As you may have figured out from the desperate attempt at word play in this post's title, I have a lot on my mind after my family reunion.
Item 1: My female family members were the ones who vocalized that they noticed my weight loss.
Most of them haven't seen me in two years -- I was too fat to want to show my face last year, even to my own family -- so I didn't go to the 2014 reunion. I thought that was a weak excuse to miss out on a chance to see people I love when life is so short, so I bought my ticket this year before I even started dropping the weight. Anyway, it was nice to get some praise, and it helped me along on that whole sucking-at-talking-about-it-with-those-closest-to-me thing. (Of course, one of the first things my dad said to me when he and my mom picked me up from the airport was something like, "Am I allowed to tell you anything about how you look?" and I said something like, "Nothankyouplease, hey, look over there!") I even maintained about a 10-minute conversation about it with one cousin, but that's probably because she's had her own set of issues with that and I felt safer. Still, I am rising above my own squeamishness, in most cases.
Item 2: I have now become hopelessly awkward in situations where someone else's weight is at issue.
My long-story-short example is of when my dad was playing around with a little kid, who was running around the plastic lawn chair he was sitting in. When he reached out suddenly to catch her, the force from the quick movement that pulled all his weight to one side of the chair, snapped one of the chair's legs and brought him crashing down onto the ground, breaking what was left of the chair. I hate to admit it, but it was like watching my own fat life flash before my eyes. That type of embarrassment was always one of my biggest fears, and looking at my dad lying flat on his back amid the gasps and emphatic "Are you OK?!"s completely paralyzed me in vicarious mortification. Even though the man on the ground was my daddy and should have been my biggest concern, the moment I knew he was fine, I immediately occupied myself with my little cousin, whom my dad was deflecting our concern towards in an effort to cast the spotlight off of himself while he insisted he was OK. She wasn't tangled up with the whole chair scene, but she did fall down and get a little bleeding cut on the back of her foot. I grabbed her hand and marched her to the bathroom to clean up the scrape and put a Band-Aid on her. I should have helped my dad up, but I walked right past him and removed myself from the whole thing because I was embarrassed. What the hell is wrong with me? Part of me thinks I was being selfish, and part of me thinks I was doing what he would have preferred in that situation, which was to ignore it.
I made a point of not asking him if he was OK in front of everyone, because if it were me, I'd just want to forget it. I need to remember that although my dad and I have similar weight problems, we are not the same person. He brought up the incident often throughout the rest of the weekend through jokes, and he actually handled the whole thing in the moment with complete grace and composure. I would have spent the next 15 minutes crying in isolation and the next several hours avoiding eye contact with my relatives. My stupid sensitivities are kind of compromising my humanity. If I could go back in time, I would jump out of my seat and be the first person reaching out my hand to help my dad get back on his feet. If that situation had been reversed, he would have leapt out of his chair to try and catch me before I hit the ground. #deadbeatdaughter
Item 3: My grandpa is a jackass.
OK, that's not true or fair, but it was a little cathartic to spit that out! I'm about to describe a pretty insulting exchange with my grandfather, but no one reading this is allowed to call him a jackass. He's just of a certain generation that never learned to express feelings tactfully or correctly (or possibly at all), doesn't understand that money is not a currency of affection, and is a legend in his own mind. I know he loves me, and for what it's worth, nothing like this has ever happened before, so keep all of that in mind as you're reading.
For background, this is my dad's dad in a nutshell: highly educated, WWII vet, breadwinner for his wife and 5 kids whom he never told "I love you," hard worker, world traveler, eventual grandfather of 6, philanthropist, and eternal emotionally repressed relic of the Silent Generation. He's a good man who doesn't know how to show that he's a good man.
So, when I found myself alone with him in the dessert room at the reunion (that's how we roll), it wasn't a total surprise when, without preamble, he challenged me to a contest with my father that he would moderate and award an amount of money so appalling I won't repeat it, to the first one of us to lose 30 pounds.
Yeah. You read that right.
Trying to ride my owning-it wave, I played it cool and responded, "Oh, I already won, then." Without taking a second to look at me or asking a follow-up question, he doubled down and told me, "No, you haven't. You haven't even started yet. Thirty pounds." I served myself the piece of cake I had been cutting -- the first sugar I had all fucking weekend -- and wordlessly left him standing alone in the room.
So, naturally, he repeated the entire wager to the next person to enter that room, which happened to be my mother. I could hear parts of his monologue to her from two rooms away: "thirty pounds" and my name and my dad's name and "weight" and "between X and X dollars." It sounded like my mom's encounter with him ended the same way mine did: with a wordless exit. She burst into the room where I was shoving cake into my mouth and said, "Grandpa has some nerve! He's in there bragging about the bet he wants to make between you and Dad!" I shrugged and said, "I don't care." She said, "Well, it's just like... fuck you!" (Also cathartic to type. And funny to remember my mom saying it.) I smiled and said, "It's OK, Mom. I don't care. Like, I actually don't care." She gave a stiff nod, wiped the nobody-fucks-with-my-daughter look off her face, and said, "Good." And then we shared my cake, because she clearly stormed out of the dessert room before she could take any for herself.
I've seen my grandpa more recently than I've seen the rest of my family, so maybe he hasn't noticed the progress (even though it was 35 pounds ago -- more than his cute little stupid bet, thank you very much). He's also a 92-year-old man who had probably heard by that point that his very overweight son had just turned a plastic chair into curbside pick-up, so maybe he just locked eyes on the next fat person he saw and decided he had to intervene on behalf of the chair population. Or, maybe he's just a hopeless old guy whose emotions are stunted and he doesn't know any other way to express his concern (or maybe that was praise?). Regardless, even though I didn't care in the moment, I started caring as soon as my cake was gone.
So, let me take care of that outstanding business real quick, because I still respect my grandpa too much to say this to his face, which is probably why I froze in the moment:
Who the hell do you think you are, Grandpa? Maybe I should tell you who the hell I think I am. I'm a self-possessed young woman who has quite literally worked her ass off over the past few months and is damn proud of it. Don't you dare forget I'm also the grandchild of your departed wife, who would have smacked you in the mouth if she heard you come at me the way you did. Let me catch you up: I have her spark, too. I won't smack you, but I WILL stun you. I'm losing this weight for me, not for any flashy challenge you imagine you can throw at me to make some kind of point. You're not a part of this, so don't ruin it. I've lost more than double the amount of weight you think I haven't started working on yet. So, y'know, I love you, but... you can keep your mouth shut and you can keep your money.
Time to go shower after my 2-mile post-dinner walk and emotional release. (SOME people should really try that.)