Drawing on the Past

I used to babysit all the time for my favorite family in my old neighborhood.  I love all three of their kids like they're family members and feel really lucky to have them in my life.  The youngest, Clare, was my little buddy for years.  We have shared a love of "The Wizard of Oz" since she was two and I was 23 (shut up) and she was the first person I know to notice that Dorothy's socks were blue rather than white, which you wouldn't think would work with ruby slippers, but then again, I'm no Stacy London, so who knows?  

Anyway, Clare loved me, even bringing me to show-and-tell at her preschool.  One day, she was very excited to show me a picture she had drawn of the two of us.  It was on a huge piece of paper so I had to break it up to scan it.  Here's Clare's self-portrait at three years old:

And here is me:

Can you see the resemblance?  I remember looking at it and just laughing out loud.  She didn't draw it with any malice or judgment, obviously.  This was just reality for her- Taryn the babysitter was round and fat and it didn't matter to Clare at all.  I held onto the picture for years and every once in a while remembered it and wished that I could have the same judgment-free appraisal of my physique, to view myself as big and not see it as any kind of a weakness or fault.

I am lucky to have a lot of friends and a frighteningly large extended family.  (I remember reading about the population explosion in middle school and thinking of my 50+ first cousins and feeling unbelievably guilty.  Sorry, Mother Earth).  (Further proof that there is no guilt like white Irish Catholic oldest-child liberal guilt).  Over the years, I've been a bridesmaid a handful of times, always when I was over 300 lbs.  I was unbelievably honored to be asked each time, but part of me always wondered what the heck the bride was thinking.  Why would anyone want me, this gigantic blimp of a person, taking up space in their wedding pictures?  It was really hard for me to see beyond what I looked like and realize that, hey genius, some people actually aren't shallow superficial head cases like you.  It was a tough lesson to learn and it's something I still struggle with occasionally.

This is a great article that I've been hanging onto for a while now.  The author, Megan Northrup, lost a ton of weight through gastric bypass and writes about how weird it is to be thin and about how differently people treat her now that she lost so much weight.  I'm going to get into a lot of those issues another time, but the thing that really struck me about the article was the last paragraph.

"Recently my mother and I were going through old pictures of me—all those years of photographs and truths that I've hidden from new people in my life—and, picture by picture, my expressions of disdain and disgust grew louder. Fully acculturated to the thin insider group, it took my mother's tears to shake me out of my judgment. With wet eyes she said gently, "Be careful what you say about that girl. I loved her very much." 

Oh man, tearjerker, huh?   This is something I have to remember.  I look at pictures of myself back in the day and I either want to laugh or cry, but even when I didn't really love myself, I was always surrounded by people who loved me no matter what I looked like.  Rather than sweeping these pictures under the rug or being embarrassed by them, I have to remember that they're part of who I am and that there's nothing wrong with that.  I've got to learn to look at this poor obese extremely fashion-challenged young lady and love her too.

The weird blonde highlights?  I think those will always be okay to hate.