A Short Writing on Fat Beauty
To the bodies that rebel for us, to my mum's friends
I have always loved my mother’s fat friends. Short lived, my time in Indianapolis at the beginning of my life was what made me. Formative- the word doesn’t hold everything I want it to, how do you define the immigrant experience? In America my parents had friends.
My mother’s friends still tower in my mind, despite most of them now being shorter than me, and most of them were, or are, or have been fat. Christian evangelical punks in 1990s Indiana and Ohio were a strange group, I live with the contradictions, and so do they. Women who lived like the husband was the head of the house, homeschool moms, always dieting, always guilty, women who controlled their children. They dressed in black, long skirts in a punk way, long skirts in a modest way, their band tees had holes in them, they didn’t drink. My mum would go to the haberdashery where she worked as a teen and buy metal studs to decorate her hoodies and draw patches in sharpie on scraps of old t-shirts to pin to new ones. They had tattoos on their wide arms, tattoos on their chests, huge with breastfeeding, their hair was dyed in bright colours that flashed into mine when they helped me add streaks of red to my blonde baby hairs.
I loved the first time I had my hair bleached and coloured, my mother’s beautiful cosmetologist friend combing out my hair while I sat in an antique wood chair in the living room of the last house my parents ever owned. I think about her frazzled blonde hair, her lip piercings, her inked skin. Two sections at the front of my head, wrapped in tin foil from the kitchen and fizzing. I don’t even think you’re supposed to bleach kids’ hair that young, it was something I held as a little glimmer of parentally-sanctioned rebellion when I eventually went to mainstream school. The brightness of the red was a revolution and I reinvented myself as one of them, one of these women.
I had to call them all by their last names, an odd formality with these adults who loved me. Mr and Mrs, each came in a pair with a brace of rowdy kids who I still love with my whole heart. Not many of them are pairs anymore, and my generation of their strange little scene is scattered across the USA in a way that means I can never see them all at once again. All of us queer and strange and messed up, but we share an ardent admiration for each other’s fat moms as they live in our memories. I’m curious how fat they really were, it was the ‘90s, the 2000s, the word was so present. Now I think they were probably smaller than I am today, they were younger than me too, younger even than most of my sister’s friends who make me feel old. They started having kids in their late teens, unwittingly ceding their young thin bodies to be reshaped. It was a constant, open battle to regain control - we all knew they were trying not to eat, and that their bodies wouldn’t let them. Unruly.
Refusing the boundaries of our shared high-control environment was impossible for me. A tiny, skinny eldest daughter with energy only to perform to the best of their ability the role of clever, godly child, I was all in. But I think there was something erotic in their bodies, not just in the early budding of my queerness, but in the way they defied control. I know a little of this war now, the aching hunger and the hope of smaller, the break between my self and my physical form, I know how painful it can be. Within that, I see these thick waists and round bellies, cellulite thighs and second chins asserting their right to exist, fighting their way through starvation, holding on to what they need to endure, sensual and expansive to the last. I wonder if it’s the same for the other kids, the fixation on their beauty, early crushes. It’s such a classic to fancy your friends’ mums isn’t it, but it’s the fat women who stayed with me.
There’s something about a fat punk. The dark lips, the cleavage in a faded old navy scoop neck, bottle-black short-fringe hair against a full cheek, hips that move in worn out denim, thick hands with chipped nails. We all knew it was wrong, wrong to look that way. And yet, in the decoration, the ornament - the overwhelming intentional difference that defied their social directive to blend in to the best of their ability - they were adamant in their beauty. Loud and inspired, they created everywhere they went. Behind them all is a trail of paintings, writings, collage, music, magical homes that sung about who they were. They were poor, they were young, they were mothers, they lived as secondary artists to their husbands. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else as funny as my mum’s friends, total weirdos who ruined everything and built everything and messed up and got lost and were so important. I love them.
Now sometimes I look in the mirror and see one of them. It catches me off guard. My ratty blue hair draping over my increasingly tattooed skin, the roundness of my arms, the rolls of fat that rise out against the elastic of my bra, the divets in my shoulders from carrying the weight of my breasts. My hastily applied mum-makeup, red lips, my cropped shirt riding up to show the ripples of my inky, stretch-marked midriff. I never thought I would be fat, I was always small until puberty put the fear of a new god in me. I started curving outwards, only eating strategically, anything but that. When I became a mum it happened all at once, and I lost my reasons for loving my body. But these women had been teaching me this, too, how to love a body like that while they showed me how they hated theirs. I have spent so many years loving for them, running my hands across the ripples on my mother’s belly. I am so skilled at making myself a tool for loving.
Lately I’ve been revelling more in my fatness. The sexuality of inhabiting my fat body comes to me in flashes, glimpses that cut through one thousand layers of crusted shame and trauma built up between my body and I. The heft of me in a hand, the shaping and reshaping of my belly, big hips rolling, the weight of me, the weight of my chest. Not curves, but rolls, stacked, abundant I feel myself shake the floor, I am loud. Clothing myself, I wear big things and bright. I carry my birthright - the refusal to blend in, I create something new - the refusal to try to be smaller. I relish in the revelation of all of me, knowing as I do the hunger for more. My body knew how to break out of the boundaries that were made for it before I did. Encoded in my DNA, my own fat mum has gifted me this- a disorderly, ungovernable form, I need only to follow its lead.
Fat poem October 2nd 2023 Look at this lovely round head! Not one but 2 (two!) beautiful chins! Plump abundance! Cheeks like ripe berries erupt in sweet laughs, words like juice! Improbable anatomy my dr says- Even my arms are overachievers! Belly rising like a sourdough, triumphant in savoury laughs that are rich- Filled with the taste of butter! Expansive! This world filled with the promise of my body - overflowing, inflating! I am a balloon animal! Laughs that POP, words like warm breath and parties!
Love
From
Lydia
Incredible! Thank you so much for sharing ❤️
Wowza. Please never underestimate your writing. (And I might have to tack your poem on my wall!)