Religion and the Struggle with Weight – continued

Late the other night, I posted a “thumbnail sketch” of the bigger emotional and psychological things that are “feeding into my struggle with weight”

Autism. Sexual Abuse. C-PTSD, and all the tiny but super clingy tendrils and tentacles that branch out from those things … topped off by being a white girl being raised in a conservative evangelical (Protestant) Christian mission “bubble” within a Catholic Latin American country. I mean … what could go wrong?

What would those things have to do with weight? One would ask. They really don’t seem to have anything to do with each other.

But they do.

I may not be really succinct here. Conciseness isn’t my forte. I tend to pick through my thoughts as they flow past, grabbing the ones that insistently bob to the surface and hook my attention.

So let’s go back a moment, and try to put some of those pieces back together and see how the flow became tangled to begin with.

First off, I suppose, would be to acknowledge that from a very early age, I was not a trauma-free, neurotypical, mono-cultural, majority child, uninfluenced by the world of religion (and conversion.)

At the age of two, I moved with my family to South America. This was just four years after five young missionaries, compelled by their beliefs, reached out to befriend and convert an indigenous tribe in the Amazon, and were martyred on a small jungle beach. This shocking event deeply shook up the evangelical Christian church around the world.

My grandparents were missionaries in that country at the time, and my grandmother was with the martyr’s wives when they flew over the site of the murders.

Though four years had passed, this event was still very fresh on the minds of the church, and the local mission community when we moved there. Around the world, the wives and their families were on a pedestal of a sort, but fame is a strange and awkward thing, when you’re living in the middle of it.

But this “rubbing shoulders” and “growing up with” was the stuff of my life. These families were my neighbors and their kids and I went to the same school (although they were several years ahead of me in age). Post-trauma stress was inherited, to some extent.

All this to give some background to my upbringing.

~~~

It was a clear Spring evening, after I was raped, and I walked beside my bicycle because I found I couldn’t ride it. I was in so much pain and was so confused, I could do nothing but cry in hoarse, gasping sobs all the way home.

Upon my arrival home, late, my mom, heavily pregnant with my next sibling, was finishing making dinner. As I leaned my bicycle on the back stairs, still wracked in tears, she noted the blood on the seat and crossbar, and assumed – as any normal mother would have – that I had experienced a dreadfully painful accident on my bike, that resulted in somehow hitting my pelvic bone quite hard on the crossbar, likely causing considerable bruising as well as the bleeding. I was walking unaided, if understandably tenderly, but I appeared to be otherwise, physically “okay”.

Concerned, she lovingly rushed me into the bathroom, and gently seated me on the open toilet. Putting a washcloth under cold water, she lightly wrung it out, and instructed me to hold it where it hurt, in order to slow the bleeding and cool the inevitable bruising. She tried to reassure me I would be okay, but also had to get back to the kitchen, because dinner was on the stove and no one else could supervise it. (Dad had recently been in an accident and was bedridden in recovery.)

She came back in now and again to try to comfort me and rinse and cool the cloth in fresh cold water to give it back to me.

I had no idea how to explain what had happened. I had disassociated completely and didn’t understand anything beyond that I was in excruciating and incomprehensible pain.

~~~

I healed, physically. My baby sister was born the month before I turned seven and I was no longer the youngest of three, but a not-quite-in-the-middle of four. I loved my sister, but dealing with the events I had just experienced and then losing my “place” as the youngest and also feeling set aside due to the demanding needs of a baby, the adjustment was overwhelming.

I know in retrospect that had my parents had any idea what had happened to me, they would never have left me to handle what I went through alone, but at the time, they didn’t know, and I slipped through the cracks.

I began to wear underwear to bed, under my pajamas. For me, it felt like at least an added layer of protection. I would wedge myself tightly between my mattress and the wall at night.

This underwear to bed thing bothered my mom. She felt it was important for hygiene to allow the skin to breathe and avoid things like yeast or bladder infections, and one could do that with loose-fitting pajamas and night gowns, but not with underwear.

I couldn’t bear it. I think some of it was autistic sensory issues and a mass of confused feelings of typical age-related self-gratification combined with PTSD, but mostly it was feeling far too aware of myself “down there” when I wasn’t covered, and desperately wanting to self-protect – even from my own awareness. I would get up in the middle of the night and put underwear on under my pj’s, and just hope my older sister didn’t wake up or say anything if she did.

Time went on, and I learned to cope in whatever way worked best for me. Sometimes it was awkward (like the underwear to bed thing) and other times it manifested as an attempt to maintain control in other areas.

We would drive home from the city with all the groceries for a month in the back of the car, and as we bumped and jostled over cobbled or dirt roads, I could see between the door seals and the car, and I would worry about losing the groceries if they opened. My parents knew the doors were locked, albeit loosened by the constant jarring, but they were certain it would hold closed and keep things in. However, they didn’t know what else they could do to assuage my concerns, so they put me in charge of letting them know if the doors opened up. It helped me feel in control.

One weekend, and I have no context to couch it in, my mother was in the bedroom with my older sister and I. My sister was four years older than me, and my mother felt for whatever reason I don’t have the context of, it was time to talk with her about ladylike behavior, dress, and modesty.

I shouldn’t, probably, have been there for that conversation, but I was there, and I listened. And I took it far more personally than my mother ever imagined.

Of course, it’s been many decades since that lecture on modesty, but what I took from it clung to me then, and still clings to me now, even knowing where it originated and the twisted way in which I interpreted it backing it up with my own experience that nobody else knew of.

We were girls. Little ladies. And we should act like such. If we’re wearing a dress, we don’t play on or hang upside down on the monkey bars where others might see our underwear or under our clothes. We needed to sit with our knees together or legs appropriately crossed.

Of course this made sense to me. Crossed legs and protecting underwear-covered places! Why didn’t she understand why I wore underwear to bed?

But then my mom added the “why” … and it hit me like a bull in the chest. Because not only were we little girls, we were little white girls, and while my sister had brown hair like everyone else, she was fair-skinned and freckle-faced and had green eyes, and I was even worse because I had blonde-hair and my eyes changed between blue and green, and my skin was paler than pale.

We already got attention for just being who we were, without adding to it by not behaving in a ladylike manner.

My mind began racing. I stuck out no matter what I did or how I dressed, but now I had an added responsibility! I determined then and there that I would do my very best to hide myself: to be as invisible as possible.

But, in that same moment, I also deeply sensed that my own body – my very beingness – was a curse that betrayed me and sabotaged my safety.

And that is where it truly began.

What does this have to do with religion? It ties in … I’ll get there, but right now, I’m going to sit on this and process it a bit.