Impress
I was always the chunky kid growing up. Back when I was seven, I remember silently praying every night before I went to sleep, asking God to please let me wake up pretty. It was 1971, and I grew up on Elizabeth Montgomery, Barbara Eden, Marlo Thomas, and Barbara Feldon. I just wanted to be beautiful like them. My mother told me all the time that I was beautiful, but she didn't count. She's my mother, after all.
I prayed about figures like Barbara Eden and Elizabeth Montgomery for several years, and then finally gave up praying. Sure, there were times in my life, albeit short ones, when I was thin. When I was twelve, I was very pretty. But thin never lasted for long.
By the time I was 14, I had a drop stomach and varicose veins. I shrugged it off out of a defense mechanism and because my focus needed to be elsewhere. My parents were always so deathly ill, and so often in the hospital with life-threatening conditions, that my own physical appearance and health became secondary. My praying for my own beauty was replaced with frequent prayers for their mere survival. I started being a caregiver at age 15.
All my life has been a journey from one medical crisis to another for my parents. I cannot remember any period longer than two months without one of them being deathly ill. My parents are still in and out of hospitals, in life threatening conditions, almost every month. I always run to be by their side and to do whatever I can to help them recover.
Now I am 42, and little has changed. Sure, I dieted. I fasted. I took diet pills. I took thyroid pills. I took protein shake fasts. I tried hypnosis. I joined gyms. I did everything imaginable short of wiring my jaw shut. But the only thing that changed was my age. I had partial successes, of course, but they were short-lived. The yo-yo syndrome is all too familiar to those of us on this website.
My weight has affected my mind as well as my body. Twice, I married and both times I married at my highest weight. My sick mind rationalized that if the men married me at my highest weight, they must truly love me. Obviously, that didn't prove to be the case.
Now that I am again single and now middle aged, it is time to take time for me. Three decades of caring for my parents did little more than maintain their status; they've never improved. I need to take care of me before I become deathly ill as well, because I have no children to look after me in my old age.
My surgery is two weeks from tomorrow. I am never going to look like Samantha, Jeannie, That Girl, or Agent 99. But I will be rid of my diabetes and have a decent quality of life, finally. I no longer pray for beauty. Now I pray for health.
