I was laying in bed again and I again remembered another significant weight confrontation.
It was the end of summer just before High School started and I started to have intestinal problems. Severe enough that it landed me in the hospital for over a week. I couldn't keep any food down, had severe abdominal cramps and (TMI) bloody stools. I ended up on IV nutrition for over a week and after much testing my parents were told that it must just be all in my head.
Um yeah, I'm 15 and just deciding to NOT eat and to crap blood. Fuckers for thinking it was all in my head. After that I had a few more episodes of these same symptoms out of the hospital but since they said it was in my "head" I just never told anyone again about it. What was the use? They didn't believe me anyways!
So I missed the first week of High School so I felt like an even more new student than if I had shown up on the first day of school. It was fine and all. The IV nutrition and the several weeks of not being able to keep anything down, led me lose a LOT of weight quickly.
I remember going to a church function. It was at a close family friend's house because I think someone was either leaving on a Mission or returning. I can't remember which.
Either way one of the snooty ladies commented on how much weight I had lost and whatever I did I should keep it up. I was 15 and had just barely gotten out of the hospital. Yeah just what I want to do, live on an IV diet and crap blood every day and throw up every day. I'm sure it would have kept me thin but I doubt I would have been healthy.
Still my mom was standing near by and also reiterated what this woman had said. Basically telling me that since I lost the weight I should try to keep it off.
Now if you read the first part then you know how my mother started me on this path of self destruction through negative comments and feedback. From this I believe I started emotional eating. I already wasn't the "size" they wanted me to be but I also wasn't as smart as my younger sister who tested at a genius IQ level. My grades were never good enough. So basically I was just plain never good enough and I didn't stack up against my younger sister. So the emotional eating started. It was the only thing I could control at the time.
It's sad and difficult to know that I felt like I was just a thing that had to look a certain "weigh" and try and be as good as my one sister too. Not the individual person I actually was.
I think a lot of this stemmed from the fact that I wasn't even supposed to be born!
That's right, I wasn't supposed to be born! I was told repeatedly that my mother took a very long time to get over the guilt of ME!
See my mom got pregnant with me when she was 16 just before her 17th birthday. I've also been graced with where they got pregnant too. In the back of a car. ((groan)) My parents were basically "forced" to get married at a young age. My dad was 18 and my mom 17. My mom was Mormon at the time too but my dad was not. I was even told that my maternal grandmother tried pushing an abortion on my mother all the way up to the time my mom delivered and tried to push adoption too.
So right off the bat I wasn't fully "wanted". I was a mistake, and accident. The only reason my parents married.
Because of this my parents did NOT have a great marriage or relationship. Growing up us kids WISHED our parents would divorce. My mother was never fully happy and my dad would tell us how unhappy his life was with my mother. We could even see it in the way my mother would "accept" a kiss from my father. If he went to kiss her she'd just stick her chin out so he wouldn't kiss her on the lips, every single time. All with the look of disgust on her face.
But as a kid I learned a lot of this when I was between 10-12 years old, just at the start of when the "fat" comments from my mom started in 5th grade. So now I am not thin enough and I learned that I wasn't wanted and I was the reason my parents married.
Talk about damaging a kid! No fucking wonder I started to emotionally eat!
In some of my darkest hours and darkest depressions I begin to wonder how much better everyone elses lives would have been if they had just aborted me. My parents would not have gotten married and perhaps they would have had happier lives and I certainly wouldn't be around having weight problems!
My parents are divorced now. Of course they divorced after they only had one child left at home instead of 6. They stayed together got the kids sake. I just don't know how well that worked out. My one sister battled drugs and alcohol and cigarettes.
So what do I do now? Wallow in self pity or pick myself up and learn from these experiences and move on? Learning is one option but of course it's not as straight forward as we'd like to believe.
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