hey.... are you gonna eat that?

So I have started several different blogs tonight, some for Christmas, one for love, one on laughter… and then I took a look at a post of a picture I put on Facebook showing two women who, for all intents and purposes, portray the stereotypical lesbian couple of one feminine woman and one who was more masculine….

A few people commented on the picture but I noted something about it…. The first comment noted how hot one of the women was, but how thin she might be.  Now, don’t get me wrong, this is nothing against noting that, but when it was pointed out that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, the next comment sarcastically cited “anorexia” as beautiful…. I was truly taken aback….

I recently went outside of my “type” in the community, setting aside physical attributes and concentrating first on who a person was and no longer taking anyone automatically out of things based on my “preference” of bigger women who wore glasses, had short dark hair and were more masculine…. I decided to just meet women and see if we hit it off based on who we were.  On this journey I have met some great women and I had the pleasure of getting to know a woman who in the past would have been on the “no” pile because she was substantially smaller than I.  Though I felt big and clunky with her, and even a bit shy, I realized those were MY issues, not hers.

You see, my older sister is also substantially smaller than I.  The family joke is that she has my metabolism as well as her own as she struggles to keep weight on and I struggle to keep from creeping any higher….  But this isn’t about me and my size currently.  This is particularly about thinner women… Now don’t get me wrong, no offense to all the thin women, I don’t want to pump ya’ll up higher than you get to be put by society but I do want to recognize that though society states that thin is in and obesity is the epidemic, thin women kind of get a bad rap.  Some of ya’ll deserve it with your “I’m far more desirable because I am thin” attitudes, however I know enough of you to know that a lot of those attitude really hide something deep and dark. 

Thin women seldom like their own body… WHAT?!?!?!?  It’s true… and here I am and was, sitting on the side thinking how great it must be to be thin for most of my life… but the truth is… a lot of them don’t like their bodies either….. Whether it be extra skin, or freckles, stretch marks or scars, loose skin from weight loss or strangely shaped moles that  had to be removed…. Nobody seems to like their body.

Now, I was raised by my mid to large size mother with my extra large sister and my EXTRA EXTRA small sister and my small brother.  My extra large sister developed an eating disorder at 16… she became my extra small sister, but being thin didn’t make her happier, she still killed herself… even though she was thin….. it didn’t bring her happiness… but I digress.  My XXS sister has always been approximately HALF of me… thankfully not in height (I’m not that tall, though that would have made her an EXTRA FAT short person... anyway, she has been half my weight pretty much since I was about 17 or 18…. My brother is also in the “0.5% body fat” group… lucky me… OBESITY!!!... again… digressing….

But, because I am a thin woman living inside a fat woman, I do like to live vicariously through my thin sister… except, while doing so, I have noticed something…. People… women especially… are just as mean and nasty to really THIN women as they are to women like myself who are fat….. so the saying that you can never be too rich or too thin is not true… because being too thin puts you in the undesirable department along with the big girls, women with massive facial hair, different size boobs, extra long labia, buck tooth, knock kneed, etc, etc, etc....

But I have noticed something else…. I have noticed that if a woman is fat (like your’s truly….) they are undesirable because of that fact… and finding someone who loves you for YOU is hard… someone who doesn’t tell you that they like you for your personality but that they find YOU hot and sexy in all your chunkiness…. Damn near impossible… add to that walking down the street to rude comments… ugh… the list goes on and we could talk about it for days… but I have also noticed that if a woman is thin (like my itty bitty sister)… she is undesirable because of that fact…. And we ALL encourage people to judge that…. 

Not ALL super thin women are anorexic or bulimic.  Not ALL women who wear a size 00 starve themselves… and not ALL women who are small did ANYTHING at all to get that way…. It’s simply the way that their bodies are made.  Some of the biggest eaters I know are thin…. And some of the smallest eaters I know are heavy….. and if you think about it, I bet you can honestly say the same thing…. Do you really think all of your thin, healthy appetite friends are throwing up?  No, because if they look “healthy” you don’t think anything of it…. If they are naturally within the proper weight/height ratio….

Those women were thin… yes they were… they were not MY type… but they were beautiful women… I didn’t like the clothes they were wearing, they looked dropped on the women’s bodies… but it wasn’t’ about their bodies, it was about how poorly the clothing fit…

 

I don’t know what it is…. But people come in EXTREME sizes now a days…. Super, super thin, and mondo, amazingly big… and they are beautiful because they are people…. But we need to stop lookin at a person’s size as though that depicts who a person is or if they are or aren’t healthy. 

Why not go out today and meet someone who fits into your stereotypical “no go” group and ask them out on a date… go for coffee and get to know them… who cares how big they are or aren’t… get to know someone new just because…. Base it on who they are not the size of their pants… and give people a break….. 

Back in time

Today I read in the paper that a man was found dead, in a hoarder's house... they suspect that the man lived there, that it was his home though the city thought it was uninhabited.... 

It brought back so many memories.... people were saying that there was too much stuff to save the man, that they could hear him screaming for help but no one could get in... this made me sad, thinking of my mother... thinking of the child I was, rather than the child I pretended.... which got me thinking about what it was like in there....

I arrived at 1209 early in the day, it seem so dilapidated, the cream colour paint peeling, the brown missing in so many places the bare wood beneath it peeking through. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the pitiful little pear tree in the yard, the wild grass on the lawn looks as though someone once tried to cut it but it has become so overgrown it could have just been trampled by one of the half dozen or so kids hanging around. The blue tape on the front room window has been pulled off and replaced several times it's end flapping in the wind. As I begin walking up the gravel and rock driveway toward the make shift fence I see further damage to the house, the windows need a good cleaning. There is an old blue and silver station wagon filled with boxes and other items I dare not guess what they are. On the left there used to be a garden, the morning glories have grown so wild they choked the life out of anything else brave enough to attempt to grow. Behind the station wagon is a big garage that looks as though it was once a barn.

I'll tell you a secret. I don't want you to come to my house. I don't want you to come in, to have a peek of my home. I would rather go to your house, would that be ok with you? I like the way your mom makes cookies, how your house smells like lemons and pine sol. When I walk in your house, I am afraid to touch anything in case I break it, or mess it up or rub dirt on it. I will be on my best behaviour, show your parents that I am a sweet girl, a girl who tries and just needs someone who cares. I want to escape from my house. Is there any way that I can come over and maybe stay the night? No, I can't stay the night, then you might find out, might find out another secret that will take years for me to admit to anyone outside my family, but oh I want to, to have dinner at your table, to listen to your family share their lives with each other. At my house it's different.

I don't know if the home I remember is the home in which I was raised. I don't know if we really had to live like that.

When you walk in you will see my shame, I know you know, but if you don't come in then you won't know just how it is. Yes, yes that's my mom, please don't tell anyone you saw her. Oh lord, how do I go to school tomorrow, why can't she stop..... There are fleas, lots of them, there are other bugs too. Bugs scare me, things that go bump scare me, because I know what that skittering sound means. The dog is in the house, no, she doesn't come outside often, I don't know why. You could have come over before he left, when things were normal. The kitchen table was once a place that you could sit, we used to sit there and eat pea soup. I hate pea soup.

The first sense needed for this journey is that of smell. Go into your room, sit down and close your eyes. Now that you are there, you begin to notice a slight funky smell, the smell of sweat. Add to that the tang of urine, now the unmistakable stench of dog shit. Smell some curdled milk, the musk of mould on something wet. Keep your eyes closed and add sound. As your face scrunches up from the smell concentrate on the sound of your heart beat, and now your breathing. The buzzing sound in your mind isn't your breathing, it is the minute sound of a fruit fly, add another and another, add twenty flies, now do you hear it? Open your eyes, the sun is shining through the windows on the wall on your right. Turn to your right, a mustard yellow fridge , silver handle that makes the freezer look as though it is all one door, splashes of something on the front in the corner opposite you, then the windows, there are three in total, side by side, the kind of windows that open upwards. One of the windows has a board propping it open a little for the cats. You can see the plastic that was put on the outside two years ago swinging in the wind while the vacuum plastic inside is ripped in several places, the sills full of various things from plants to food containers, cat hair coating everything from the window. Turn further, see the sink full of dishes. There are dishes in a big round plastic “dishwasher” that has to be hand cranked. The dishes are all made of some kind of hard plastic substance. There is water in both sinks, something blocking the drain in one so that they both get plugged. The counter top is covered with more dishes, food in various stages of spoiling sticking them together. The cupboards are a cream color but are so dirty that they look like they ended up in the wrong end of a food fight. In the middle of the room is a 6 seat table, the surface of which is covered with pots and pans, plates, food in containers, the buzzing is coming from somewhere above, several sticky fly tapes weave in the breeze, the flies buzz as they try to escape eminent death. Walk a little further into the room, come closer to the table and see what is in this pot. I think it once was oatmeal but i don't know. Look closer, did you see that? See the oatmeal moving? Hold on, let me grab this spoon and pull back the top layer of oatmeal, see the eyes of the maggots as they writhe around in their home, you didn’t know that maggots moved like that did you? Directly across from you on the left side wall are still more cupboards and somewhere beneath the dishes, beneath the garbage there is a counter top, I think it used to be brown but I can’t be sure. There is an old stove next, brown and shiny. The oven is above the range, it doesn’t work anymore, I don’t remember when last it did. The range can be pushed in and pulled out but the sticky food on the surface has prevented it from going all the way in or all the way out leaving the two back burners almost touching the dials. There are pots on the range too, a pressure cooker once used for cooking, the contents trapped inside, the top gasket flew off one day hitting the ceiling, the pot too hot to touch was left there, the food by now inedible. Next to the range is the microwave, big in size, the timer must be turned past 20 to start the actual cooking. Mom built that little shelf next to it, the one where the deep fryer sits, the oil has been spilled many times, grease congealing on the wall and everything beneath it, splashing down the side of the old brown microwave. Below the deep fryer where the oil has spilled used to be where the cat litter box was, then, when Marmalade had her babies, we moved the box and she had her kittens there, they died from the fleas but the make shift bed still remains now covered in old, used oil. The deep fryer has seen better days, food and oil have been heated onto it. You can’t see it from this angle but the fryer used to be stainless steel. We recycle that oil, never replacing it until it is spilled down the wall, everything cooked in it has a slight burnt taste to it. Turn past the doorway, past the piles and pile of items in the room that once was the den. As you turn you might be able to see all the shelves that mom built to hold the books, once the room was quite nice. The last wall holds another mom-built shelf, this one holds the coffee maker. She took apart two coffee makers to put a timer on this one so that her coffee is made at a certain time. The coffee in the bottom of the pot will be recycled, it re-heats well she says. Mom’s bed is beneath the coffee maker, having run out of room in her room, unable to get into her bed she has moved first to the den and then the living room, but once out of room there, she now resides in the kitchen. Her bed is covered in things, so many things, garbage, cigarettes, clothes, toys, books, coffee cups, plates, there is only enough room on the cot for her body if she sleeps on her side.

If you turn just a little further you can see the living room, the TV on the far wall and the door in the corner….watch where you step as you make your way out, please don’t tell anyone, I understand that you don’t want to come back, neither do I.