I’ve often wondered whether it’s more difficult to be the overweight daughter of a naturally slim mother or one who is prone to plumpness.

With the thin mother, I could see the struggles that come with obliviousness. Their slim bodies act a certain way when fed and watered normally, why shouldn’t it be the same for their daughter’s young form? I can also imagine a mother whose tiny dress size has always been a point of pride being disappointed or embarrassed at their daughter’s less-than-svelte body.

On the other hand, if you’re a chubby kid and big momma is constantly complaining about her fat thighs and bouncing from cabbage soup this to meal replacement shake that in an effort to drop “the weight”, congratulations:  odds are you’re going to be her de facto diet buddy until you finagle your way to an out-of-state college.

Sometimes it’s difficult to have empathy for these characters.

After all, I’m going to venture onto a very sturdy limb and say many if not most big girls who struggle with disordered eating patterns learned it at the feet of their fad dieting mothers. And let’s not even get into the body hate projection, the screwed up approach to self-worth and all the rest of the stuff that’s put our therapists’ kids through private school.

Still, a little compassion is in order.

Our mothers didn’t have the size-acceptance community we do for support. They might not have even known liking themselves just as they are was even an option, much less have a place where they could rage, share and occasionally get some sense lovingly –if virtually– slapped into them.

Besides, their mothers might’ve been pieces of work themselves, this stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum you know and it wasn’t too long ago that most of the western world was on food rations. I know my grandmother very nearly starved during the Great Depression and she kept a lifelong eating disorder and a raging case of fat hate as unfortunate souvenirs.

I’ve got nothing but sympathy –okay, almost nothing but sympathy– for women whose sense of personal value is so tenuous that a swing of the scale can make a difference between love and shame. I can only imagine how difficult it is not to pass it on to their children.

I do believe most mothers truly want the best for their children. For every Joan Crawford doppelganger, there are hundreds of well-intentioned moms who inflicted harm not out of cruelty, but out of their own human brokenness. They did what they thought was best using the tools they had at the time and although I’m sure we could spend ages comparing ridiculous and painful war stories, the best WE can do is forgive our mothers, learn from them and not make the same mistakes.

What do you think? I know it’s a sensitive subject, but I’m particularly interested in hearing how those of you who’ve struggled over size with your mother have forgiven, moved on and developed a new, healthier relationship…or not.

Happy Monday, gang, how’s every little thing?

Me? I’m fab. Signed the lease on the teensy new Plumcake Cottage in my equally teensy new village where my neighbors are the Pacific ocean, a motionless shriveled man who is approximately 300 years old and looks like Voldemort’s granddad (but, you know, in a nice way, although if he doesn’t move soon I’m going to have to check if he’s dead) and about three dozen dusty old trail horses who seem very interested in what’s going on with their new neighbors and ohbytheway was that a bag of apples they saw being loaded into the kitchen?

Nice work if you can get it.

Back in the states several of my friends still act as if I’ve moved into an uncharted, cannibal-filled area of New Guinea instead of a blissfully bucolic seaside village where, okay, the closest gas station is 20 miles away and if you want eggs for tomorrow’s breakfast you find the tree with the hand-painted wooden sign reading “Huevos Aqui” and follow the shakily pointing arrow to your cholesterol-laden destiny; but it’s also a place where you can walk for six miles on a white sand beach without meeting anyone except an escaped horse and and –at low tide– plump old women peeling mejillones (marine mussels) off craggy semi-submerged rocks.

Still, it’s a long way off from the hipster haven of Austin, Texas or the international moving and shaking of Washington, D.C.. So why the drastic move?

Simply put, I never thought I wouldn’t live in other countries, especially developing ones, and that in a large part has to do with my mother.

Born in Hong Kong, her formative years were spent moving all over Asia.

All her brothers and sisters were born in different countries and as a child I would delight in hearing their stories of cobras and monsoons and peasant revolts…a life totally different than anything I could know from the Benneton-diverse (you can be any color you want as long as you’re rich) confines of privileged suburban D.C..

Love and luck took me to Mexico specifically, but I’ve always been jealous of my mother’s experiences and believed a life lived entirely in your native country is something to be mourned, not cherished.

Although she’s no longer a part of my life and the tell-all fodder far outweighs the Hallmark moments, I thought we could take this week to discuss and yes, even appreciate, our mothers.

Since mother-daughter relationships are so complicated, especially when there’s a weight issue involved –raise your hand if your mother put you on a diet as a child because she couldn’t control her own size so she’d at least try to control yours– we’ll get into the deeper stuff later, but I thought it might be nice to start out on a generous foot.

Today Miss Plumcake wants to know:

What’s the most valuable gift your mother gave you, not by being a bad example, but through positive influence or personal inspiration?

It Gets Better is a noble sentiment, and maybe for some people part of a stigmatized group it’s true. I certainly hope it is.

But I’m not convinced it’s an accurate statement for the fat kids out there; especially not those who grow into fat adults.

For people of size, I’m not sure it does Get Better, at least not naturally.

Left to its own devices, the Western Beauty and Culture Machine will happily crush you underfoot –for your own good, of course– for being too big for their britches.

Everywhere you look there will be pop-up ads and billboards and interchangeable vapid reality TV “stars” admonishing you from photoshopped pages to change your body into something society deems acceptable. Only then will you get invited to the cool parties, have a partner who loves you and finally be worthy of full human status.

Oh, and don’t you dare be angry. They’re just doing it so you’ll feel better about you! They’re “just worried about your health”. Did they mention you have Such A Pretty Face? Did they make the Pointed Sigh?

Sigh.

It’s not like people really need much of a push to treat fat people as sub-human anyway. We’re manifestations of weakness, of the laziness and sloth they fear in themselves, we deserve our bad treatment because really, we’ve brought it upon ourselves. (You can try pointing out science refuting the claim that size is more than just a case of calories in vs. calories out, but be aware it’s dancing-with-a-pig futile in many if not most cases.)

Nope, you’re a lazy cow and there’s nothing sacred about cows in this culture: They just get slaughtered…or worse, slaughter themselves.

Bullying is now news, after too many –one is too many– kids, perceived or identifying as something other than cut-and-dried hetero, committed suicide.

But bullying, we all know, is not new news and it’s not solely the domain of gay kids.

Yet how many front page human interest stories do you hear about the plight of the fat kid being bullied in school?

Whither our tearful congressmen? Where’s the garment-rending when a bullied fat kid commits suicide?

More importantly, where are our 24-hour specialized hotlines to stop those suicides before they happen?

Tormenting fat kids is less of a headline and more of a forgivable rite of passage, swept neatly under the Children Can Be So Cruel rug (Children Can Be So Cruel, a fully-licensed subsidiary of Boys Will Be Boys and She Was Asking For It In That Skirt Partners, International)

Yeah, children can be so cruel.

Is it a newsflash that adults can be too?  The “War on Childhood Obesity”, however good its intentions might be, is just another way to codify and institutionalize size discrimination against the people least capable of defending their own interests: children.

Regardless of age, if you’re fat, Society, either openly or covertly, wants you to hate yourself thin. Except we can’t hate ourselves thin, at least not in the long term. Sometimes only thing that sticks from years of being hit in the head with the anti-fat hammer until our ears ring with self-hate is…guess what? Self hate.

So it’s hard to say It Gets Better because really, it’s going to get worse. Subtler, to be sure, but worse.

What’s the solution? We can’t wait for it to GET better. We have to MAKE it better.  Individually. Put on your own oxygen mask, then help your neighbor.

Make it better by applying a critical eye (and okay, sometimes a critical finger) to anti-fat bias.

Surround yourself with positive, thought-provoking friends and resources. Read The Fat Nutritionist. Understand Health at Every Size.

Reject any media that celebrates a culture where our bodies are punchlines and our feelings don’t count but still want our precious, precious dollars. I’m not the smartest girl on the block (and it’s not even a very big block) but even I have a problem with giving companies money to insult me.

Stop watching E! and its equally abysmal coterie (Those channels make you stupid. They just do. Read a book. Watch a documentary. Just step away from the “Reality TV” before mindless describes more than just your choice in entertainment).

For the love of all things holy, stop buying women’s magazines.

Watch the runway shows if you want to be up on fashion, at least you’ll only subject yourself to the models and not hot pink headlines offering quadruple chocolate fudge bombs, plastic surgery tips and “630 Ways To Drop Fifty Pounds By Thursday You Pathetic Spinster Cow!” on the same cover.

Find your own path, define your self BY yourself.

(more…)

Three in the morning and my eyes screech open, my heart, tired of being accused of not existing, does its best Charlie Watts in my chest.

No, it’s not one of the usual predawn car alarms or impromptu dog fights,  it is –joy of immeasurable joys– an anxiety dream.

They’ve been coming around with less-than-endearing frequency recently.

That’s no big surprise.

I’m about to move out of the current Villa Plumcake, which is entirely too big, plus it’s being held together by nothing but duct tape and prayer, into a sweet little cottage in a new village a hundred miles away.

Moving is stressful so naturally daytime stress equals nighttime book reports in my underwear.

Except they’re not book reports in my underwear: they’re vivid replays and variations of my mother’s name-calling and overall cruelty about my size when I was a child.

Weird.

It’s weird because I’ve been at peace, or so I thought, with Mommie Dearest for a decade.

I harbor her no ill will, I understand why she is the way she is and even though the phrase “all the warmth and parenting skills of a particularly unself-aware komodo dragon with the worst taste in men this side of Eva Braun” MIGHT be bandied about with what some people COULD describe as pinpoint accuracy, I’ve got no beef –not even a lean four ounce portion, “about the size of a deck of cards”– with the old lady.

"Hi, for the next 17 years I'll be projecting my own insecurities and body hate onto you. Oh, and punishing you for my own bad life decisions. Enjoy!""

So what’s with the nightmares?

I don’t know.

I have them, then I spend the next few minutes in a flush of relief because that’s not my life anymore, the blood stops banging hot in my ears and I’m fine. I go back to sleep to dream about talking to Wayne Rooney about how we’re going to comfort Cesc Fabregas now that his lifetime hero Pep Guardiola has relinquished the reins at Barcelona. You know, like a normal person.

I’m not even sure why I’m writing about this other than to remind my readers –many of whom suffered more than I did– that even when you’ve moved past your childhood, even though you’ve done the inner work and shelled out squadrillion dollars for a therapist and you can look at yourself naked in that hateful dressing room fluorescent lighting and still love what you see, still believe you are worthy of love, sometimes you can stumble or heck, your dreams can stumble for you, and –to steal a phrase from Stuart Smalley– that’s okay.

It’s so easy, I’m especially guilty of it, to gloss over the pure trauma sometimes involved with being a big young person in a world that equates big with bad.

Maybe that’s because in my travel across the fatosphere I’ve run into a lot of mawkish pity parties written by women in the permanent victim mode, those unfortunate souls unable or unwilling  do the work required to move on from their teenage angst and so every human interaction is an affirmation of their deeply engrained flawed belief that they are not worthy of love, that everyone hates them or looks down on them because they’re fat and that their mother/father/seventh-grade boyfriend was right all along.

I have empathy for those girls, but at the same time I secretly want to shake them and say “Maybe you don’t have friends because you’re a total downer. No one likes a sadsack, regardless of the size of said sack. Get thee to a therapist and work that sh*t out. Then let’s have gin and tonics.”

Still, it’s okay to have a mini relapse, a relapsette, if you will.

It’s okay to revisit and remember those dark times and the people who led you there.

Just don’t get stuck.

Your childhood, no matter how magical or traumatic, is over.

One of the great luxuries of being an adult is the ability to reframe our own past.

We can’t change it –Lord knows I wish I could, I totally would’ve gone back and cut that snotty Ruth Wallach-Eisenberg’s stupid crimped hair when I had the chance since I got punished for it anyway– but we can change how we look at it, how we let it inform who we are as adults, even if we stumble.

After all, you’re good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn-it, people like you.

Well, it’s late in the afternoon –too much Tramadol in last night’s pasta sauce I’m afraid– I just woke up to the sad but not unexpected news that Pep Guardiola has chosen not to renew his contract as sexypants manager of futbol juggernaut Barcelona and the mango I just chopped up for breakfast tastes like onion because I gambled on “is this knife clean or dirty” and lost, so I guess now is as good a time as any to admit a deep, dark secret:

I sleep with a stuffed animal.

>Richard Parker, generally referred to simply as “Tiger” (hey, not even we creative types can be creative all the time) is a six foot-long Bengal tiger and my constant bedtime companion for close to two years.

I’ve always eyed with suspicion grown women whose beds are covered with plush bunnies, fuzzy bears and other infantilizing paraphernalia. If you are old enough to afford your own bed, you are old enough to spend the night without Mister Floppers and company. Still, when Tiger came into my life, I knew we were meant to be.

Tiger has served as my go-to body pillow since I first brought him home, adherent to his duties where many other body pillows have failed. He regally bears the indignity of being used as a knee-stabilizer on nights when sleeping on my back is a must, he plays the role of “little spoon” with silent hauteur and when I need a bit of lift to write in bed, he’s got my back, literally. Not bad for being purchased while in a 3 a.m. fugue state in the Hallmark aisle of my local Walgreen’s.

My best friend in the entire universe (“and beyond!” she’d add) is also a body pillow enthusiast. She’s a big girl too but unlike me, is naturally endowed with what is known to medical science as “spectacularly ginormous bazoongas”, so much so that, when unfettered or only slightly battened down via stretch cami, they make sleeping comfortably a serious challenge.

Last year she spoke longingly of some firm looking double-pronged pregnancy pillow she saw in either a Jennifer Aniston or Jennifer Lopez movie where the lead Jennifer was in The Family Way (I don’t know, nor am I interested, in what the movie is called. Best friend though she is, she also has the singularly worst taste in movies of any person I’ve ever met, despite having a Very Impressive Degree in film something or other).

A bit of Google-Fu led me to the Leachco Back ‘N Belly Contoured Body Pillow.

It’s her birthday on Saturday (Happy Birthday, Girl!) and this was my gift. Her initial response was “Oh Girl I ruvs it!” which is always a good sign.

I don’t have one myself, but were my sleeping arrangements other than they are, I would willingly retire Tiger in exchange for something that supported my back, thighs and stomach (my gals are travel-sized so don’t really do much of anything but sit there and tell me when it’s cold).

What about you? Would you wrap yourself in a double-sided body pillow or do you prefer some other method?

Hey gang, just a little public service announcement from your very-nearly-cholera-free (though in retrospect smoked marlin n’ grits last night was perhaps a shade too adventurous) pal Plummy:

Be mindful when posting your medical information online.

Now obviously when Twistie asked readers to post their strangest diagnoses, she wasn’t mining your information for blackmail fodder to be stored in the bowel-iest bowels of Miss Plumcake’s Volcano Dream Lair until such a time as your creepy skin condition/antiquated disease/atrophied Siamese twin can be monetized for personal gain. And no, that’s not just because Miss Plumcake’s Volcano Dream Lair doesn’t technically exist. Although it totally should.

I’m proud of the unusually tight-knit relationships this kooky blog has engendered over the years, and when you post and comment with the same invisible friends year after year it’s easy to drop your guard. No big deal, except you’re not just having a casual chat here on the island of misfatty toys; you’re publishing, and when you’re on a public blog like this one, there’s no way to unring the Google Cache bell. It’s like herpes and menudo breath: You’re stuck with it for life.

Twistie’s ethical and I’m lazy, but there’s nothing saying nefarious nogoodniks –or worse, your employer’s (or potential employer’s) human resource department– won’t use their Google Fu to track down every scrap of laundry you’ve left draped around the internet’s chandeliers, dirty or otherwise if it’s of benefit to them. Illegal and unethical to be sure, but don’t think it doesn’t happen. And if comment tracking isn’t possible now, who’s to say it won’t be neat new feature in the coming years?

If you’d like me to delete your comments in the name of damage control, shoot me an email and consider it evaporated, just you know, be careful out there. And while we’re at it, you might want to get a cream for that rash.

As I mentioned on the Facebook page, it looks like Ashley Fink’s character, Lauren Zizes –the Token Fatty on Glee– has been written off into the sunset.

I stopped watching Glee a few episodes into the second season when I can only assume they fired all their talented writers and replaced them with escaped lab animals so they could better afford an extra six thousand hours of Autotuning per episode, but I remember bristling when Fink’s character would only be bought off by candy and then applauded a few episodes later when Puck, the resident Hot Guy and eventual boyfriend told her “I’m sure you’ve been treated badly by guys before” and she snapped back, asking him why he assumed that.

I cringed when Puck thought serenading Lauren with Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” was even close to a good idea, and cheered when she said “That was the first time anyone ever sang me a love song. And it made me feel like crap.”

She didn’t need, nor did she especially appreciate, people telling her it’s okay for her to be fat. She knew it was okay to be fat. She liked who she was: Fatness included.

No more of that.

It’s just further proof of my theory that the Media treats capital F Fat Women in the entertainment industry like The Highlander: There can be only one. Right now it’s Melissa McCarthy who dethroned Gabourey Sidibe who dethroned Beth Ditto who dethroned Crystal Renn back when people thought she was plus size…it just goes on.

Sure they’ll let a few inbetweenies float around and put them, usually naked (I swear I’ve seen Ms Renn’s ladynook more than I’ve seen my own, and I own several full-length mirrors) in their annual “shape” or “self-acceptance” or “hate your body a little less but really don’t because we still need you to buy this stuff from our advertisers” issue. But as for media face-time for real fatties?

You better get your sword and kilt back from the cleaners with a quickness.