Edwards - Guilt trip: my quest to leave the baggage behind

When your mother says shes fat

Dear Mum,

I was seven when I discovered that you were fat, ugly and horrible. Up until that point I had believed that you were beautiful in every sense of the word. I remember flicking through old photo albums and staring at pictures of you standing on the deck of a boat. Your white strapless bathing suit looked so glamorous, just like a movie stars. Whenever I had the chance Id pull out that wondrous white bathing suit hidden in your bottom drawer and imagine a time when Id be big enough to wear it, when Id be like you.

But all of that changed when, one night, we were dressed up for a party and you said to me, Look at you, so thin, beautiful and lovely. And look at me, fat, ugly and horrible.

At first I didnt understand what you meant.

Youre not fat, I said earnestly and innocently, and you replied, Yes I am, darling. Ive always been fat, even as a child.

In the days that followed I had some painful revelations that have shaped my whole life. I learnt that:

You must be fat because mothers dont lie.

Fat is ugly and horrible.

When I grow up Ill look like you and therefore I will be fat, ugly and horrible too.

Years later, I looked back on this conversation and the hundreds that followed and cursed you for feeling so unattractive, insecure and unworthy. Because, as my first and most influential role model, you taught me to believe the same thing about myself.

With every grimace at your reflection in the mirror, every new wonder diet that was going to change your life, and every guilty spoon of Oh-I-really-shouldnt, I learnt that women must be thin to be valid and worthy. Girls must go without because their greatest contribution to the world is their physical beauty.

Just like you, I have spent my whole life feeling fat. (When did fat become a feeling anyway?) And because I believed I was fat, I knew I was no good.

But now that I am older, and a mother myself, I know that blaming you for my body hatred is unhelpful and unfair. I now understand that you too are a product of a long and rich lineage of women who were taught to loathe themselves.

Look at the example Nanna set for you. Despite being what could only be described as famine-victim chic, she dieted every day of her life until the day she died at seventy-nine years of age. She used to put on make-up to walk to the letterbox for fear of somebody seeing her unpainted face.

I remember her compassionate response when you announced that Dad had left you for another woman. Her first comment was, I dont understand why hed leave you. You look after yourself, you wear lipstick. Youre overweight but not that much.

Before Dad left, he provided no balm for your body-image torment either.

Jesus, Jan, I overheard him say to you. Its not that hard. Energy in versus energy out. If you want to lose weight you just have to eat less.

That night at dinner I watched you implement Dads Energy In, Energy Out: Jesus, Jan, Just Eat Less weightloss cure. You served up chow mein for dinner. (Remember how in 1980s Australian suburbia a combination of mince, cabbage and soy sauce was considered the height of exotic gourmet?) Everyones food was on a dinner plate, except yours. You served your chow mein on a tiny bread-and-butter plate.

As you sat in front of that pathetic scoop of mince, silent tears streamed down your face. I said nothing. Not even when your shoulders started heaving from your distress. We all ate our dinner in silence. Nobody comforted you. Nobody told you to stop being ridiculous and get a proper plate. Nobody told you that you were already loved and already good enough. Your achievements and your worth as a teacher of children with special needs and a devoted mother of three paled into insignificance when compared with the centimetres you couldnt lose from your waist.

It broke my heart to witness your despair and Im sorry that I didnt rush to your defence. Id already learnt that it was your fault that you were fat. Id even heard Dad describe losing weight as a simple process yet one that you still couldnt come to grips with. The lesson: you didnt deserve any food and you certainly didnt deserve any sympathy.

But I was wrong, Mum. Now I understand what its like to grow up in a society that tells women that their beauty matters more than anything else, and at the same time defines a standard of beauty that is perpetually out of reach. I also know the pain of internalising these messages. We have become our own jailers and we inflict our own punishments for failing to measure up. No one is crueller to us than we are to ourselves.

But this madness has to stop, Mum. It stops with you, it stops with me and it stops now. We deserve better better than to have our days brought to ruin by bad body thoughts, wishing we were otherwise.

And its not just about you and me anymore. Its also about my daughters and your granddaughters. I do not want body hatred to take root inside them and strangle their happiness, their confidence and their potential. I dont want my girls to believe that their beauty is their most important asset, that it will define their worth in the world. When they look to us to learn how to be a woman, we need to be the best role models we can. We need to show them with our words and our actions that women are good enough just the way they are. And for them to believe us, we need to believe it ourselves.

The older we get, the more loved ones we lose to accidents and illness. Their passing is always tragic and far too soon. I sometimes think about what these friends and the people who love them wouldnt give for more time in a body that was healthy. A body that would allow them to live just a little longer. The size of that bodys thighs or the lines on its face wouldnt matter. It would be alive and therefore it would be perfect.

Your body is perfect too. It allows you to disarm a room with your smile and infect everyone with your laugh. It gives you arms to wrap around your granddaughters and to squeeze them until they giggle.

Every moment we spend worrying about our physical flaws is a moment wasted, a precious slice of life that we will never get back. Let us honour and respect our bodies for what they do instead of despising them for how they appear. Let us focus on living healthy and active lives, let our weight fall where it may, and lets consign our body hatred to the past where it belongs. When I looked at that photo of you in the white bathing suit all those years ago, my innocent young eyes saw the truth. I saw unconditional love, beauty and wisdom. I saw my mum.

Love, Kasey xx

Being a pear

Before I even reached puberty I knew I was a pear. Even after I grew into a DD cup I was still a pear, which of course meant that with boobs that big my hips must be massive.

In my first year of secondary school when a teacher took all the girls aside to assign us our body type apple, pear or hourglass we thought she was being helpful. Long before we understood issues like compound interest and climate change, my peers and I were thoroughly schooled in the crucial matter of our body-shape flaws and how to disguise them.

The importance of hiding our flaws is so critical to succeeding at being female that body-type categorisations have now been extended well beyond fruit and time-keeping devices.

Trinny and Susannahs contribution to humanity was the definition of twelve body types, which include, among other things, bricks, bells and musical instruments.

Targets fashion stylist Donny Galella is imploring women to Always dress for your body shape, and lifestyle.com.au is using geometric shapes to help brides to hide their ugly bits on their special day.

Sarah McMahon, psychologist and director of BodyMatters Australasia, says that categorising womens bodies in these ways is A wolf in sheeps clothing.