TW: ED
A few months ago, I realized something: with vacations and pregnancy as the only exceptions, I do not think there has been any time in the past decade or so in which I’ve eaten more than two meals in a day. My diet is a pendulum swinging from ‘restriction,’ through ‘ridiculous rationalizing’ (“If ice cream is the only thing I eat today, then it’s fine;” “All protein is fair game, all bread is bad and sugar is a negotiation”) and briefly lingering over ‘mindful eating’ before finally reaching ‘overindulgence as a coping mechanism.’
I have an eating disorder. (If anyone is keeping score, my ‘challenges’ lineup is anxiety, depression, ADHD, and ED; that may seem like a lot, but consider that they often travel in such packs, complementing each other and intensifying the challenge they pose to those of us who encounter them.)
I’m far from alone, of course. Who truly has a healthy relationship to food? Who isn’t using food, the consumption and/or the avoidance of it, to try and control, fix or soothe something inside of us that isn’t related to hunger? Whomst among us is so lucky to have a truly healthy relationship with food in a country that worships both unreasonably large portion sizes and unreasonably small waist size? One that has spent a good deal of its international communications telling the world that if one’s body suggests indulgence in the former, we’re not merely less attractive than the latter, we’re disgusting?
ED impacts so many parts of your life, your body, the way you experience everything. I’m so used to it that I don’t know another way to be. I only recently became able to call the thing a thing at all, thanks to the pandemic. My child requires constant feeding, something I didn’t have to be so present for in the past. Even with her only being with me 50% of the time, amount of energy I spend cooking and serving (and just being in the house with so much) has caused me a lot of uncomfortable feelings, including guilt for having *this* kind of food problem when people are starving not miles from where we live.
I’m a decent cook now but it took me longer to get there because of this thing. This thing makes it impossible to pick restaurants; that whole joke about women never knowing where they want to eat implies I may have a lot of company in this thing. This thing only seemed like a problem back when it involved purging. This thing is so easy to hide because it just looks like I’m taking good care of myself (which I am in seemingly every other regard.) This thing is why you shouldn’t equate size and health. This thing cannot happen to my daughter, I won’t let that happen.
Unlike my ED, my holiday antagonism is well documented and well understood amongst my loved ones. Send that “Happy Thanksgiving” text if you must; I don’t have the energy I had in college to respond with a thought about the cruelty of toasting the genocide of the original inhabitants of this land, but we both know that my “Happy day to you! Hope you are well!” is very forced, very forced.
There are a few sources for my distaste for holidays, and my issues with eating are among them. When food is something you’re constantly running from, events that find you surrounded by it in seemingly unlimited quantities can be incredibly stressful, especially considering that food is one of the only things about most of the major holidays that pleases me at all.
Like my eating disorder, my loathing for holidays is also informed by the ways in which I have historically centered boys and men in my life. From the moment I was old enough to receive a Valentine’s Day gift from a peer, for years, each time I didn’t receive some sort of romantic gesture and/or gift for a major holiday felt like a failure.
That first middle-school carnation sale would be among the moments where I found myself convinced that if I were more attractive, I might have the sort of male gaze I wanted. In a pre-body positivity world, it was even easier to connect “thinner” to “prettier”—some of y’all aren’t old enough to remember when EVERYONE on TV and radio, in magazines, was thin, and EVERY exception to that rule was a body likely to be mocked—and holidays thus also became a time in which I could convince myself that I was unchosen because I ate “too much,” while the occasion presented me the opportunity to eat too much yet again.
In adulthood, I came to look the way I thought I should when I was younger. The obsession shifted from weight loss to weight maintenance, which felt like a more serious task after 2013, when another consumerist celebration would become my least favorite annual event.
What to the single mother is the second Sunday in May?
Mother’s Day is a holiday in which partners and old children celebrate the mothers in their lives with experiences and gifts. I am blessed to have my mother, which means I’ll be gift-giving, but my own child is only 8, which means I won’t be gift-getting and anything that we do to celebrate is going to be on me to plan and pay for. So, basically, it’s just going to be a Sunday, except for I would be a terrible mom if I wanted to make it a Daddy’s House Day and just be by myself.
See, it’s no secret that a lot of you all hate single mothers. Hate us. Our motherhood is used as a punchline. We’re made to be analogous with desperation and poor decision-making. People openly speak about dating us as if it’s some sort of charitable act or even indicative of poor self-esteem. Black single mothers are, of course, particularly reviled, often regarded as if the struggles of the community lie at the feet of the women who stayed ten toes, even when the other parent chose to split.
My life refutes so much of what is assigned to us by media and popular culture, and not just on account of my great co-parenting situation; and the lives of most single mothers I’ve ever known are similarly incongruous with the lonely, long-suffering matriarchy who has no reason for being—and nothing to sustain her—aside from the work of caring for her children.
Admittedly, I have put a lot of effort into distancing myself from what people think of single moms, which has fit hand-in-glove style with my obsession over my size. I felt like had to lose my baby weight *fast* and always be at least moderately fit because having a child makes me a harder sell for a man, and as much as I know this to be fatphobic, misogynistic nonsense, I also know that fat women and single moms are two groups that are the subject of open contempt, and what kind of harm that a Black woman feminist in public who lives at that intersection can expect. And I haven’t had the therapy breakthrough yet where I can stop being afraid of that.
I’m admittedly struggling at the crossroads of recognizing fatphobia as a violent, anti-Black societal plague and having an eating disorder that finds fatphobia literally coursing through my body, both to my detriment *and* to my advantage via the size privilege it may have conferred upon me.
My fatphobia seems exclusive to me; I see the beauty in other people’s fat bodies but I almost never could find it in the mirror back when I was fat myself. I know it can’t be that simple and that I likely perform fatphobia in other ways, too. I haven’t dated many fat men, for example, though I will admit that my aversion to doing so is largely rooted in a fear that I would gain weight in the relationship because it might break my resolve to maintain my size. That is very ridiculous for multiple reasons—especially considering how I’ve heard fat men speak about women’s bodies, for it would be silly to assume one would make me feel comfortable with extra weight— but its called an ‘eating disorder,’ not an eating-related set of healthy habits that are in the best interest of oneself and society-at-large.
It doesn’t matter that I find fat women, on average, to be more attractive than most people, or that I think of myself as so much of a catch that a man should be lucky to even breathe in my presence. My ED does not let me turn off those outside voices—nor the ones in my head—that whispers “Single moms can’t get fat, single moms can’t look dusty, our kids cannot look dusty…single moms gotta keep it together.” I never felt this way about any other mom (well, no one should look dusty, but if anyone on EARTH has a reason, it would be a single mom,) nor do I fuss over anyone else’s body. I love y’all bodies, y’all look beautiful just the way you are. This is about me and my stuff, which comes from our collective stuff, but still.
Even while I recognize that what we’ve deemed attractive is too narrow to fit us all, this thing has made it so that what I know to be true about the world and what I see in the mirror are too often in conflict.
Instead of encouraging me to celebrate my motherhood, one of the best and the most important pieces of who I am, Mother’s Day just became yet another day for me to indulge in some self-loathing or frustration. As often as I plan solo activities and special moments for the two of us all the time, somehow, this one particular day just felt like it belonged to the other kind of mother, and not me. It was a reminder that I hadn’t yet found someone to be my life partner, a fact that doesn't unnerve me on a typical day—especially considering that I have been unwilling to be intentional about doing so—but would make me feel bad when I saw larger families out celebrating.
I’m now ambivalent about February 14th regardless of what I have going on romantically, and I’ve found ways to enjoy most other holidays as well, but getting through the day that’s supposed to be about me proved to be a big challenge for those first few years of my daughter’s life. Especially when I’d watch someone, a waitress or taxi driver, realize that there was no gentleman who’d be joining us, and look at me with what seems like pity or contempt.
My food issues may still be on the menu, but I’ve finally 86ed most of my insecurity about being a single mom. I may not see my body with the clearest of vision, but I do see the beautiful, loving family that I’ve helped to create, I see my character, my work and so many other things about myself that I readily recognize with pride and enthusiasm. Black mothers are the greatest thing on this planet, I am fortunate to be part of this illustrious sisterhood and I do not require anything that I do not already have in order to be a fully participatory member of it. In other words, I always knew, and now I’m acting like I know.
In 2021, I am going to enthusiastically celebrate Mother’s Day for the first time. I am going to celebrate my ancestors and the women of my lineage, many of whom never had the ability to go to get food from a restaurant or buy a little something just because they wanted it. I am going to celebrate my mom from afar, and a few days later, in person for the first time in over a year. I am going to celebrate the joy of being my baby’s mama, the greatest joy I have ever known, and I am going to celebrate all the single Black women raising children, either as co-parents or entirely solo.
With somewhat limited activity options this year, we’ll probably just end up at some restaurant seated next to a large multigenerational family of 17, catching a few sympathetic looks while I feel secretly relieved that I didn’t have a whole lot of kids because I don’t think I have the chops for that. No matter what, I know it will be a beautiful time because we are celebrating a beautiful thing—motherhood!—and I plan to savor every bite.
You wrote the shit out of this agreed. Tbe having to work harder, because of already internalized hatred towards us. Whew
I personally hate Mother’s Day! I always have. Being in a marriage where I often don’t feel appreciated , I would always say “ please don’t buy me anything. I don’t care I like to be celebrated through out the year not just on “holidays” “. But he don’t hear me. This article even though I am not a single mother , I’m here for it!