact that my TM had, until that point, always been thinner than me (which had constantly been a defining part of our relationship, at least for me), having a svelte daughter was like finding an unexpected Hanukkah present behind the couch, in March. She loved it. My mother had always thought I was the best, and even had always thought I was pretty (maybe even the prettiest). But when I got thin, I truly became a princess, and that made Mom royalty.

  Mom was so proud of me. When I lost the weight, she carried a similar expression to the one she bore when my niece, her only grandchild, was born. My brother and sister-in-law may have provided her with a baby to love, but I provided her with a new and improved daughter, a success story. This is the stuff life is made of, her welled-up eyes seemed to say.

  (This is the stuff therapy is made of, my eyes silently replied.)

  Even though I knew that all the hullabaloo was rooted in her firm love for me, it was just a bit too much. I was thin. It wasn’t as though I had been selected as the very first vegan lesbian to tap-dance on the moon. I was not making history; I was making juices.

  —

  “Jazz,” my mother said seemingly out of nowhere, as we sat together in her kitchen, letting Grandma rest in her room for a bit, “you just are so beautiful. So beautiful.” She was shaking her head left and right, lips pressed tightly together, as if she had just tasted a rare and rich red wine.

  “Thanks,” I responded, monotone, as uncomfortable as always to hear my mother’s cacophony of compliments and fighting the urge to rebel and purposefully start to look ugly just to counter her accolades. Even now, in my midthirties, my first inclination with my TM was to rebel against everything she said. When I was with her, a part of me always regressed to being a hormonal teenager. I even sat more slumped over, staring at the table with an inexplicable pout.

  “I mean it, Jazz,” she continued, her cadence more musical than usual, as I frantically stirred soy milk into my tea. My mother’s hair was a trendy purplish-red with heavy bangs that landed at the top of her thick-framed glasses. (I joked to her that she should start to hang out at some of the lesbian bars I frequented.)

  “I said thanks,” I whined—still apparently fifteen years old.

  My snotty tone did not register with my TM, who made up for her inability to pick up on nuance with her keen ability to always look absolutely fantastic and put together—even now, when we were in for the night. Her blue, high-heeled boots clicked under the kitchen table, and I momentarily worried that my bare feet might accidentally be crushed beneath them. I curled my toes under, just in case.

  Of course, Mom had always told me I was gorgeous. “You have such pretty lips,” she’d say, when I was growing up. “You have such silken hair.” “Your eyes are so mysterious.” “Your toes are so cute.” “You’re so beautiful, Jazz,” she’d tell me, like a doting mother should—like I would, if I were a mother.

  (One reason I will never have children: the possibility that my daughter or son would grow up and write a memoir criticizing my parenting, airing my dirty laundry for all to see. It’s got to be somewhat mortifying and infuriating, especially when parents are just people, too, and most of us try our best. My mother certainly did, and she got quite a lot right along the way.)

  Now that I was thin though, the volume was turned up—way up. Mom would stare at me and shake her head repeatedly. She continued to ask me my shirt size whenever I saw her, and compare it to her own.

  “Are you a small now, Jazz?” she’d ask. “I’m a medium now. I really have to lose some weight. Well, at least our feet are still the same size. Though I guess mine are a little bit smaller than yours.”

  “Mom, please stop.” I had zero tolerance for conversations with my TM about weight loss. It was simply a topic I felt was out-of-bou
nds, and I told her that again and again. Every time she brought it up anyway, despite my boundary setting, I was once again a young teenager in Jenny Craig, being fed herbal fen-phen with a side of low self-esteem. I was struggling through Weight Watchers, counting points as vehemently as I counted disappointments. I was overhearing conversations where she was calling me “matronly.” I was discouraged from shopping in plus-size stores.

  Not that I can actually really blame her for any of this anymore. Though at the time it was easy to point fingers, the truth is, she was trying her very best. Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, Mom had seen me in near-constant emotional turmoil, devastated by my size and my bullies. Though nowadays parents have much more support than they had then to deal with their bullied or “different” kids, I honestly think Mom was doing the best she knew how—which was to help me fix myself, as opposed to helping me find the teenage equivalent of inner peace. And her own preoccupation with losing weight, even though she was always svelte and stunning, colored my existence—just as most of our mothers’ relationships to their bodies inch their way into our psyches and our belief systems. I honestly grew to not blame her for trying her best—but it still was raw territory for me, and I was uninterested in discussing weight with my weight-obsessed mom.

  The way I experienced it, my mother’s effusiveness grew as I shrank, and that perturbed me. “I need some new pictures of you for the wall, Jazz, and for my art room at school. The others are . . . well, you’re really different in them.”

  As I sat at her kitchen table and finally looked up at my mother, noticing beneath her perfectly applied makeup and her ornate jewelry a hint of vulnerability, of pain—and of a deep longing for perfection that I understood all too well—I realized she was right about one thing: I was most certainly different now.

  —

  On some level, we are each just a product of our upbringing—of the people, places, and things that shaped us early on. These days, when I am frightened, the fear sits in the exact same place in my gut as it did when my pediatrician forced my legs open all those years ago. When I feel safe, I can viscerally recall my grandmother’s soft and strong arms, with her delicate hands that held me until the day she died. I can hear her saying, “Shhh, bubela . . .” even still. When I feel insatiable longing—as I often do—I am ten again, sitting next to my extremely self-focused father in the front seat of his car, just after he picked me up for our weekend visit, driving down Anna Lane together, away from my mother and my room and my life, wanting desperately to merge the two worlds, knowing I can’t. When I am confident, I am fifteen and am playing Mama Rose in Gypsy at Middlesex County College, belting out “Rose’s Turn” to a riveted audience and standing in a laser-sharp spotlight. When I am self-conscious, I am in tenth grade, walking to the front of the room to get the bathroom key, exposed to the bullies and to my very own heartache. When I am ballsy, I am eighteen, talking my way into Patti LuPone’s dressing room.

  And even these days, when it all becomes too much and I have no idea who I am in this new body, I am a kid reluctantly getting weighed in at Weight Watchers. In those moments when I feel like a pariah who is still on the outside looking in—even though those around me are motioning for me to join them—I am a kid walking past the welcoming plus-size shop to the Cinnabon, the place I feel secure. In those moments of confusion and pain about the way the world has changed—or, no, the way I have changed—I am still that kid. And in those moments, I am admittedly and notably not alone. Instead, my TM is right there beside me, gently but vehemently encouraging me to step on the scale.

  At some point, as we get older, we stop letting our childhoods define us. (Hopefully, anyway.) As I got older and my feet became more firmly planted beneath me, I started to see my beautiful mother as more than just a person who existed in a bubble. I saw her as more than the source of my frustration. She became real—an adult manifestation of her own version of a pained girl. She was not just the woman who was uncomfortable with me shopping at the plus-size store; she was also the one who came to every last performance I was in, absolutely certain that I was the most talented one. She was not just inadvertently making very sure that I was inheriting her disordered eating and body image issues, she was also making sure to teach me kindness and empathy, two qualities that ultimately helped to lead me to a meaningful career and worldview. She taught me about generosity and devotion.

  Indeed, despite everything, my mother has been a constant for me. A constant headache, yes, but also a constant rock. Our relationship has been fraught with emotion and complexity, and yet there was never a time when she and I were not speaking; there was never a time when I didn’t feel connected to her on a powerful, and ultimately comforting, level. For better or for worse, there was never a time when my mother was not my very good friend. The truth was, throughout my life, her own issues about food and body image transferred to me as effortlessly as an iron-on patch—covering up tattered pieces of my own psyche that probably would have done better had they been left frayed and torn.

  But, then, that’s a mother’s role, I guess—to do her best to mend you, even during those times when you’re so broken and shattered that there’s no real hope of a quick fix. My mother was not without her flaws, but I saw eventually that her own issues surrounding eating and weight stemmed from the parts of her that, throughout the years, had also been damaged and torn by our society’s messed-up relationship with food. That thought has softened me—and it strengthened our relationship, making us closer.

  It seemed it was time I expanded my view of my mother.

  —

  My cell phone rang for the third time in a row, so before even looking at my phone I knew it was Mom. She had a tendency to call me repeatedly when she really, really wanted to reach me. (Both she and I have always been very into instant gratification. It is taking a lifetime of unlearning to teach myself patience.)

  As soon as I picked up, before even saying hello, she started, “Jazz, hi. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Is everything okay?” I responded.

  “Yes, yes. Yes. I just wanted to tell you—I’m so excited—that I went to my first animal rights protest!”

  “That’s fantastic, Mom.” And I meant it (even though I already knew about the protest, because she had posted about it earlier that day on Facebook—which, yes, she was on now).

  Ten years prior, a few months after I became vegan, my mother had told me that she’d “never give up chicken,” largely because skinless white meat was the quintessential recommended diet food. She had been absolutely adamant. But at my persistence—and after I showed her and Grandma a documentary about factory farming—Mom agreed to try it for a month. She never went back.

  And now, at sixty-four years old, she was dipping her toe into the world of activism.

  “It was at the local slaughterhouse,” she told me. “I held a sign that said ‘Do Not Torture the Innocent.’ Each time even the tip of our toes inched onto the grass, the security guard screamed at us. It was surreal.”

  “I’m really proud of you, Mom,” I said, marveling at how my mother was truly coming into her own. She was, I realized for the first time, radiant—both in her attitude and deeper, in her core (she had always been radiant in her beauty). And so, at thirty-four years old, I found myself softening to her.

  My mother and I said good-bye. When I got off the phone, I promised myself to stop acting like an adolescent every single moment I was with her, or even on the phone with her, and to try harder to be more accepting of her idiosyncrasies. It’s amazing how difficult that is to accomplish when it’s your own parent in question.

  These days, when Mom flirts with bringing up anything related to body image or dieting (usually her own dieting—since her battle with her own body image forges on), I calmly ask her to please change the subject. Perhaps it’s not the ideal solution, but it allows us to maintain a genuine relationship, and I
simply cannot be her confidante around these issues. I have found that boycotting certain discussions with people who trigger me—such as talking about weight loss with Mom—does not mean I am avoiding something I need to confront. Sometimes, as with her, those kinds of boundaries can be self-preserving.

  —

  Perhaps my softening was also partly because that was also the year that my grandmother died, leaving my mother and me floundering and frantic, faced with the ground-altering reality that we couldn’t possibly fill the void my grandmother had left. She was the peacemaker between Mom and me—the one we called during our daily fights when I was a teenager, who always left us feeling validated, yet who somehow concurrently managed to calmly convey the other side of the story in a way we would hear. She was the one who listened the best—to my mother’s stories about her art students, to my own stories about the plight of animals, and to everything in between.

  My grandmother herself changed, too, on that day when I showed her and my mother the documentary about factory farming. She had long considered herself an advocate of women’s rights from well before it was fashionable, and she took great pride at being the first female in her family—her parents were immigrants and she grew up poor—to go to college (when she was just sixteen), and then go on for her master’s. So when Grandma connected the dots and learned that animals were being treated with brutal unfairness, that this was indeed a social justice issue that mattered, her ears perked up and she started to bring up animal rights issues in her social circles, during games of mahjong or bridge.

  On one particularly sunny afternoon, I was lucky enough to be there to watch it happen.

  —

  “Listen, Florence,” Grandma said as I sat in the chair in the corner with my laptop, puttering on Facebook. I had been visiting her for the weekend and told her I’d help out with her get-together by serving celery soda to her friends (some habits never die) and making sure the red and white mint bowl was full to capacity at all times. Other than that, I promised to make myself invisible.