Salon.com > Self-image

Plastic surgery after the baby

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000

The sign on the wall pointed east to the Plastic Surgery wing, tucked like a secret in the far end of the hospital. I opened the door into the waiting room; a fountain bubbled in the background and Kenny G played from the speakers. Everything about the room was soothing: Relax. Your private affairs are safe with us.

The table next to my waiting room chair was littered with pamphlets—Botox, chemical peels, implants, liposuction, procedures that would either suck matter out or pump matter in. I picked up one entitled “The New You” and flipped through glossy pages detailing breast implants. I dropped it, face down on the table, disgusted with myself.

I was called back by a nurse named Linda, a middle-aged woman whose facelift had left her eyes pulled into an expression of wonderment, as though she held permanent interest in nearly everything I said. She asked me a few questions and then popped in a DVD.

“Just watch this, jot down any questions, and the doctor will be in shortly.”

Buxom blondes rode bicycles with—by the looks on their faces—orgasmic delight. Women played tennis in short skirts and bulging sweater-vest tops. They all confided how happy they were, how confident they felt, now that they were “fixed.”

Pictures of people who mock me

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:30:00 +0000

I was traveling with students in Barcelona in the summer of 2011, walking through La Rambla, when I noticed two guys making fun of me. I could see them in the reflection of a mirrored building, making gestures with their hands to suggest how much bigger I was than the thin girl standing next to me, her small waist accentuated by her crop top and cut-off shorts. They painted her figure in the air like an hourglass. Then they painted my shape like the convex curves of a ball. The guys were saying something, too, but there was only one word I could make out: Gorda. Fat woman.

I’ve been hearing comments like this for much all my life. Maybe someone else would have yelled at them, or shrunk inside. But I don’t get upset when this happens.

I pulled out my camera, and set up a shoot.

For about a year, I’d been taking pictures of strangers’ reactions to me in public for a series I called “Wait Watchers.” I was interested in capturing something I already knew firsthand: If the large women in historical art pieces were walking around today, they would be scorned and ridiculed.

Her obsession with weight

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 01:00:00 +0000

My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer when she was 85, but it progressed slowly — everything does at that age, the doctors said — and it wasn’t for five more years that family started descending on her home in Santa Monica, Calif., to say goodbye.

I flew across the country and found her in what had once been called the music room, where she started sleeping once it became too difficult to climb the stairs. The cocktail bar was filled with her clothes and other necessities — diapers, a walker, a bedpan. The bed was where the piano used to be. I went over and took her hand. The skin on her face was sunken down around the bones and the skin on her arms fell off her in loose folds. “You look so thin,” I said.

“I know, darling,” she said, breathing raggedly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

* * *

I was 19 when I started associating my worth with weight. It was summer, and I was living in my grandparents’ rickety beach house in Cape Cod.

All the weight I didn’t lose

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone knows this trick: You hold the camera above your face, stretch your neck and shoot. I take my own picture this way. You see my heart-shaped face, my cutely assertive chin, and my dark brown eyes. Sometimes I peer insouciantly over the rims of my glasses. You don't see the double chin or the pudgy roundness of my face. You don't see my body, apart from the cleavage I occasionally throw in. Pictures make me thinner than I am, or will ever likely be. That angle slices away more pounds than my surgeons, and that's saying a lot.

I am the “after” side of surgery, having lost more than 250 pounds. No one gets this, at least not without an explanation, because I still weigh over 200 pounds, and the weight loss fable is supposed to end when you're thin, not when you're merely “an average fat American.” I still wonder if I should get more surgery. I have so many pieces of clothing that fit, but that I reject because they cling in one place wrong. That particular place is my right thigh and calf, which are obviously larger than the left. (I call it my freak leg.) Doctors have no real explanation, but the general theory is that a fall I suffered when I weighed 600 pounds actually broke off a chunk of fat in my calf. That place just above my knee seems swollen, and is the reason I can't wear skirts anywhere close to above the knee. If jeans stick to the freak leg, I toss them into the back of the closet and try another pair.

My year without makeup

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

This is who I am: a woman. I’m a daughter, a sister, a friend, a wife, and a mother. At age seven, I was a girl with braids and rainbow hair clips, and at thirteen, I became a teenager with acne, orthodontics, and teased bangs. At nineteen, I was a college student battling her freshman twenty-five, then a new graduate with a discount poly-blend office wardrobe. For nearly a decade after that, I was an independent young woman in confusing relationships who paired thrift-store finds with designer shoes. At twenty-eight, I became an overjoyed fiancée with a shiny new ring, then an anxious newlywed with a new mortgage. When I was thirty-one, I swelled up into a pregnant goddess with superlative melons, then collapsed, nine months later, into a zombie with magenta undereye bags. Then that happened again. Today, at thirty-seven, I am a busy work-at-home parent and spouse. On most days, I wear jeans, and shoes with traction. I have a yoga membership I probably won’t use up. On Fridays, I drink a beer in front of the television and fall asleep before ten.

Sexy dresses that barely fit

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:30:00 +0000

Over the past two years, I’ve lost more than a hundred pounds. There’s nothing impressive about this feat — it’s not as if I’ve lost the hundred-plus pounds sensibly, sequentially and permanently. Rather, I’ve lost the same five pounds about 20 different times through a series of dubious dietary stunts.

Per the established metrics of weight-to-height ratio and body mass index, I’m not what a medical professional would call exceedingly overweight — though Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the average “thinspiration” Pinterest page would post dissenting opinion. Essentially, I’m your garden-variety mesomorph who doesn’t eat to live but, rather, who lives to eat her feelings.

What consumes me, urging me to mindlessly consume? Usually nothing special — like so many other people, I nosh my way through shame and regret about the past and anxiety about the future. But 2011 and 2012 were exceptional — annus horribilis, times two: I got dragged off by a riptide of depression that I feared might kill me; one of my sisters learned she had lupus; one of my in-laws was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer; my mother’s COPD landed her in the hospital, and my beloved bachelor uncle fell ill under conditions too horrible to describe and died eight months later. It was not a good couple of years for illusions of familial immortality. No.

Hiding my freckles

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 22:35:00 +0000

Angel kisses. That’s what my Grammy called my freckles when I was a little girl. And what my great-grandmother called my mom’s freckles when she was a little girl. Unfortunately, our Grammys can’t be with us all of the time, and much of the universe lacks their confectioners'-sugar-dusted worldview.

Where I grew up, in mid-coast Maine, the primary industry is lobster fishing. Although I can now recognize my hometown as an oasis of beauty and tradition, as a kid I was terrified of the lobstermen and their stories and slang. They smelled of bait and had thick Maine accents I couldn’t understand.

One day a grizzled lobsterman, still in hip waders, came toward me down the stone steps of King Ro Market, our village’s general store, which kept an enormous block of hard cheese on the counter, to be sold by the slice, as well as motor oil, Wonder Bread, and my objective whenever I escaped the carob and kale of my childhood home: Swedish fish and other penny candy.

“Jesus Christ,” the lobsterman said, laughing with genuine amusement as I tried to sneak by. “What’d a seagull shit on your face?”

My big, strong, manly hands

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 20:15:00 +0000

I inherited a lot from my mother, though I first recognized my hands. Long fingered and wide palmed, we are women with muscular hands, working hands. In adolescence, it struck me as unfair, because my mother was beautiful — pale and ethereal, with fine features and blue eyes — and no one was ever going to be distracted from her face by her hands. But me? I felt too animal to be beautiful.

Before I gave thought to beauty, I delighted in my body. I was a strong, brown, passionate child, with lots and lots of words. I talked fast, and I moved faster – through the woods around our Cape Cod home, up trees, into the ocean’s crashing surf. I also felt a lot, finely tuned to the swells of my own heart, as well as others’ wants and hurts. I sensed a deep well at my center, and sometimes it bubbled over. I’d read or think or feel myself into a brimming state, then lie with my back to the ground, body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming, fearing I might combust – suffer a supernova of brain and heart, annihilate myself. I also fell down a lot. I banged into walls and trees, and tumbled up and down stairs almost daily. The refrain of my childhood was “slow down, Melissa!” and my nickname “Crash,” but I always got right up — skinned knees, purpled thighs, stinging palms — and brushed myself off, kept going.