by Anne Lamott
I learned to hate certain kinds of female bodies, i.e., that of my mother, who was pear-shaped and whom my father found repulsive. I learned to idealize the bodies of the women my father loved, i.e., the taller and long-legged women whom it goes without saying my mother hated. I am both fairly tall and pear-shaped. As you might expect, I learned to hate my body, except during those fabulous years of anorexia, drug use, and personal catastrophe. When my dad and later my best friend were dying, I got down to 112 pounds, which is twenty-five pounds less than now. I loved it so much. (Except of course for the part about my father and my best friend dying. So there was that.)
It took getting older, the greatest friends, years of therapy and unending self-forgiveness to heal the damage I caused myself around food, my body image, and the effects of early old age.
Left to my own devices and without a lot of help, I still believe there are only two major female bodies: us, the pears, all butts and thighs, with grievous cellulite; and the women with long legs, who in middle age get big tummies. They hate their tummies, but we pears hate and resent their long legs and think they don’t have any real problems and that they should go the hell away and run around town in their little shorts. (Actually, there are also the naturally thin people, but there are so few naturally thin people that they don’t really matter, and no one likes them anyway.)
Two decades ago, the authors of a book called When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies posed a question that ruins my life whenever I remember it. I hope it does not ruin yours: What if, no matter what you did or didn’t eat, you’d always weigh exactly what you weigh today, never gaining or being able to lose a pound?
The idea filled me with doom—it killed the hope of ever looking twelve again; that the lifelong jig was up and now all that was left for me was to have a life with flab and droop. On bad days I wanted to offer the authors a deal: How about we revisit this question in a few weeks, when I could be five pounds lighter? When I asked my partner how he would respond, he said he’d settle for the extra ten he is carrying, if it wouldn’t lead to twenty. One friend said she would binge every day for the rest of her life and in fact would do very little else, except maybe also start cutting.
I have experienced hard-fought diminishment of the obsession with food and weight. I swim in warm water in public, in people’s pools and at beaches every chance I get, and the shame is way down. But in the weeks before each regal beachly appearance, I always try to lose weight. I don’t go for brutal training programs, but I do secretly stop eating carbs, fats, or whatever. Science proves again and again that all diets work briefly, and pretty much all work the same, with initial and exhilarating weight loss, then plateau, then weight gain and shame. The weight we lose almost always finds its way back home, and it invariably brings friends. This, I think, has to do with childhood injuries to our sense of value, with anxiety, and with the inability of our poor parents to nurture consistently, and dieting cannot heal this. Look around at your family and friends, at how many have lost and then regained ten or fifteen pounds just this year. I don’t mean to discourage you. Maybe you have a secret-decoder-ring plan not to gain back the weight this time. Yay.
My therapist said starving and dieting are like putting ice cream on a leg wound. I said that ice cream would feel cool and numbing. She said yes and then it would melt.
So what wouldn’t melt?
Well, this brings us full circle, to just trying to do a little better, today. That is the secret of life.
Is that discouraging? It is and it isn’t. The good part is that you don’t have to start blending your coffee with Tibetan yak butter. (That’s a lot.) You don’t have to pee onto tiny sticks to maintain ketosis and its delightful vomity breath.
Eventually one has to find a way to eat and be kind to one’s body. I am not a metaphysician, but this is the body you’re going to have the entire time you are here. The only nourishment that can give a body and soul the feelings we crave is profound self-love and union with that scared part of ourselves. Horribly, but as is always the case, only kindness, forgiveness, and love can save us. Oh, and grace, as spiritual WD-40. And walks are nice.
Love means care of, respect for, and delight in our own selves and bodies. The delight part may seem a bit of a stretch, but there’s no way around it. “God is love,” we Christians like to remind ourselves, and every act of love highlights God in the world, because love is not just an idea. Love is something alive, living, personal, and true, the creating and nourishing power within life. It is patient, free to all, and it is medicine and food. This may look like rubbing lotion into your jiggly thighs, patting your stomach as if it is a relative you love: “Why, hello there, Auntie.” Love looks like the laying on of hands.
The opposite of love is the bathroom scale.
Putting away the scale is important for all but a few people. If you are one of those people who weigh themselves every day for some healthy reason—other than scaring or shaming yourself, congratulating yourself, or reassuring yourself that you are a good person because you’ve kept your weight down—then weigh away. Otherwise, can you put the scale away for a week? How about four days? I have been addicted to the scale, too, which is like needing Dick Cheney to determine my value as a human being every morning.
Can you also put away your tight pants, the ones that actually hurt you? Wear forgiving pants! The world is too hard as it is without letting tight pants have an opinion on how you are doing, and make it clear that they are disappointed in you.
At the same time, it feels great to be healthy, and some of you may need to be under a doctor’s care. But people like to chirp, “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels,” and this is one of those idiocies a certain kind of rage-filled person likes to say, along with “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” I will tell you some things that definitely taste better than thin feels—crème brûlée, lasagna, and all Mexican food except menudo. No one needs to join a gym or live on weight-loss-franchise frozen food, like a tortured astronaut, to be healthy, or eat kale smoothies or hire a bossy trainer. It won’t work. You will lose weight quickly, and gain it all back, plus five, minimum. Some of you need to get outside and walk for half an hour a day, or do wheelchair exercises. Mostly, except for my friend Janine and the one percent of the population with celiac disease, you do not have to give up gluten. In fact, I always order extra gluten.
But I have a serious problem with sugar. If I start eating it, I often can’t stop and don’t want to. I don’t have an off switch, any more than I did with alcohol. So sometimes, for weeks or months at a time, I give up sugar. I’m glad when I lose weight, and feel ripped off when I gain it back.
Given a choice, I will eat Raisinets until the cows come home, and then those cows will be tense and bitter, because I will have gotten lipstick on the straps of their feed bags. But we crave what we eat, so if I go for three or four days with very little sugar, the cravings are gone. I love this and it is not dieting. If you are allergic to peanuts, maybe don’t eat peanuts.
It’s really okay, though, to diet if you need to, for whatever reason, or to binge, and also to have (or pray for) an awakening around your body. It’s okay to stop hitting the snooze button and to wake up and pay attention to what makes you feel okay about yourself, one meal at a time. Unfortunately, it’s yet another inside job. If you are not okay with yourself at 185 pounds, you may not be okay at 150, or even 135. The self-respect and peace of mind you long for is not in your weight. It’s within you. I resent that more than I can say. But it’s true. Finding a way to have a relatively safe and healthy relationship with food is hard, and it involves being one’s own very dearest person. This will not cause chaos or death, as you were surely taught, but rather an environment where you can drown out the many mean and mistaken voices.
There is the $66 billion American diet industry whispering sweet nothings everywhere you turn. There is your family’s jealousy or mortification a
bout your body. There is our own dispirited stance toward ourselves, designed to protect us and advance our potential. There are also the convincing voices of mindfulness, coaching us to eat slowly and to savor taste and texture bite by bite; but to be blunt, this isn’t going to happen. While I am not advocating for the school of Shovel and Stuff, to sit chewing so methodically starts to argue a wasted life.
Maybe some of us can try to eat a bit more healthfully, and walk a bit more, or wheelchair dance, and make sure to wear pants that do not hurt our stomachs or our feelings. Drinking more water is the solution to many problems. Doing a three-minute meditation every day may change your life: It is the gateway drug to slowing down. Naps are nice, too.
Otherwise, without intervention, we may notice each hot new diet. There is no proposal so absurd that thousands of desperate dieters will not buy the book. (My personal recent favorite, right after the caveman and baby food diets, was based on the noble Viking lifestyle, raiding your neighbor’s grain stores and salted venison lockers, shopping for foraged vegetables, fatty fish, and moose meat.) The definition of insanity notwithstanding, how many times have you stopped eating carbs, or fats, or processed foods? How did that go?
What gives me hope is how three of the sturdier women at my church got healthier by consciously preparing their meals as if they had asked our pastor or me to lunch or dinner. They wouldn’t say, “Here—let’s eat standing up in the kitchen. This tube of barbecue Pringles is all for you. I have my own.” They wouldn’t ask, “Have you gained a little weight? Have you thought about trying the new Viking diet? Yes? Here—have some moose.” No, they’d set the table, get out pretty dishes, and arrange delicious foods on the plates. They would cook and serve whole foods, not dish up frozen foods with a dozen ingredients, including unpronounceable additives and petroleum products. There would be grapes or lemons for color, roasted pumpkin seeds for crunch. Those plates would be filled with love, pride, and connection. That care is what we have longed for our whole lives, and what we create when we are kinder to our bodies and our hungry souls.
TWELVE
Famblies
If the earth is forgiveness school, family is your postdoctoral fellowship. Family is hard hard hard, a crucible. Think Salem witch trials, or Senator Joseph McCarthy and House Un-American Activities Committee, great pain from which great transformation arises. The family is the crucible in which these strange entities called identities are formed, who we are and aren’t but agreed to be. Even in what might pass as a good family, every member is consigned a number of roles intended to keep the boat of the family afloat, which because of the ship’s rats—genetics, bad behavior, and mental illness—is not as easy as it sounds. It’s the hardest work we do, forgiving our circumstances, our families, and ourselves. Parenting is hard, and so is old age. And every single teenager is hard—even twelve-year-old Jesus drove his folks crazy. (And no word at all on the high school years; like Obama.) Babies are hard. In-laws are hard. And forgiveness is hardest of all.
I was given the role of perfect child at an early age, with disappointment arising from my extreme sensitivity, migraines, and nappy hair. The role of problem child had already been assigned to my older brother. Then I was mommy’s big-girl helper and daddy’s sweetheart. I was eventually my baby brother’s other mother. I was the reliable one, the diplomat, the trusted secret-keeper, the class brain and class clown. And this was all by kindergarten. I grew out of the migraines and grew into my hair, but I am still the world’s best big-girl helper, the reliable one, the overly sensitive child, a perfectionist, and so on.
Why give up these identities? Maybe because they gravely limited and falsified my life. And because they aren’t who I am. But I like the containment, and how they keep me safe, confined and shipshape, like spandex. When I wear those roles, I can’t feel the air on my skin, but by the same token, I’m not exposed.
My favorite role was diplomat, until I called one of my uncles a scumbutt.
I had not asked to be given the role of child statesman, of arranging back-channel negotiations between my parents and siblings whenever called on to do so, like Colin Powell in a red plaid kilt. I didn’t know I could turn down the job. I took it on, and I liked it: identity is a posture that we steal and assemble as a protective coating, but it’s also a ski mask, camouflage and protection from the cold.
As a girl, I put together a human-appearing persona for the world. We all take on many roles, whether we deserve them or not: good wife, devoted father, dutiful child, do-gooder, rebel, witch. I may be a loser, but I have the belief that I have an upper layer of winner. I may be a winner, but deep down I know I’m a loser, a fraud, a cipher.
The love of family is so central to our lives that if you slip up—say, by calling your uncle a scumbutt, and I might add, in the next breath, a morally bankrupt human being—it throws the carefully crafted mobile into a spinning, tangling mess. But I swear, it was an accident.
This was thirty-some years ago, and there was a modest amount of money involved in the flare-up (I know, what a surprise). My uncle was managing a small collective family fund in a thumb-on-the-scale way. I was representing my brothers’ interests and mine, and lately things had gotten clipped and tense. Luckily my brothers and I were still drinking. My older brother called me to say that I needed to call my uncle and explain our position as diplomatically as possible, and after one more cool refreshing beer I set out to do just that. In less than a minute, things went bad.
I listened to my uncle’s rationalization for ripping us off, then said this horrible thing and slammed the phone down. It rang almost immediately. It was my older brother, checking back in.
“Hey,” he asked, “how did it go?”
It put a strain on the relationship between my uncle and me for a decade or two. And when I got sober a few years later, it didn’t improve immediately, as I had hoped. I prayed for us to have healing, and banked on time, failing memories, and the inevitable arrival of new, fresher family dramas to turn our collective attention to.
I sat out family gatherings for a while. I prayed for my uncle’s well-being, for him to have everything I longed for: security, peace of mind, good health, joy. But my uncle was not heavily into the joy business. He was nervous and somehow managed to seem clipped and dithery at the same time. He thought I was a religious nut, which maybe I am. I thought he was missing some essential wiring.
Jesus’ message is that who your family says you are has nothing to do with the truth of your spiritual identity. He says that we can all be annoying, petty, misguided, and seem cuckoo to Aunt Muriel and cousin Bob, but that we are in fact perfect children of Light, and that he loves us more than life itself, and that nothing we do can get God to stop adoring us, but He or She would not object to more of an effort toward active goodness and mercy, even when we feel misunderstood and cranky. Jesus says we are made of the same stuff he is, that we are perfect expressions of love, all evidence to the contrary, and somewhere—maybe in Matthew, though don’t quote me—he says the most important words of all: “Don’t be a big whiny baby.” These are both true at once, and again, not what your family told you.
I love my family, my brothers, their wives and kids, my son and his child, my aunts and uncles and my cousins and their kids and spouses. The center of my life has been to try to keep our family together, all of us, even this one man who has never liked me, even before my little episode. I somehow knew that he was a fun-house mirror, No. 2 in birth order, like me, Dutiful Child, which translates as “filled with rage,” taught to self-destroy, and to cultivate favor. But he loved me. That’s the catch, the rub.
The family package usually comes with food, shelter, and fraught companionship, yet it also includes boredom, fear, and prejudice. It provides a structure that can be tricky to navigate, like a jungle gym. The terrible weight of family is that you may love them, but you also know them too intimately, their dark sides, their secrets and lies. You
adore your kids, your nieces and nephews, but you know what they are in for: the world will let them down, hurt them, and try to squelch their spirits so they will be better employees. The world is Lucy teeing up the football. The world is a mean, weepy alcoholic who wants to date your kids. They should have armor, guns, and why—come to think of it, you! Yay, you—bodyguard, banker, nurse.
The good part of false identities is that they kept us alive. They kept us overachieving. The family has to be a cauldron of challenges and loss, or we couldn’t grow. But the cost is so high—the held breath, the lifelong fear of being ambushed or unmasked. Do we have time to notice the baby-fingernail moon, a thick cape of morning mist, the diamond dew? Do we play anymore, step away from tasks, duties, and habits with curiosity? Tread carefully: if you are not vigilant, this may lead to wonder, which is joy, which every fear in you knows will lead to job failure and lost revenue.
So often our focus is on supporting the identities and structures that were put in place for us by the more powerful damaged people in the family as caricatures of themselves. Giving up even one of these identities can be threatening to the organism. But the willingness to change comes when the pain of staying where you are is too great, like Anaïs Nin losing her willingness to stay tight in a bud.
After I attacked my uncle, I became willing to look at “diplomat.”
Families are hard partly because of expectations, that the people in them are supposed to mesh, and expectations are resentments under construction. You know one another’s resentments and dreams better than anyone else ever has, until you each meet your chosen family. Another expectation is that knowing your relatives, and their knowing you so well, should somehow smooth out conflict. Ha ha. We are naked in the family; our worst dangliest bits show. You can’t hide much within the cell membrane of a house. We were raised to believe and expect that blood would be an emollient, but it turned out that we, the children, were the emollients. What linked us all was what didn’t work, because that is what got everyone’s attention.