When I was around eight, after my Dad left me again or after a suspicious family reunion in which my now-deceased, convicted child molester uncle may have played a role in some fuzzy memory I’ve not yet addressed, I got fat.

I hate saying that, but its true. I went from being the smallest girl in my class (height & weight) to a shockingly overweight version of that former child. I thought for years that my ballooning was hormonal, but when I really look at things, I was not built to carry around that weight, not without some sort of emotional eating involvement.

At that time, I remember not wanting to go swimming with some of the other kids from my apartment complex because I had gotten fat, and at nine, that’s a curse. I was told that if I just didn’t eat so much, I would be beautiful. Then there were jokes about the “seconds” I would take at dinner time (yet, I was punished for not cleaning my plate). Gaah. Food and I have just not had a great relationship over the years.

Prior to my tween-splosion, I can recall being very, very hungry. Fruit punch on raisin bran hungry. That was during the Chicago years when my sexual abuse started, my mother and step-father were using and dealing drugs, and I was left to my own devices at age three. I used to hoard food, or sneak around and eat. One of the first things I did when I got my driver’s license was drive through somewhere and order food; I was so happy to have that control.

Again, food and I were not friends, and perhaps even with the overeating, it was a reaction to my former starvation. I don’t know.

My food and eating issues have been around all my life. After having my children, I would have the normal, postpartum body and like most postpartum women, I hated it. Granted, there was the part of me that loved the line in Mists of Avalon about silvery stretchmarks being a badge of honor of motherhood. Its not all bad, I suppose, but with food and body image issues, it all kind of balls up together.

In the past five years, after having The Twitches, I lost a total of 90 pounds. Really, most of that was lost within the first two years after they were born when I stopped eating meat and nursed them until my boobs touched my toes. I got my weight down to a healthy number and I was thrilled. I wasn’t perfect, but I could wear clothing I liked and I felt more like “me,” who ever that was.

Toward the end of that weight loss period, things in my life began to systematically destruct. Everything, and I mean everything was out of control with my marriage, my friendships, my whole world.  Somehow, I’ve become that person who gets anxiety-induced nausea and cannot eat. I used to think of it as a benefit, really, that I could use the bad times to melt away a few pounds. It was a fair exchange, really. So, while I was at my lowest weight since age 13, and kind of happy about it, I was really taxing my body and my mind. It was a control thing, it was a reaction to stress. I remember saying to The Husband a few times, joking (but not), “maybe if I’m skinny, you’ll love me again.”

My weight loss didn’t help my marriage (go figure), and things got worse. I had an affair, I dropped another 20 pounds, I developed a metallic taste in my mouth, my hair started falling out, and my teeth began to shift. By the time everything was said and done, I was a physical and emotional mess. Skinny? Yes! Happy? Fuck, no. I had managed to destroy my life and was in the process of destroying my own body.

After that, I was informed that I likely have an eating disorder. Maybe I do, I’m not sure. I’m back on the same path again because of my current level of stress, but I’ve noticed that even though I am forcing myself to eat, I’m still losing weight. I don’t know how to classify that now, but last week, I was back at my lowest adult weight. Sigh.

Yesterday, somehow Freedom and I started discussing weight, and I showed him my “fat pictures,” when I was about three months postpartum. I expected, well, I don’t know what I expected, but what he said was, “you look unhappy.” Not “awww, you’re still beautiful,” or “wow, yeah, you were huge,” but a simple statement about my state of mind… not my body.

I don’t know what to do with that.