And it’s here, in the middle of what psychologist Jean Piaget called the Age of Magical Thinking that I first experienced the thought I could not seem to un-think, no matter how hard I tried. It’s the same thought, the same story that so many grieving children, and adults, tell themselves after someone they love has died—it was all my fault. For reasons that I didn’t then understand, there was a very bad feeling inside me. I didn’t know it was just a feeling. I thought it was who I was. Again and again, when that feeling returned, so did the story—the voice in my head telling me I was a bad, bad person, telling me there was something I could have said or done or even just thought that would have saved her life, but I had missed my chance, and now she was gone. She was dead. I was alive, and I was going to need to make up for that, somehow.
3
Your own kind of girl
Chocolate, you’ve got chocolate on your mouth.
Oh, you long to be like the other girls
But you weren’t born to be ‘some other girl’.
‘YOUR OWN KIND OF GIRL’
(Modern Day Addiction, 2009)
If I were a better liar, if I could lie without a ‘tell’—without a twitch of the eye or a sniff of the nose—I think I’d still quite like to lie about this chapter.
The truth is so messy.
My lie, on the other hand, would be very neat. It would be entitled: An Inspiring Tale of Body Love, by Clare Bowditch.
And it would just read as one little sentence, something like:
Despite my body’s propensity to wax and wane like the bellow of a well-played piano accordion, it’s never occurred to me to want to change, not even once.
But that is not my story. Not even close.
Naturally, I blame my mother. My whole life she’s been in my ear, yakety-yak, with that classic line about how it’s not your outsides that count, it’s your insides.
Meanwhile, the world tells me different. Its terms are very clear: first as a girl, then as a woman, my best chance for success is to be thin or to get thin, and then for fuck’s sake to stay thin.
Both these stories feel true to me. And it’s on the shore of this paradox that I often find myself beached, unsure of whether I’m allowed to tell the true, unresolved story of my body, or whether I have to wait until I’m ‘fixed’.
Like my life in general, I just wish it were all a bit simpler.
I thought by the time I wrote this I’d be ready.
Apparently not.
Apparently, just like prancing around in my bathers in front of strangers at the local pool after Christmas, I have to show up scared.
So here I am with the true story of my body; a story my body has already been telling, without my permission, for years.
I was always a big girl, right from the start. My mother called me ‘a little peach’. My sisters called me ‘Little Baby Poonta’. They said it was an affectionate nickname, and it was easy enough to believe them because back then, back at the start, back before I knew anything of the world and what it would ask of me as a girl, or a woman, I liked my jiggly body. I liked the way it felt when I danced, and swam, and woke up in my own bed, all warm and soft. Inside my body felt like a good place to live.
Then I turned three, and everything changed.
Up until then, although I knew I was big—bigger and taller than the other kids—I only understood it in the same way I knew that my hair was long, and my eyes were green, and my dog was called Sam. I didn’t think of my size as some problem to be solved. I didn’t think of my size at all. At kinder, I was too busy singing, finger-painting and chasing Jimmy—the first boy I ever loved.
Oh, Jimmy. Dear sweet little Jimmy.
Yes, he was shorter than me, but just like Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog, I knew we were right for each other. I saw past his size. What I saw were his lovely blue eyes and his white hair, the way his face looked just like a Cabbage Patch Doll, only he was alive! I loved Jimmy so much that I told him so every day, all day, mostly by standing very close to him and singing him my original love songs like: ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, I love you, Jimmy. I love you so, so much. I LOVE YOU, JIMMY! Hooooo!’ (jazz hands).
Mum said my songs were just wonderful!
Jimmy—not so much. Sometimes, when he saw me coming, he’d put his hands over his ears and run away.
Despite this, I was still pretty bloody confident that he loved me as much as I loved him.
‘How could he not?’ said Mum. ‘You’re a peach. I’m going to eat you! Run!’
And I would. I’d run. Fast as the wind. Look at me go!
But one afternoon at kinder, when I approached Jimmy to sing him a new song, he said, ‘Oh, no. Go away!’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Why? I’m singing for you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re too big. Girls aren’t supposed to be so big. Go away.’
Too what? Too big?
I looked at him, I looked at me, then I looked at him again, and realised, perhaps for the first time, I was not just big, I was too big. In that moment I noticed that my painting smock was tight against my stomach. In that moment it fused inside me: there was something wrong with me. The words circled in my head like guilt. You’re too big. That’s why Jimmy doesn’t love you.
Mum was not having it. ‘No way,’ she said. She got down on her knees, down to my level, looked me in the eyes and called me schuttie, the Dutch word
