Prompt Week Nine: You don't know what you have until it's gone...

                The summer before eighth grade I went on a diet. I counted my calories and portioned out my food. I lived off dill pickles dipped in mustard and dry cereal. I didn’t need the added calories from the milk. For a treat, I allowed myself to have popsicles. They only had sixty calories and I savored the sweetness in my mouth. I was constantly hungry, tired, and irritable. I spent hours keeping a meticulous journal of everything I ate. I weighed myself five times a day and if I gained weight I would go for a run. I wore a size two.

                My mother was thin with a dark tan. She was beautiful; her hair was long and curly. To me, she was perfect. Her favorite food was homemade granola with almonds; it was the only thing she ate besides salad.  She was constantly complaining about her weight, said she was fat.

                One day I heard her talking to my uncle on the phone and the conversation turned to me. He hadn’t seen me in a while, our family wasn’t that close. My mother didn’t know I was around and she told my uncle I was great, beautiful with blonde hair and long legs, tall. I was short with dark brown hair and muscular legs from gymnastics and cheering. I was nothing like the daughter she described.

                We moved after eighth grade and I spent the summer getting ready for cheering tryouts. I was nervous but I made the team. At the first practice my new coach sized us up, trying to figure out who would fly and who would base during stunts. The girls on my team were tiny, smaller than me and I knew I wasn’t going to be a flyer anymore. At a size two, I was assigned the position of a base, something I had never done. At our first competition I ran into my old teammates and they were shocked to find out I wasn’t flying anymore but their surprise didn’t make sense to me. It was obvious I wasn’t thin enough and I spent the next four years at the bottom of the pyramid, a size too large to fly.

              In college, it became harder to maintain my weight. I wasn’t cheering anymore and the food in the cafeteria was so good. Things I never let myself eat before, like fried chicken, pizza, and bread suddenly became a part of my diet and for the first time, I realized how much I loved food. It was fun to eat without thinking about my pants size, though I spent plenty of nights in front of the mirror disgusted by my weight gain. It was a hard transition but I eventually decided I enjoyed food more than I valued the thin, ballerina’s body I strived to have. I was never going to be a Barbie doll with blonde hair and long legs; I wasn’t the girl my mother described and for the first time, I didn’t want to be.

                I wear a size six or eight now; I’m not as toned as I used to be and I’ve become an expert at dressing to hide my imperfections. I eat a lot more and don’t waste hours recording every calorie in a book or weighing my food. I’m happy.

When I look at pictures from high school I see a pretty girl with porcelain skin and a thin frame. She forces a smile as she strikes a pose she hopes is flattering because she has no idea how gorgeous she is. I want to slap her for wasting her time worrying about a pound here and there, for never accepting a compliment. I want to scream at her for never once wearing a bikini with pride because that body’s gone; I’ll never have it again and I never got to enjoy it.