Eat the Damn Cake

A little over two years ago, I moved to Manhattan. On my first night here, I wrote a song that began “This big city/ with its small sky….” The buildings obscured everything. I felt slightly buried. I felt incredibly alone. The next day I went out into the world and learned that I was not fashionable. Mostly I learned it on the campus of Columbia University, where all of the young women had a certain look. It was a look that my friend Liane and I (both of us at Columbia at the time) tried to describe, months later. “Shiny hair,” she said. “They always have shiny hair.”

“Their skin is always clear,” I said.

“They’re always thin.”

“Their clothes always match. But like they didn’t mean to match.”

“Their clothes are always a little casual, but you can tell they’re expensive.”

“Their jeans are never too blue.”

(these colors are acceptable. source)

In fact, in the year I spent at Columbia, I only saw one heavyset girl. One. I wondered what her life was like. And I felt this enormous, unquenchable urge to buy boots. Continue Reading »

So, a belated happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I’m back in Manhattan, where you can hear traffic from absolutely anywhere, and people wearing frighteningly stained blankets walk alongside people wearing Bergdorf Goodman, and I live in a little pale yellow apartment with Bear, a lot of diet soda, the cookies he always brings me, and a toilet that is happy to run for hours.

We spent a week in California, by the bay. Is it The Bay? It sounds that way when people say it. By the bay, where you can look into the distance and see more than five hills at once, and the eucalyptus trees hang their bark in dramatic, tired strips, and homes that belong to people who are now my family nestle against hard inclines. I didn’t notice any running toilets. Or at least, they politely stopped after an appropriate amount of time.

I suddenly have a much bigger family, and suddenly I was eating turkey with them. And sitting on their couches, and laughing at their jokes, and opening their refrigerators without asking. Continue Reading »

I’m in California, staring at the hills and mumbling to Bear, “Wait…This isn’t real. I mean, I’m not real, because I can’t be looking at something this beautiful.” And Bear is saying, “No, you’re real. I can feel you,” and poking me in the sides. We’re here for a week, spending time with his strangely fabulous family (in-laws are supposed to be more complicated. I’m not sure how mine are so distinctly nice. Is it California? Does it just do this to everyone?). I’m writing this on a computer that isn’t mine, and realizing how bad I am at typing on any other keyboard but mine. Even though the keys are falling off mine, and there are giant, mocking crumbs between every single one. Anyway, the point is, I’m not blogging. I’m visiting with family. And staring at hills. So the post below is a guest post from Lucy. I don’t understand why there are at least three different fonts in it. I don’t even know how to begin fixing that. But because this blog is a serious business enterprise, I’m going to include her full bio. Also because formal bios are awesome. How could we concisely and appropriately work all this into a conversation?

Lucy is a feature writer based in Brisbane, Australia. She has a Bachelor of Journalism from Queensland University of Technology and has written for newspapers, magazines and blogs including The Courier Mail, RUSSH, Oyster, MiNDFOOD, Virgin’s Inflight mag Voyeur, www.mamamia.com.au and The Australian Ballet’s blog, www.behindballet.com.au. She is also in cahoots with the wonderful Girl With A Satchel (www.girlwithasatchel.blogspot.com). Lucy loves cake and adventures on planes. She buys too many books.

(Lucy)

Last week I caught up with a friend who I haven’t seen in the months since having jaw surgery (or as my medical notes say, ‘major facial reconstructive surgery’) to correct a radical overbite.

“Gimme a look at you,” she said, taking my face in her hands.

She smiled, then shrugged.

“You look exactly the same!”

If I whacked down before and after photos in front of her, I’m sure she’d spot the difference, but I felt deflated. Now that it was over, and my new face had emerged from under yellow bruises and comical swelling, I still looked like me. My teeth fit together, which was the point, but the stories I’d been placated with in the nine month lead up – “think how beaUUUTiful you’ll be!” – were bogus. Unless I’d missed something: maybe I was beautiful, in my own awkward, toothy way, all along.

Growing up, I had an inkling my face was odd. It was long and thin, my lips didn’t meet properly and my smile, in all its over-bitten glory, was never the stuff of an MGM contract. I was unfazed. At 12, decked out in Adidas gear a la Sporty Spice, I thought I was drop-dead freakin’ gorgeous.

Once I reached grade seven and a kind spirited young man informed me that my nose was “pointy” and I resembled Bugs Bunny, not Melanie C, it hit me – compared to everyone else, I was weird looking. I gazed wistfully at the pretty girls, at models and actresses, in awe of their perfectly symmetrical smiles and ski slope noses, ever hopeful an Ugly Duckling fairytale was timed to unfold in my teens.

The words ‘jaw’ and ‘surgery’ weren’t spoken in stern sentences until my wisdom teeth were pulled at 18. Other words, like “balanced profile” and “abnormalities” were bandied about, but once I heard “braces for 18 months” the deal was off. I’d met a boy, was engrossed in my journalism degree and spent weekends in rowdy bars watching bands. Braces? I don’t think so.

 I surrendered in 2008. My bite had worsened, my jaw joints ached and somewhere along the way I’d decided I wasn’t gorgeous at all – not even close – and my self-esteem was in tatters. I embraced orthodontics, but surgery was off the cards. My orthodontist, ever the pacifist, nodded sympathetically and told me the operation could be complex and traumatic. The bands (take two) would have to do.

I decided to have surgery at 24. I already felt pangs of regret for not taking the plunge sooner, was struggling to chew, and figured if a bone saw was my ticket to the land of the good looking, I was in. And this is where things got a little sticky. Orthognathic surgery, as anyone who has experienced it will tell you, is not a cosmetic procedure. But in so many ways, it is cosmetic. It involves rearranging your face and bolting it back together, after all. It exists to correct jaw abnormalities and all-over-the-shop bites. But it will also alter your appearance, and, as the sheer scale of the operation and the pain that will ensue dawns on you, appearances are what you cling to.

For nine months, I obsessed over every minute detail of my forthcoming surgery. I trawled the web for before and after shots, spent hours on forums and even more hours comparing my face to other faces. I was petrified, unfathomably overwhelmed, and, I imagine, great fun to live with. I’d tumbled face first into the trap so many orthognathic patients had tumbled into before me – believing I’d be spectacularly beautiful once my bones were in their allotted spots and this agony – the sobbing, the obsessing, the sleepless nights – would be worthwhile. I knew what it would feel like, when I was beautiful and shimmery and complete. I knew it would be magical.

Recovery was sobering. Home for four weeks with my mouth clamped shut, I ran the gamut of emotions – relief, elation, fear, sadness, despair, frustration – and once the swelling subsided and my new visage began to reveal itself, I was right back where I began. I was still ugly! It was so unfair!

And then something else happened.

I woke up one morning, mouth caked in blood, struggling to breathe, and said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’

Somehow, through all the struggling and flailing and fighting, the fact that I couldn’t control how I looked slapped me in the – ahem – face. I had one of those neurotic out-loud, finger pointing conversations with myself. “You can either invest every ounce of your energy into this self-loathing, exhausting cycle, or you can change.”

I changed.

I asked myself what I really, really wanted from my one, amazing life. Guess what? It wasn’t to be staggeringly, head-turningly beautiful (disclaimer: there are days, as there are for all women, when I wake up convinced I am the second coming of the Wicked Witch of the West and want nothing more than to morph into Anne Hathaway. This passes).

I realized, like Dorothy does in the Wizard of Oz, that I had what I needed all along. I was already beautiful and shimmery and complete. It just didn’t look, or feel, how I thought it should.

When I told a friend I was writing this post, she emailed back asking why women feel the need to analyze and self-obsess when we should “just ignore photoshopped images” in magazines and “get on with it”. On some levels, I hear her. In the grand scheme of things, as women struggle to be regarded as human beings in the developing world and thousands die from a curable malady in Haiti, talking self-esteem can seem frivolous and futile, and for those blessed with a rock solid sense of self, it’s especially irksome.

But my argument was this: For the huge proportion of women who are mired in self-loathing, consumed with ‘fixing’ themselves and obsessed with being perfect, talking self-esteem is crucial. Because if we don’t, and we never break free from the energy-sapping cycle of self-hatred, we can’t really contribute to the world. And that, more than any unfortunate overbite or crooked nose, would be a damn shame.

(These are going to the cake gallery. But had to share them here first)

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Un-roast: Today I love my skin. It’s fair, and does not appreciate being taken out into the Australian sun but it’s soft and I like that it’s unique.

P.S. It’s me, Kate, again. You can tell from the italics. Thank you so much, Lucy! A lot of people talk about bodies when they talk about body image, but for me it always applies first and foremost to my face. I wrote about my nose job originally here, and here, when I went back for a consultation with another surgeon.

Erica Jong wrote an article called Mother Madness about attachment style parenting. It was published in the Wall Street Journal. She said, “Aspiring to be perfect parents seems like a pathetic attempt to control what we can while ignoring problems that seem beyond our reach.” She was reacting against what she perceives as a suffocating trend. A rapidly spreading horde of self-proclaimed expert mommies armed with recycled diaper bags full of toxic organic diapers. She writes about the popular breastfeeding wars, refutes the idea that being with your kid a lot is inherently good for her/him, and generally doesn’t say anything that hasn’t already been said ad nauseam, in every other piece about womanhood, for years. I was bored by the second paragraph.

So instead I read some entertaining fluff. An article about beauty in Psychology Today. It contained such gems as: “Now, before you brand me a traitor to my gender, let me say that I’m all for women having the vote, and I think a woman with a mustache should make the same money as a man with a mustache. But you don’t help that woman by advising her, ‘No need to wax that lip fringe or work off that beer belly!’ (Because the road to female empowerment is…looking just like a hairy old man?)”

Writer Amy Alkon was on a crusade to prove that women need to care about being pretty. Women need to stop buying the nonsense Naomi Wolf and her clan of wailing, griping feminists propagated. Stuff about beauty standards being oppressive and harmful. That’s just whiny. Put on some damn makeup and get a boob job, ladies! Because you know you want a man. And there’s no other way to get one.

(a diaper bag for the fashionable, trend-resistant mother. source)

So I picked up the New York Times, which was intently telling the tale of Priscilla Shirer, an influential evangelical leader who specializes in women’s ministries. She instructs women to give up feminism and accept that their husband is the king of his castle and the lord of the TV remote and the pharaoh of choosing vacation destinations and the tzar of deciding what toppings you’re getting on the pizza. She also adds that a failed diet is often “a direct sign that we have not submitted ourselves completely to the Lord.” Continue Reading »

I started another blog. I wanted to be able to write about education and homeschooling (the topic of a book I’m slowly but surely working on) without dividing this blog between that and body image related stuff. So now begins the great experiment of writing two blogs while also occasionally living the rest of my life. I’m feeling cocky, so I’m just gonna do it. If someone you know is interested in alternative education, regular education, stories of a weird childhood, or me, please direct them to the new blog. If someone you know teaches in a public school, please tell them to come over and have interesting discussions with me. (Or to inform me that my parents brainwashed me and homeschooling should be illegal. The legality of homeschooling is an interesting topic.) If you fit any of these descriptions, then come on over yourself!

Sometimes when I write about homeschooling, people think I’m saying that regular school is terrible and everyone who went or goes to it is going to turn out badly. I don’t think this at all. My parents went to public school. So did Bear. So did several of my closest friends. All of these people turned out really, really well. I don’t hate school. My little brother went to high school. It seemed to work out pretty well for him. I also don’t think homeschooling is perfect, and my mission is not to promote homeschooling as an ideal lifestyle. It’s just to raise awareness about alternative education options, and tell my own story. Homeschooling is a pretty new movement in the U.S., and, though I don’t think anyone has any numbers on this, I have always been able to tell that there aren’t that many people like me around. As in, people who didn’t go to any kind of school before college, and are now in their twenties. There are a lot more resources for homeschooling parents now than there were when my mom was starting out, but there aren’t many resources for the adult children of homeschooling. Now that we’re in the “real world,” it’s almost like we are supposed to forget about how weird our lives were up until college. We’re supposed to perfectly assimilate and quietly disappear. I’m bad at being quiet.

So this is my new blog: Un-schooled

Check it out! Spread the word! I’ll buy you cake…

One summer, I decided to stop shaving. It may have been the same summer that I decided to move to New Hampshire and be a waitress. I was….fifteen? Sounds right. My waitressing plans fell through, but no amount of frustratingly attached parents was going to prevent me from having hairy legs. I got the idea from something someone said.

I was over the house of a boy I was sort of dating, and his dad was talking about this girl who worked at the organic farm down the road. She was a very pretty girl, apparently, except that her legs were covered in hair. He did a little fake shudder and his sons laughed appreciatively. His wife said, “I’d never not shave.”

Which reminded me of another woman I knew, who had said those same words when her husband was discussing a camping trip, and why she wouldn’t come. And how she couldn’t be far from her feminine toiletries (I really doubt that he used that terminology). This was when I was ten, and makeup impressed me, especially since my mother didn’t wear it, and it was a mystery. The woman who would never not shave wore lots of makeup, and clearly held the key to all of the secrets of womanhood in her delicate, manicured hand. So one day, I figured, when I grew hair in inappropriate places, I would proudly shave it right off again. Continue Reading »