Suzanna and I have had many lengthy phone discussions about weight and the media, about how generally crazy the world is, about how the worth of a woman is measured not in contributions to society but rather with a dressmaker's tape, and after one such discussion I asked her if she would write down everything she had just said over the previous hour and share it with you all as a guest post. As it turns out, her powers of recollection are something to behold. --Weetabix

Nature versus Nurture. The debate rolls over and over the tongues of scientists, doctors and everyday people talking about extinction and adaption. There is also controversy surrounding weight gain and weight loss on almost every magazine and tabloid at the checkout counter of your friendly grocery store, not to mention the words of journalists in publications on the web and in print. 

It seems to me that people (and by people, I totally mean my family members) are forever worried about how they look, and almost obsessive about their weight.

Does that get passed down the generations along with eye and hair color?  Or is it learned from watching the actions of your own family and how they interact with you?  After being blatantly honest with people on the Internet about how much I weigh--actual poundage--I still don't have the answer about whether how much I weigh is nature or nurture.

I can show you evidence. I can tell you stories. I can rail against the man (as it were) and still be the same size. And some days, that is just fine with me. Some days I am all for looking like a cherub with longer legs and no wings, Rubenesque I say. Some days?  It kills me.

a I have been writing to preserve memories and stories, as well as for entertainment, for a long time.  Know what else I have been doing?  Seeking acceptance and praise, and for me those two things--weight and writing--have been linked from the start.

In a memory book, there is a photo of me on our deck when I was eight years old.  My mother lovingly scribed at the bottom of the photo, "Spring 1980, Size 10 Slim Levis Jeans."  There I am smiling for the camera with hip bones visibly protruding.  Writing may have been a link for my mother as well.

I was in the Talented and Gifted program in school when I was a kid. My parents had my IQ tested and that meant another two things. One, I could get out of some boring homeroom stuff now and again, and two, that I couldn't slack off and just daydream my way through class anymore. The potential was known. No way to hide anymore. No way to just write stories on the insides of my notebooks and poetry on the 3x5 cards on the checkout list from the books at the library.  I had to "buckle down."

Buckle down, hmm?

I was 10 and I was more worried about my weight than I was worried about my IQ. I would slide forward on those little orange, plastic classroom chairs and sit on the edge so my thighs wouldn't spread. I was one of the tallest girls in the class, thin as well, but I felt like I was this huge lumbering monster.

I was taller than my older sister. She of the long torso and absolutely flat belly, built just like my mother.

It was only in ballet class where my teacher would praise my long legs and swanlike neck. "Your arabesque is beautiful my dear, hands just right. Control...control...ah, perfect." And then I would leave the classical music behind in that studio that smelled of hardwood floors and resin and walk back into the normal world and my home for dinner.

When we were little they wanted us to clean our plates. The older I got the smaller the portions seemed. My mother said I was a bottomless pit where food was concerned. She loves to tell stories about how I would come home from a sleepover at a friend's house and proclaim, "I didn't sleep a wink and haven't had a bite to eat." Was that my way of just asking for food? 

As a family we ate at breakfast, lunch and dinner. If it was after school and dinner was to be delayed by softball practice, another ballet lesson, a horseback riding lesson or whatever reason, a small snack of apples or peanut butter on celery (or something of that sort) was permitted. Otherwise, snacking was not permitted. And if you were hungry, "Dinner is in a few hours, just wait a little bit, your father will be home shortly and we'll eat then."

At the age of 11 or 12, just before I hit puberty, I gained some weight. Looking back now at the pictures, my cheeks were fuller, but my legs were still sticks and I was still thin. But my body needed that weight for the five inches I would grow that summer in less than three months. It was torture. I felt like my body was being ripped apart. My legs would ache and I wouldn't be able to sleep through the night because of the growing pains.

What did I hear from my family? From my father: "You don't sweat too much for a fat girl." From my mother: "I don't know how we are ever going to find clothes to fit you."  From my sister: "...." (We didn't talk much back then.) When I grew into my feet? My dad would offer the ever-helpful, "Well, you sure do have a firm foundation!"

I was 13, almost 5' 7" and 113 pounds. My mother lied, and on the back of my headshot for modeling it said 110 pounds. Why would those three pounds matter?

At 14 my height and weight are inscribed into the memory book.  5' 7" 118 pounds.

At 15...same shit.  5' 7" and...what's this? 130 pounds. The horror! So, other things are brought to the forefront, Outstanding High School Students of America, Solo in Christmas Concert, Cheerleading camp at SMU.

The height/weight thing in the memory book stops there until the last entry, 17. At 17 I had gained an additional 10 pounds and thought I was an enormous ogre. I woke most mornings to find my mother bearing one of two things for breakfast: Carnation Instant Breakfast or Slim Fast.

I went to college when I was barely 18 and dropped the freshman 20 as opposed to gaining the freshman 15 and was praised, adored, worshiped and commended for getting a handle on that weight thing.

And yet, there was my mother. "Oh, you look fantastic...if I could just lose 10 more pounds!" And my father, "You don't sweat too much for a fat girl." My sister, "You're beautiful no matter what." She and I had finally become close.

When I was 22, I went from 140 pounds to 200 pounds in under six months. Now if my body was just getting ready to reload for another growth spurt, I could have handled it. I would have been over six feet tall and my shoe size would probably have been an 80 or something, but that isn't what happened.

I was miserable, I was married to a redneck cop, I had stopped dancing every night of the week in bars, I had stopped dancing for the college repertory dance team and I had just gotten the Norplant birth control device surgically inserted into the skin under my left arm. Six sticks of time-release birth control and a more sedentary lifestyle. I was retaining so much water that I could barely see from my face being so puffy. I had moon face.

I went to doctor after doctor with pictures from those five or six months: "What is happening to me?" I would journal out my dietary habits and get poked and prodded from blood draws and have to collect my urine for 24 hours at a time for this ass of an endocrinologist. "You have a tumor on your pituitary gland, I just know it," he would say. "You couldn't have gained that much weight in that short period of time even if you were eating batter fried mayo with brown sugar and the only exercise you were getting was rolling to the kitchen and back to the TV," another doctor would say. When all I wanted to say back to them was, "Fuck off. I am just fat and people don't see me anymore. I can hide right here out in the open and be just fine."

That was 13 years ago. I have gotten used to the weight and the weight fluctuations and what I look like with boobs, but what I haven't gotten used to is my mother's incessant need to feel responsible for my weight.

A few years ago she actually told me, "If you and [my husband's name] continue on the path that you are on, you will both be in scooters by the time you are 40."

What do you say back to that? I ask you.

I prayed on it, cursed a lot about it and sought the counsel of close friends and my husband. What I came up with was this: I called her one morning on the way into work. When the topic inevitably turned to my weight--as it always did--I told her, "Mother, I know that what you think you are telling me comes from love. I know that you cover everything that you say with, 'I am just worried about your health.' I am relieving you of that worry. I am relieving you of the responsibility you feel that you have to govern my weight. I don't want there to be another discussion between us about my weight because what you say hurts me. Whether it is coming from love or concern, it hurts my feelings and makes me angry at you."  She tried to interrupt me several times but I kept at it until I got every last sentence out.

She still talks to me about it, with the "I promised I wouldn't talk to you about your weight, I know...but..." and then I say, "Thank you, I love you." And I hang up. It has been hard not to talk to her about everything as I have always been a chronic over-explainer. But I have had to cut her out of that part of my life. High cholesterol count? Not going to call and tell her. Lost a pound or 10? Or gained them? Not going to call and tell her.

My father still remarks on my big feet but that is about it. My sister still thinks I am beautiful.

That's really all the praise I need. --Suzanna Danna