Last night, I had a flashback to one of my less than stellar moments. When I was in elementary, I attended a rather racist/small minded school. The student body (lower, middle, and upperschool) was about 300 and for many years the population of brown skinned folks was no greater than 4...me, some upper school kid, Kashul and her brother (they were from India). Not only was I just one drop of diversity, I was also taller, larger and smarter than my classmates. No matter what I did, I always stood out...and instead this being a positive thing, it was a negative thing.
When we were at recess, I always played "The Monster" in chase. The one day I sat down and refused, the other kids got mad at me. "You have to be the monster. You're the biggest one in the class and you're black".
Help from the teachers? Ha! For extra credit, the PE teacher asked us to write down a joke. A girl in my class wrote the following:
"How do you keep niggers from jumping on the bed? Put Velcro on the ceiling!"
Not only did the girl receive full extra credit for the joke, the teacher dismissed my complaint with a "Why don't you see that as funny", I had to take it as far as the school principal. When the teacher was called to the carpet by the principal and my parents...she became weepy and regretted the joke going through. The lesson - using nigger was wrong, but humiliating me in other ways was fine.
Shortly after that incident, we had weigh-ins in class. At the time, I was 5'6". I weighed in at 135 lbs, had begun my period and was in a B-cup...perfectly fine weight for someone of my height and build. But I was in a class of kids who had barely crested 4'0" and 70 lbs. The teacher used this time to berate me in front of everyone for being fat. She warned the other girls not to be like me and told me that I needed to lose weight.
It was a sad, sad, sad time.
How did I deal with it? I stole food from other people's lunches and then acted surprised to find that "Mommy packed" extra puddings, twinkies, cookies. I also used allowance and other monies to buy corndogs, fries, grilled cheese sandwiches and ice creams at lunch - in addition to the lunch I bought from home.
My parents were so perplexed. My father once said "I'm worried about you. I don't understand why you're gaining so much weight. You don't eat that much at home." I wanted so badly what hell that school was, but I knew that he was working so hard to raise the money so that I could go to a good private school. I felt like I would be letting him down if I told him about the pain that I went through every day. So, like a good fat girl, I just stuffed my emotions to the bottom of my soul and just smiled. That day, not only did I steal junk from people's lunch, I stole a bologna sandwich. I also bought three corn dogs and 2 ice cream sandwiches. It was so off the chain that my teacher called FINALLY called home and told my parents that I was stealing food from other kids (it had been going on for years....the teachers knew, they just figured since I was Black, my family was too poor to feed me).
Did that get me out of the school? Not hardly. I had to fail all my classes in fifth grade before my parents pulled me out and put me in some place that was much better for me - a public school for smart kids. I could have been going there all along! It was fab...there were all kinds of kids from all kinds of backgrounds. I was still the largest and the tallest and the smartest - but it was a little easier. I never fully recovered from the experience at the first school and that impacted me all the way through college. Never felt good enough to be accpeted for me, hated being fat, hated standing out for anything, didn't trust that anyone liked me for me. How did I deal with it? I ate and ate and ate and refused to exercies. I was also in orchestra, lead in the school plays, president of several organizations - it was all a front to cover up my insecurity.
Man, that was a horrible time. It was also the birth of my wicked relationship with food and body image. I was only 6 when all of this started....and 33 when it stopped.
27 years.
