Visiting Family, Taking Baby Steps
Visiting Family, Taking Baby Steps
I just returned from a holiday family trip to Raleigh. There is so much to unpack as it relates to my relationship with food and my body, things I haven’t put into written word yet and questions I would like answered, but I should start with my feelings going into the trip.
This was a family visit, but more specifically, my family’s visit. Now, we’re a family of women. Yes, we have my husband, my son and extended relatives who are men, but all that’s left of the family I grew up with is my mother, my sister and my half-sister. I see my mother every week, my half-sister every month or so, and my sister a few times a year. Us all being together is still an occasion. When my sister put out the call to come to North Carolina in December, and my half-sister who lives the furthest said she was in, I knew I had to go.
Of course, I worried about how it would go. My mother triggers me like nobody’s business. Even though I am actively working on my issues with my mother, and I know these issues are mostly my issues, there are still things that come up that she should know by now.
She still doesn’t get that it’s not ok to talk about size and weight and how much you’ve eaten (disgust when it’s too much or the humble brag when it’s very little) and the latest diet you’re on, even though she’s now had two granddaughters in treatment for eating disorders. Over the years, I’ve provided her with articles, emails and handouts of the things you should and should not say to or around someone who has been in treatment for an eating disorder (or really anyone else at all), and we’ve had some success. She’s been asked repeatedly to not bring these things up by me and my sister in front of our kids.
I have spent my whole life having to listen to my mother disparage herself about the size of her body or some other part of her physical appearance. How she looked, and by extension how her daughters looked when we were younger and under her thumb, was a primary focus. Let’s not worry about how we feel, let’s just worry about how we look. Appearance was and is everything to mother and is still a frequent topic she brings up. I can only imagine the internal conversations she has with herself.
I feel bad for her, I do, because it’s a prison and not of her own making, but I am over it. Almost every time I see her, there’s still at least one comment about her body, about whether her weight’s up or down, what she likes about herself, what she doesn’t. If we’re in the company of someone who’s down, as long as it’s not one of my children, then that has to be a topic.
She is mostly on her best behavior when my children are around, although there are still occasional slips. I was mentioning to my youngest daughter last night about how overall it was a great visit but that I had been apprehensive because of “what Granny might say.” She replied, “You mean like this summer when she announced in front of the whole family that my sister has the tiniest waist and largest boobs of anyone she’s ever seen, and she doesn’t know what keeps her from toppling over?” Yes, I told her.
This one had been a real doozy, for so many reasons, but primarily because my youngest daughter desperately envies her sister, her sister’s figure and the attention her sister gets for her figure, and at that point in her recovery, she worried she would never have a figure.
Since my youngest daughter wasn’t going on this trip, I expected there would be more comments from my mother. I was sick of the body talk before I gave up dieting, but since I’ve given up dieting and have spent more time researching diet culture and how insidious, pervasive and dangerous it is, my tolerance is at an all-time low. I don’t want to hear about the size of her body, how she feels about herself, whether she’s up, she’s down, she’s been eating too much, she would be great if she could just get rid of her stomach. I just can’t anymore.
And all of these months that I’ve been steadily adding weight, she hasn’t said a word. And every time I’m alone with her, I’m expecting her to. It’s been hanging over me, and I realized it was one of the reasons I had been avoiding her when it would just be the two of us. Because even though she hasn’t and I don’t think she ever will again directly bring up my weight (you know, unless I lose it), it’s still hanging over me. The silent judgment.
And I know her well enough to know what she’s thinking. “My God, you’re gonna lose your brand new, amazing husband if you don’t do something about how much you weigh.” I think I’ve gotten a reprieve only because she knows it was necessary for me to aggressively feed my entire family, myself included, in order to stop one of them from, literally, starving herself to death.
It took me a few months to unravel why I was avoiding my mother. When I brought up my “aha!” with my therapist, she gently told me it was probably time to set a boundary for myself. It was easy to do when it was about protecting my kids, I explained, but it’s much harder for me to do it for myself because it would reveal my own vulnerability and sensitivity, something I’ve largely avoided with my mother. My therapist gave me a simple phrase that I could use to shut down unwanted comments without getting angry or upset or having to reveal any vulnerability.
“We don’t talk about weight here.” I said it out loud a few times. I wrote it down. Simple. Matter of fact. Unemotional. Easy to quickly adapt. Not open to discussion.
I put it into practice for the first time during this holiday visit. Of course, it was at the dinner table. “Pretty soon Sharon is going to weigh less than I do!” she beamed across the table at my half-sister. I don’t remember a prompt, I think she was just making conversation. I looked at my oldest daughter, could feel the pace of my heartbeat quickening, and said, “Mom, remember, we don’t talk about weight?”
That ended the conversation, and then we moved on. I worried about how it was received around the table, but the next day as my sister and I were taking a walk in the woods around our vacation rental, she brought up how “Mom just can’t get it through her head that she’s not supposed to talk about that stuff.” Baby steps, I guess.