> Weight Loss

Family Album
by author Jenn Farrell

In her 1957 wedding photos, she is the classic embodiment of the term hourglass figure: generous bust and hips set off by a small waist. Her dress and going-away suit showcase her fashionably abundant figure and nervous smile.

Here she is in 1971, trim in a purple pantsuit, playing with her infant daughter. She is elated over her recent 100-pound weight loss, thanks to her new “diet club” and a prescription for pills that keep her from eating, but also from sleeping. She cleans the house at four in the morning and ignores her racing heartbeat.

A tentlike white poncho and caftan blouse cannot hide that the fat has come back, with interest, by 1978. She looks stressed here; her smile forced. She does not like having her picture taken.

In 1981 her inscription in the Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cookbook, a gift to her 10-year-old, reads: “As long as you always watch your weight, I will always wish you bon appétit.” Her wish, even to me, for a “good appetite,” is full of conditions and contradictions.

My mother was a consummate cook, baker, and canner who fed not only her family but every person who ever crossed our threshold. Our home was all about food: buying it, making it, storing it, and most of all, sharing it. Our Halloween loot bags were the stuff of neighbourhood legend. Every holiday, every party, every ordinary day, was centred around eating. But my mother was the only one who got fat.

Whether she was unhappy because she was fat or fat because she was unhappy seems a useless chicken-or-egg argument. They were bound up with each other, the same way love and hate could be found in the same chocolate cake, depending on who was eating it.

There was no diet too surreal and no pill too dubious in her quest to be slim. Alternating between starving herself and stuffing herself, my mother’s weight fluctuated so much over the years that I stopped being able to really see her. Only in photographs am I finally able to distinguish these multiple versions of her: one fitting into the other, like matryoshka dolls.

In 2006 I look at my mother for the last time and barely recognize her. Here in the morgue, her face is gaunt, deflated. It took dying to make her thin. The undiagnosed illness that starved and wasted her for months was finally discovered, too late, to be cancer of the stomach–a pathetic irony.

At home, preparing for the funeral, her memory is everywhere. Especially in her kitchen, from the diet drink mixes in the cupboard to the pie shells in the freezer. I try to eat an apple; it turns to dust in my mouth. I drink tea and stare out the window at her untended garden. I’m waiting to be hungry again. My daughter bursts in, a welcome distraction. “Mummy, I’m hungry!” she announces. And I will feed her. She has a good appetite.

Jenn Farrell is a Vancouver writer.

Source: alive #306, April 2008