Fat Blue Stockings
Today's Weight 179.5 lbs
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Within my extended family there are several fat women.
[Incidentally there are NO fat men – that only just occurred to me! I wonder if that’s significant…I’ll mull on that for a later post.]
All the fat women are intelligent, academically bright and professionally successful.
The rest have ‘jobs’ rather than careers, and have navigated through the choppy waters of life with varying degrees of success or failure. So far (thankfully) there has been no drug abuse, no violence, no family scandal bad enough to make me want to flee the country and change my identity.
On the other hand, there has been much successful (and loving) child-rearing, much uncomplaining toil for little pay and less reward, much dedication to home and family life.
In the early ‘60s my family experienced its very own baby-boom, and 5 of us girl-cousins were born between 1962 and 1966. Me, my sister J, and my cousin Janet were the ‘brainy ones’ and my other three cousins (Tracey and Debbie) were ‘the thin and pretty ones’.
We were predominantly plain and nerdy and gauche, while they all had boyfriends by the time they were twelve, had gotten laid by the time they were fourteen, and were knocked up by the time they were eighteen.
Man, we envied them! And boy, how they mocked and tormented us!
My cousin Debbie died in her teens, but even at 40+ Tracey is still jaw-droppingly gorgeous. It's difficult to differentiate her from her equally gorgeous daughters and their already frighteningly well-developed (though still pre-pubescent) granddaughters. They constitute three generations of skinny, foxy head-turners.
The last time we got together at a family party, J, Janet and I sat together with our respective husbands/partners and talked about diets and work and diets and work and diets and work and …well, you get the picture.
None of us danced – at a family party! – and none of us wore anything sexy and revealing (in our defence we hadn’t realised it was that sort of get-together), and most of us didn’t even do any flirting – except possibly with our own partners.
But we were now mature women, right? Confident, poised and self-assured, right? No longer those fat little geeks wistfully wishing we were pretty and popular, right?
Wrong!
It was like being transported back to the agonies of teenagerhood! I felt as fat and inadequate at forty as I had done at thirteen! All of their taunts and barbs came flooding back – because as teenagers they were cruel in the way that only gorgeous girls can be cruel.
If there was envy on either side, if was definitely emanating from the fat corner. Despite our successful careers and (mainly) successful marriages, there was a general feeling of inadequacy and yearning. OK, so we might earn better salaries and have more stable relationships, but we’d sell a kidney to be that sexy and that attractive!
Meanwhile, you could tell from their sneers that the skinnies might envy us our spending power, but they wouldn’t swap roles with us for a heartbeat.
It made me wonder what our lives would have turned out like if we’d been prettier and hotter. Our pretty cousins were no less intelligent than we were as children, but as soon as adolescence hit, they had no time for anything except boys. They skipped school, played up in classes, stayed out late every night, failed their exams, and left school at 16. Whilst J, Janet and I were studying for our A levels and choosing our respective universities, they were struggling to raise their firstborns in grotty council high-rises.
By the time we left university at the threshold of our careers Tracey had a couple of kids and all of her career opportunities had been wasted.
Yet, on some really deep level, we envy her, not vice versa. We probably wouldn’t go so far as to change places with her, but we’d certainly choose some of the more palatable aspects of being her.
It’s called having your cake and eating it, I think.
It makes me wonder - if we’d been pretty and slim would that have been our destiny too? Would we have been strong enough to resist the lure of teenage testosterone?
How many dynamite careers have turned into duds because some teenage Romeo turned the (previously studious) head of a bewitching Juliet? Maybe all that boy-attention would have been our undoing!
If so, we have our fat to thank for making us successful career women.
That’s a good thing…right?
Seriously though, I\'d rather be someone who is respected for her brain than her body. It\'s far less fickle and transitory, and it defines me far more than my body ever will.
Once I got to university, I immediately acquired a boyfriend, rather to my own surprise. I\'ve still got him. Possibly I\'d have worked harder if I hadn\'t met him, but I think I\'d have done more societies and ended up with the same results.
I do think I\'d have been fine if we\'d never met - after all, I wasn\'t looking for a boyfriend - but I wouldn\'t be if I lost him now, because, well, I love him. But I sincerely think that I wouldn\'t ever have gone looking for someone to fill that role.
On the other hand, I probably won\'t take a job somewhere away from him even if it would advance my career, but I know that he would make the same sacrifice for me, because he has.
My sister and cousin are both pretty and slender, and one is nearly finished her Part II architecture degree while the other is in her final year at Cambridge. But then they are very focused. I\'m incredibly proud of them both.