A Blog Memoir in 25 Things: The Other Side of 200

14. As a toddler, I'd eat my little sister's baby food. Snooze, you lose!

Sitting on the crunchy white butcher paper in my doctor's office, I was worried about butt sweat when I really should have been worried about the little frown on her face.

'Well, Ding, this is where we are.' She pointed to a chart. 'For your height and weight, you are in this area.' Her finger circled a bunch of red squares.

'And does this Red Zone mean I'm going to drop dead in the next couple of weeks?'

Her smile was just as brittle as the paper I was sitting on. 'Let me put it this way. You need to be on the other side of 200 - I don't care how long it takes, that's where you need to be. Your family's medical history contains huge red flags - hypertension, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, diabetes. If your lifestyle doesn't change, this is your history, too.'

I was silent. All I could think of were those tasteless, white, wet scoops of cottage cheese my mother made me eat when I was in the 8th grade.

My doctor continued. 'Ding, this is what my practice specializes in. You can do this.'

'Hypothetically, what if I don't get on the other side of 200?'

'You don't want that. Already, your blood pressure is causing other issues.' She sighed. 'Look. I'm not into skinny minnies. I'm not saying you need to shrink all the way down to a Bobble head. But you need to be on the other side of 200. I won't even give you a number. 199? Ok. 190? 195? 180? Fine. 175? 170? Better. But get on the other side of 200 and stay there.'

It's never good to see you're in the 'danger zone' and, if you saw me, you'd never think, Oh, she is morbidly obese. But, according to a chart in the doctor's office, I am.

Perhaps I'm deluding myself, but it wasn't the idea of losing the fat that made me a little shaky-voiced as I described the appointment to my Roomie and some friends. It was everything else.

Hypertension?
Heart disease?
Diabetes?
Stroke?
Potential blindness? (Because of my high blood pressure, a blood vessel had burst behind my left eye and a portion of my eye's left visual field became significantly blurred.)

I don't want these things. I DON'T want these things.

We can talk about 'fat acceptance' but as a now diagnosed, official, Fat Person I am saying that I don't want these things and if it means sacrificing my sociall unacceptable fat on the altar of Not Dying, sign me up. If not dying means losing a tire or two around my middle, then so be it. I have no affection for them. I am not wed to these rings around my middle. If it's going to be a choice between me and my fat rings, I choose me.

The fat rings, and the politics attached to them, can go fuck themselves.

So here I am - trying to get on the other side of 200. And I can't help but think of my mother.
...
The day after my mother died, I stood in my parents' kitchen. It felt so small. Like my head. My head felt like it had shrunk and everything I heard or saw came from a great distance.

I opened the refrigerator, just to do something rather than from any particular desire to eat. Next to the little cups meant to protect eggs, I saw 6 vials of insulin. Scooping them up, I went to my father's converted office in the backyard. As usual, he had a few of his church men with him. Their conversation stopped when I entered the room.

'What are these?' I lined up the vials on dad's desk.
'Your mother's medication,' he said.
'They're all full,' I said.
He was silent. The men left the room.

'She stopped taking her medication. She stopped taking her insulin.' My father just looked at me. 'Why didn't you do something?' It may have been unfair to raise my voice against my teary-faced father but I couldn't help it. Something needed to be raged against. Someone needed to be raged against.

But all my father could say was that she hated it. She hated being diabetic; she hated not eating what she wanted; she hated having a disease; she hated being told what to do; she hated getting up in the morning and pricking her finger and reading her levels and injecting herself. She would cry in the mornings and my father would have to give her the injections while she cried. My big, smart, strong-willed father was tortured thinking he was doing something to his wife that made her cry. But then, the crying - and the injections - stopped. He and I both knew what this meant. We didn't say it out loud, but we knew.

I scooped up the bottles again, went back inside my father's house and put the vials of insulin back inside the refrigerator.

My mother may have been a fast driver but she was a slow suicide.
...
This is me, trying to get on the other side of 200.

In the hipster Dominick's on Chicago, buying the kiddie snack packs of veggies and fruit from the Eating Right brand. If I have to control my portions, and thus my calorie intake, then these smaller versions of food will have to train me to make different choices.

Roomie takes one look at our regrigerator and says, 'We are eating like 4th graders.'

Me, in the morning, eating one whole wheat waffle with a drizzle of honey and a few scoops of low-fat yogurt with some crunchy cereal tossed in while catching a few minutes of Good Morning America.

In the cafe, for the one morning latte I allow myself during the week, to be made with skim milk and, instead of a large, I order a small.

In the later morning, feeling myself get a little munchy, I take out my lunch and eat the piece of fruit I've packed. Or maybe one half of the sandwich I've made.

After lunch, I walk with a coworker for 30 minutes down by the river.

When I come home, I begin to broil a nice piece of salmon drizzled with a little olive oil, some garlic and cracked black pepper. Roomie cooks some spinach with balsamic vinegar.

After dinner, I barely miss the cigarette I would have had with a glass of wine.

As the weather warms, I know I'll have to wave Roomie ahead and forgo the very comfortable and convenient ride home. I'll walk farther to the bus stop or take a different bus route, all to walk a little farther (about 4 blocks out of my way.)

I thought getting to the other side of 200 would have been more mentally difficult than this; I thought I would have kicked and screamed about 'dieting.' But I guess it's all in how you think about it. To me, this isn't 'dieting.' It's living. Not 'living' in the Oprah-sense: all blurry light, white clothing and huge gusts of breath about one's 'best life.'

What I'm doing is less glamorous than that. It's, literally, living - inhaling, exhaling, heart beating.

Fuck the fat. Fuck the politics. I'm changing the way I've been living because I fucking don't want to die like my mother.

A Blog Memoir in 25 Things (inspired by Facebook)

25. I was unofficially voted Most Likely to Flirt With Your Boyfriend. The truth of this depends on what alcohol is at hand. (See #24.)

There are two early memories I have of boys, both named David. Well, there are more than two memories, and more than two boys, but these are the most telling.

David Oliver was my first childhood crush, a teenage boy who lived in our apartment complex on Santa Rosalia. (Which we pronounced San-ta Ro-sa-lee-ya, an iambic, musical sound I’d whisper to myself.) Back then I didn’t know that we were poor; I thought our white stuccoed apartment building was beautiful. Scarlet bougainvillea crawled over the front walls, sunlight shined warmly across the hard wood floors of our apartment and so what if my sister and I slept in what was clearly supposed to be the dining room. We had a piano our father would play while making up funny songs to make our mother laugh, mom made hammocks strung across the hallway so we could swing quietly in the air (while I imagined we lived in trees like bananas) and we would sometimes climb into a cardboard box and launch ourselves down the smoothly worn stone steps to crash against the front door below.

(We did this until my mother decided it wasn’t exactly safe for me to send my light-as-air sister hurtling through second story space to bust through the front screen while I pealed with laughter on the landing above.)

But David lived across the automotive oil-splattered courtyard with his single mother who was, more often than not, drunk on her ass. He was a light brown color and his bouncy afro was smooth, neat and medium sized; he was as thin as Encyclopedia Brown and he liked hanging out with our dad who was handsome, young, employed and friendly to everyone in the building. I see now that the patterns of my youth pretty much dictated what my later family life would be: my father would be everyone’s father figure and every man I met would be a rival for my father’s affection.

Buried in my family’s stuff, my dad still has the audio tape of a recording he and David made, spoofing the old TV show, Kung Fu. You play it and first you hear the shooshy white noise of a hand held tape recorder then the wobbly theme music of the show. Then you hear my dad’s voice as The Master, giving Grasshopper a test. It’s five minutes of improvised nonsense about the price of eggs in the ghetto and in the background you can hear my mother laughing while my father and David struggle to keep it together. I love listening to that tape.

He would come over a couple of nights a week or on the weekends to practice on our piano. I remember he said that he wanted to go to Julliard. I was only a kid, maybe 5 or 6, but I would hide behind the wood slatted doors of our dining/bedroom and listen to him practice and felt something that made my little girly chest squeeze tight. My unreliable memory tells me he practiced Moonlight Sonata but my common sense tells me I have no way of knowing what it was he played all those times.

Between the slats of the door, I’d watch him, unable to take my eyes off his long fingers running over the keys, playing music my dad didn’t know. Everyone in the house would stop to listen to him – my mom standing still at the stove; my little sister huddled at my back; my father in the living room with David, listening.

With the hindsight that comes with pop psychology, age and a couple years of therapy I realize, and have peace with the fact, that David was playing for my father. My little crush on him was nothing compared to the love and yearning David had for a father like mine. His love swamped the paper boat of my five-year old squishy feelings, which were probably created more by the music than actually falling in love with a 15 year old neighbor.

When we moved to our new house later (doesn’t every childhood, ‘first love’ story end with someone moving?) I remember clearly that David clung to my father and cried.

(Here is where I hope my memory has betrayed me.)

We never saw David again. I think that we had heard, through old friends, that his mother stayed at the apartments while the Santa Rosalia neighborhood crumbled around them and that David may have become just another young black male statistic, cut down by the death-dealing gangs of Los Angeles.

The 39-year old me thinks about the gentle, 15-year old he’d been and, oh, how I wish that he’d made it to Julliard.
…

There was a little loud black kid, David, who was in my third or fourth grade class. He had freckles, a square-top ‘fro, and jumped around the playground with his little gang of friends, like a terrier. My friends back then consisted of the Girl Who Peed, the Girl Who Wore Pajamas to School and the Girl Who Picked Her Nose. I was not high on the Mar Vista Elementary social totem pole.

One day he bounced up and began to run the dozens on the Girl Who Wore Pajamas to School. She was mortified; I could see little tears beginning to form in the corner of her eyes. Then he shoved me in the chest and called me fat. Without hesitation I kicked him in his little elementary school balls so hard he dropped in mid-laugh.

Sure, I got sent to the principal’s office; sure, they called my parents (my father, who worked the night shift at the station was home for the call and when he heard it was basically self defense, he told the principal to stop wasting his time when she should be calling the bully’s mother, instead) and, sure, they made me apologize in the end to little sniffling David.

But I’ll never forget the feeling of shock, anger and then the adrenaline-propelled pleasure as I stood over David’s keening body on the cracked elementary school playground.

Girls are taught to avoid pleasure. Pleasure will give us a reputation; it will get us in trouble.
But when I felt my little third/fourth grade foot connect with David’s testicles, and heard his laugh choke off, that’s what I felt. Pleasure.