BBW Berit from "My Life as a Dog"

As a sixteen year old girl I saw the Swedish film "My Life as a Dog" at the Fine Arts Theater in Mission, Kansas.  At the time it was one of my favorite films, and although I have grown attached to far more movies than this one since then, it still retains a special place in my movie-going heart.  It's been twenty-six years since I've seen it and I still recall scenes from time to time.

I've been blogging a lot about body issues lately.  I've become friends with several fat activists.  Big bodies have been on my mind.  So I've been thinking of "My Life as a Dog" and how it was one of the first times I remember watching other people respond favorably toward a large woman.

The artist's model Berit, played by Ing-Marie Carlsson, is, in the parlance of the urban dictionary crowd, a BBW--a big, beautiful woman.  All the townsfolk are hot for her.  The twelve-year-old protagonist nearly kills himself falling through a roof trying to peep on her during a nude modeling session.  Already wide-hipped at sixteen, I vividly remember sitting in the scratchy seats under the big screen thinking to myself, "Wow, if I lived in Sweden in the fifties instead of Kansas in the eighties I'd be a beauty queen."

Here's the trailer.  Warning: contains brief female nudity:




Watching this now, Berit doesn't seem that big to me at all.  I'll have to go back and watch the movie on DVD and see how I respond to it as a forty-two year old woman who has learned to love her body, rather than when I first saw it, just five years after my sweet little fifth-grade self was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa after having been sent to Weight Watchers in third grade.  Is it a case of I'm older now so things that seemed so big when I was a kid seem small now?  Or were the pickins so slim for American images of BBWs in the eighties that I was too quick to lump not-really-all-that-big Berit into that category?

Hurt Two Birds with a Rock

Me: "Come on, turn off the TV.  It's time to fix your hair."
Katie: "But, Mooooooom.  I want to finish 'Ponyo'.  It's almost over."
Me: "No, it's time to fix your hair now, not later."
Katie: "Why don't we do that thing, you know, that thing?  Where you hurt two birds with a rock?"
Me: "Kill two birds with one stone?"
Katie: "Yes!  Kill two birds with one stone.  You can fix my hair while I sit here and finish watching the movie."
Me: "There you go again.  You and your good ideas."

Cheerios Family and Charles Ramsey

When I was a young woman my therapist told me to "envision the life I wanted to live."  She said if I could picture inside my head what I wanted my life to look like, I'd have a clearer understanding of what I needed to do to achieve those goals.  It sounded to me a lot like what us laypersons call "fantasizing" but heck, I'd give it a shot.

My three main goals at the time were this: find a life partner, have a kid, publish a book.

That was twenty years ago.  I'm pretty pleased with my slow, steady progress.  After about a decade of being single and "working on myself," I found a life partner when I was 31.  I had a kid at 35.  And although I haven't published a book, at age 42 I downloaded the app to Google Drive so I can read the manuscript of the memoir I wrote, Unashamed: From Anorexia and Anxiety to Body Acceptance and Bravery, on my Google Nexus tablet as if it's an ebook.  When I read it and pretend it's an actual, published ebook, it's not petty child's play or fantasy: I'm envisioning the ebook I want to publish.  

Back in my younger days, when I was envisioning the life partner I wanted to have, what I saw was this: a black guy, or maybe a biracial black and white guy, with long dark hair, who was tall and kinda looked like a cross between Anthony Kiedis and Lenny Kravitz.  I'm superficial, what can I say?  But no, my "envisioning" went a little further than looks.  I imagined this life partner of mine to be a high school teacher at some impoverished inner city school who, in his free time volunteered for Big Brothers and Big Sisters and scooped poop at the local animal shelter on the weekends and visited elderly patients in nursing homes and read them the paper or from one of their favorite novels or just sat around and chewed the fat with them and let them tell him about the good ole days.  I wanted him to be the kind of person I wanted to be if I could figure out a way to heave myself out of my depression bed.

I don't know why I envisioned my future life partner to be black or biracial.  Probably because I have daddy issues and I wanted to marry someone who looked the polar opposite of my own father, who is white, short, and bald.  I dated a black woman for three months back in the day, but I've never dated a black man.  Well, there was that one boy named Michael who in high school gave me a ride home and then kissed me on my front porch, but that's as far as I'd ever gotten romantically with a black guy.  I started to say "with someone of African descent" but we're all of African descent if you go back to Mitochondrial Eve.  

As things go, my life partner turned out to be tall, yes, and with long hair, yes, but he's even whiter than me.  Blond hair.  Blue eyes.  No matter what your therapist says, no matter how much envisioning you do, you cannot predict who you will fall in love with.  I lucked out.  Will's better than my wildest dreams.

I still have an affinity for black men, though.  Some black men walk into the library and they have those long dreadlocks or braids and I'm like, mmm hmm, that's what I'm talking about.  I would never cheat on my husband.  I'm not a multitasker.  I can only handle one lover at a time.  But come on, no matter how solidly monogamous you are, who doesn't notice attractive people?  I know Will thinks lots of other women are hot and I don't feel threatened by it.  If anything I feel honored that of all the hot women in the world he chose to stick with me.  

I kinda feel like Jerry Seinfeld did in that one episode of his eponymous show where he makes a statement about loving Chinese women and Elaine calls him on it.  Isn't that a little racist?  And Jerry's all, if I like their race how can that be racist?  It's not like I'm attracted to all black men.  Or that I'm not attracted to white guys or men of other race and ethnic groups.  Obviously.  My lily-white-assed husband is who I picked to stick with partially because I love his lily white ass.

What I really love is when I see a hot black man come into the library with his white wife and their biracial kids because then I get to remember my long ago envisioned future and pretend that's my family for a minute.  Just yesterday there was this family that stopped in front of my desk.  The dad was black.  The mom was white.  The kids were biracial.  And there were two grandparents with them, both white.  The white grandmother pulled out a small bottle of hand sanitizer and bent over to gently rub it into both her grandkids' hands.  The contrast of her old, wrinkly, pale hands against their young, smooth, dark hands was a thing of beauty.

I remember when I was a kid and we drove by the high school one day to pick up my brother and we saw a black boy and a white girl on the steps outside, kissing.  My mom made a comment about how that never would have happened at her high school, that it was only in her junior year that her school was forced to become integrated and three black students began attending classes with her.  I think about that time, when I was sitting in the back of my mom's Vega, the vinyl seats sticking to my thighs as I sat with the window rolled down, looking out at the world.

The times are changing.  For the better.  Slowly.  Now it's commonplace to see white grandmothers holding their black-and-white grandkids' hands.  In Katie's class last year there were twenty-two kids.  Out of those twenty-two kids, eleven had white skin and eleven had brown skin, and many of those brown-skinned kids have one white parent.  Katie has two classmates in the same grade, one white boy and one black boy, who are brothers.  The white boy's mom is white and she had him with another white guy before she married her husband.  The black boy's dad is white, so I'm assuming his ex is black, or maybe the boy was adopted.  So when the white boy's mom and the black boy's dad got married, the two became brothers.  This is the world we live in now.  And that makes me happy.

That's why I'm disappointed to read about the Cheerios ad with a biracial couple in it that had its comments feature disabled on YouTube because so many racist rants were popping up.  Bad Internet!  When a hero like Charles Ramsey gets songified for his comment about how you know there's something wrong when a pretty little white girl runs into a black man's arms, I don't know whether to be happy that that Internet feels comfortable enough about race relations that we can joke about it, or to be disheartened that the Internet continues to be a cave for anonymous trolls to hide out in.  But man, the song sure is catchy.

And dang that Cheerios ad is cute.

"A Butterfly" by Katie Carleton, Age 6

"A Butterfly" by Katie Carleton, age 6.  

Katie has a Play-doh kit that has these three spatulas you can use to get the Play-doh out of the molds and to cut it in wiggly lines.  When I was in bed with a migraine the other day, Katie was left up to her own devices.

She got out her Play-doh set and soon realized all the Play-doh was gone - dog ate some, some dried up, most of it just got used over time.  Without complaint, she took the three spatulas, colored them, and taped them together to make a butterfly.

I love that she continued to use the parts of the kit to create something long after some might think the kit was worthless.  I mean, who can create a butterfly using a Play-doh kit that's run out of Play-doh?  Katie Bug can!  The butterfly is proudly displayed, taped to her bedroom door.

Judgy Mother

I'm a judgy mother.  I wish I were free-thinking, live-and-let-live, love everyone like my inner hippie idealist espouses, but my inner critic always shuts that peaceful bitch up.  Maybe I'm just in a bad mood because it's been raining for a week and I've got a migraine.

My worst judgment is passed on parents who complain about the drugery of taking care of their children.  It drives me insane.  I'm certain the reason it annoys me so much is because I'm envious these superfertile breeders have the balls and ovaries to take for granted something as sacred as parenting.  Something so serious, so special to subfertile me, who counts her blessings every day the thirteen months of stressful visits to the fertility specialist and medication and timing finally worked and produced our proudest creation: Katie.  How could I whine and sigh and post complainy Facebook comments about how frustrating it is to be her mother after all the trouble I went through to become a parent?

I rolled out of bed at 10AM and popped some more Ibuprofen.  My tablet was laying where I left it last night when I gave up after trying for centuries to get through level 13 of Angry Birds.  I woke it up and saw I had some Facebook notifications.  When I opened my Facebook app, instead of checking my notifications I got side-tracked and noticed a link to this post from a fellow mom friend.  I read through it in a hurry--Katie was calling from her bedroom where she had been patiently playing with her Legos until Mommy dragged ass out of bed, asking what's for breakfast.

Hrmmpf!  Well if the blogger's so "tapped out" and frustrated with parenting, why did she have five kids?

Katie called again, asking for eggs, so I brought her a banana and gave her a kiss on the cheek.  "Here, eat this until Mommy gets the kitchen clean enough that I can cook you some eggs.  Right now the stove is covered in dirty pots and pans."

When I walked out of her bedroom I went into the kitchen and decided to brew a pot of coffee.  I needed some caffeine to get energized enough to do the dishes.  I played around on my tablet some more until the coffee was done.  I poured a cup of coffee and went downstairs for a minute to use the laptop.  I needed to share a link on Facebook real fast and my tablet was not cooperating with the concept of copying and pasting URLs.

After I shared the super-important meme, I looked up Jen Hatmaker, the author of that mommy blog that ticked me off a few minutes before.  I wanted to see her full story before I started going off on her on my own blog.

The nerve.  Bragging about her slacker mom ways to the whole world.  How dare she not take her job as mother seriously?

Then I read that she's this wonderful, saintly, spread-love-and-peace kind of mother and I felt bad.  She adopted two of her children from Ethiopia.  That's why she has five kids.  That's why she's pulling four more fistfuls of hair out of her head each day than I am.

I was immediately reminded of the time I ate lunch with Katie at her school.  I'd been writing and working at the library a lot lately and she was feeling neglected, so she asked if I'd come to her school to have lunch with her.  I sat at the table with her little friends and we had a great time.  But I couldn't help myself, judging the lunch of the kid who sat immediately in front of me.  Inside his Angry Birds lunch box he had three Special K cereal bars and a Capri Sun.

What kind of parent packs that kind of lunch for her kid?  I bet the poor thing packed it himself.  What kind of parent makes a first grader pack his own lunch?!

Later I found out Special K Kid's mom had just had a baby, and that he, at seven-years-old, was the oldest of three.  I pictured what my life would be like if I had a newborn, a preschooler, and a first grader to take care of and I cut her some slack about the crappy sack lunch.

It's so easy to judge parents we don't know.  But once we know someone, and we know they're doing their best and some days their best is shitty, as is the case with all of us good parents out there, it's easier to forgive others.  And ourselves.  I should write a blog post about this topic.

Hold on a sec.  Katie's calling.  Again.  It's after noon and I gotta get the dishes done so I can cook my super, special, miraculous kid some eggs.

A Difficult Pleasure

I'm on break now from playing stick ball with my six-year-old daughter.  I don't have much time to pay attention to what's going on in the world when the person in my back yard on summer break is so interesting.  So when I do get a break from summer parenting, I like to watch John Green videos on YouTube.  They're short and they're smart.  Here's the best I found today:


It makes my day better when I pay attention to Green and ignore most mainstream media clamor.  Here is yet another reason why John Green is so awesome:

"...it's not easy to read Moby Dick, but it is really fun.  Like visiting the aquarium you get to go to sea without puking.  As you know, Hank, I hate the idea that when it comes to books and learning hard  is often seen as the opposite of fun.  It's strange to me that we should be so quick to give up on a book or a math problem when we are so willing to grapple, for centuries if necessary, with a single level of Angry Birds.

When I was a student why was I so willing to work hard, much much too hard, to make people like me, and so unwilling to work hard to read great novels or comprehend the edglessness of the universe?  I don't have an answer, maybe I'll find one in comments or here at the aquarium, or maybe I'll find an answer looking at Melville's great whilte wall of a whale, but in the meantime the search is a pleasure, and a difficult one, as most great pleasures are."

Doll in a Sneaker Car, Seat Belt Included

Cleaning Katie's room is a challenge because we let it get so messy that what should be a routine, easy task becomes daunting.  One fun thing I get out of it, though, is finding toys left in funny positions, as if they were abandoned mid-play.  Here's an example of a doll I found today.  Katie doesn't like these sneakers because she can put on her Velcro ones by herself.  She hasn't yet mastered tying her own shoelaces.  I like that she re-purposed them as her doll's car, seat belt included:

Breakfast at 1:07PM

I announced first thing this morning that I was going to help Katie clean her room today.  We've been putting it off for four days now.  After a couple cups of coffee I got side-tracked writing, while Katie played all morning.  We finally sat down to breakfast at 1:07PM.  Needless to say, Katie and I have been a couple of slackers so far this summer vacation.  That doesn't mean Katie's brain is turning to mush.  She's still thinking.

Katie: "Mom, when I put the bite of egg under my tongue I'm like, 'Huh, what is that?  Is that an egg?  I can't taste it.'  But if I put the bite of egg on top of my tongue I'm like, "Mmm, this is a tasty bite of egg!"

Me: "Yep, that's right.  Why do you think that is?"

Katie: "Because I have like thousands of taste buds on top of my tongue and like maybe one taste bud under my tongue?"

Me: "That sounds right to me.  Did you read about that somewhere or just figure it out yourself?"

Katie: "I just figured it out myself."

Me: "Wow, like a real scientist., experimenting with ideas and figuring stuff out."

Katie, beaming, "Yep!"  Suddenly serious, "You know, Mom, most scientists like messes."

Me: "But what if their work space is so messy they can't conduct an experiment?"

Katie: "But that's what scientists do.  They create messes when they work."

Me: "Well sure.  Same as artists.  I'd rather write than clean my house."

We both sat silently together.  After a minute, I said, "Well, I'm going to go blog about this.  I'll help you clean your room when I'm done."  I left her to conduct experiments on things that need figuring out.  Cleaning can wait for science and art.

Night and Day

Last Night:

Katie: "Mom, I'm going to clean my room."
Me: "What?"
Katie: "I'm going to clean my room."
Me: "Huh?  What's going on?"
Katie: "I'm going to clean my room.  All by myself."
Me: "You're going to clean your room all by yourself?  You don't want any help?"
Katie: "Nope.  I'm going to do it all by myself."
Me, skeptically: "Wow."
Katie: "Mom?"
Me: "What?"
Katie: "If I do chores around the house will you give me an allowance?"
Me, the rebellious daughter of two retired accountants who thought she had been keeping her child in ignorant financial bliss: "An allowance?  Who told you about doing chores for an allowance?"
Katie: "Brady and Kale do chores for an allowance."
Me: "Oh.  Your classmates do this so you think you should do it too?"
Katie: "Yes.  I think it's a great idea!"
Me: "Well, like what kind of an allowance are we talking about here?"
Katie: "Like, if I clean my bedroom you give me two dollars?"
Me, holding out my hand to shake-on-it before my sweet, ignorant child realizes two bucks to clean her room is a freaking steal!  I had planned on helping her with it this weekend but if she wants to do my part for two bucks, have at it kid: "It's a deal!"
Katie: "Really?"
Me: "Sure.  I wasn't going to talk to you about doing chores for an allowance for a few years.  Honestly I didn't think you were mature enough for that kind of responsibility yet, but since you brought it up, sure, why not.  Let's try it.  But I still want you to help pick up after yourself in the living room and take your dishes to the kitchen and set the table and stuff like that for free, just because you're a part of the family and we all have to pitch in on picking up after ourselves, Ok?  But for special, big cleaning projects, sure, you can have some money for doing those kinds of things."
Katie: "I am mature enough to do it, Mama!"
Me, my throat catching a bit: "Yes you are, Sweetie.  So what are you going to do with all the money you earn?  Buy ice cream from the Ice Cream Truck?"
Katie: "No!  I'm going to save it for college."
Me: "What?  Are you serious?"
Katie: "Yes!  Brady and Kale are saving their allowance for college too.  We're going to be scientists!"
Me: "Wow, Sweetie.  That's great!  Would you like to open a savings account at the bank?"
Katie: "What's a savings account at the bank?"
Me: "It's where you give them your money that you want to save for college, and they give you a little bit of money each year that you have money in your savings account, so like if you put fifty dollars in the account they might give you two bucks after the year, so then you'd have fifty-two dollars in your account even though you only put in fifty.  And then if you put in fifty more, you'll have one-hundred and two dollars!  And after a year you'll have one-hundred and four dollars because the bank will give you two more dollars.  So by the time you're eighteen you'll have a lot of money saved."
Katie: "Yes!  I want to do that!"
Me: "Ok.  Clean up your room and we'll open you a savings account."
Katie: "Ok!"

This Morning:

Me, wiping sleep out of my eye with one hand while the other hand holds a cup of coffee: "Katie Bug, are you going to clean your room?"
Katie: "What?"
Me: "Uh.  Remember?  You said you were going to clean your room so you could get an allowance and save your money for college so you can study to be a scientist?"
Katie: "Oh.  Ha-ha-ha.  No."
Me, a little disappointed I felt so disappointed that my six-year-old kid lost her enthusiasm for cleaning her room and not blowing her money on ice cream: "Oh.  You don't want to go to college and become a scientist when you grow up?"
Katie: "No.  I do.  But for now I just want to watch 'The Lion King.'"

Whew!  I was worried my kid was starting to lose her ability to live in the moment.  These hooligan first graders, teaching my kid about financial responsibility.  Good thing she's got all summer to laze around, watching videos and not cleaning her room, to forget about their radical ideas.

Envy

A friend of mine shared a photo on Facebook that hit home with me:

image source: Facebook

More than my hot temper, my moodiness, my competitiveness, my struggle with envy is something that causes the most unhappiness in my life.  I wish I could remind myself of this quote each time I feel the green illness creeping inside me.

I don't envy people's possessions.  I don't care that many people in my community drive fancier cars than I do.  Car culture bores me.  I don't care that many people my age and in my socioeconomic class have a bigger, cleaner house with matching furniture that hasn't been donated to them by pitying friends and relatives.  I'm into frugal living and getting by with less "stuff", so I'm pleased with my rickety shit.  I no longer envy other women's bodies.  When you get to be my age, forty-two, and your body has guided your soul through as much muck as mine has, you learn to love the vessel and all its imperfections as much as you love a well-worn robe or a favorite pair of arms wrapping themselves around you in a warm embrace.

The two areas where I struggle the most with envy are 1) writing and 2) breeding.  My creative output.  

I'm an extremely critical reader.  If a book I'm reading is not well-written, I simply can't finish it.  So basically every book I've ever finished is a favorite of mine.  The fact that I got through it is proof it's good.  A poorly written work gets tossed aside in a fit of envy.  A good piece of writing takes me outside of myself where I'm no longer paying attention to my own ego.  I feel inspired by good writing, not envious of it.  It's bad writing that taps my inner envy.  If this crap found a publisher, what does that say about my unpublished manuscript sitting at the back of my desk drawer?  

My most sickening envy comes from other women's fertility, or, more specifically, from other women's lack of appreciation of their fertility.  I want more kids.  When I was younger I had fantasies of having ten children when I grew up.  Will once told me he wanted six kids.  We married when I was almost thirty-four.  After trying for over a year to get pregnant, I saw a fertility specialist who confirmed my suspicions that I'm subfertile.  My mom had taken DES when she was pregnant with me, and that on top of my Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) means I don't produce the right concoction of hormones to sustain a pregnancy naturally.  After six months of taking the medications Clomid and Estrace and timing my ovulation via sonogram in the office, Will and I were able to conceive and my body functioned well enough to bring her into the world.  After Katie, though, we've had no success.  

I used to cry about it.  I felt bad for Will especially.  He's the poor schmuck who fell in love with a subfertile old lady.  He's the one who wanted six kids and I can give him only one.  He and Katie would be better off without me.  He should marry someone younger and more fertile who could give him the big family he wants and the siblings Katie begs for.    

Most days I don't think such things.  Most days I feel blessed with our small family.  The three of us get along wonderfully.  We eat together and laugh together and play together and give each other just enough space that we can focus on our introverted pleasures.  We have a beautiful family that's just right for us.  I'm proud of us.

Yet that green monster stirs inside me some days.  Why can't I have more children?  Why is it so easy for other women who don't even plan it to get knocked up and yet my body won't budge no matter how hard we try?  It's especially loud and obnoxious inside my head when other women, superfertile women, publicly complain about their children and their pregnancies.  Come on!  Seriously, sister?  I'd trade places with you in a heart beat, me puking out my guts inside the toilet or waking up three times a night to tend to my child while you come over here and try to explain to your lonely six-year-old why she doesn't have a baby brother or sister.

Envy.  It sickens me.  It's not helpful.  Here I am, complaining about other people complaining.  There are women reading this now who are sick of me complaining I only got one kid.  Their kids suffocated as their Oklahoma elementary school crushed them during a tornado.  Their kids died during a drone attack by my government.  Their kids got hit by a stray bullet during an inner-city gang fight or out in the sleepy suburbs during a day when some kid forgot to take his meds and felt like people-hunting.  Or there are women reading this now, sick of me complaining that my fertility specialist could only help me have one baby when theirs couldn't help them have one.  Or there are women reading this now, sick of me complaining that my life did not go as I planned it when theirs hasn't gone as they planned it either.  Oh wait.  Those might be the same mothers of unplanned pregnancies and children who won't sleep through the night whose complaints about what they got stuck with in life triggered this envy within me.  

Envy is a ridiculous feeling.  Envy is full of assumptions that other people's lives are better than yours, when in reality we're all struggling and laughing and living and loving in our own way.  Pay attention to your own life, Becky.  It doesn't have to be anything other than what it is.  Love your life for what it is, not what you think it should be.