I stopped crying then, because, yes, I did understand; much more than I knew how to explain with words.
Mum had known this day was coming but, even when it did, she still had no idea how to make it right. She had been warned already, she said, by a child psychologist at kinder, a woman who checked in on us from time to time; Mum had been told that even though I was bright and strong and clever, I was also rather tall. Top percentile. I looked a lot older than I was. In her opinion, there would be a gap, a discrepancy, between the age I looked, and the age I was. I would be judged for that, she said. It might make things a little tricky.
That year—the year I started kinder and first had the feeling there was something wrong with me—was the same year my older sister Rowena got sick, and moved to the hospital. Things were not easy at home, although, really, I had nothing to compare it with. To me, this was all quite normal. I just kept doing what I’d always done—I skipped, I danced, I demanded the world join me in the musical of life.
I was a kid. I was three and four and five. Every day was a new adventure. Yet the membrane separating me from other people, their feelings from my feelings, was very thin indeed. I had no words for the complex emotions swirling around inside me. Often, I’d think I’d done something wrong, but I couldn’t remember what, or how to make it better.
I wanted to believe Mum when she told me there was nothing wrong with me, that I wasn’t too big, but I already suspected she was just saying that to be nice. I started hearing a voice in my head around this time—one that was full of accusation, and anxiety, and worries. It told me I was too big, too much. I was making too much of a fuss. I was too demanding. Even then I was well aware that nothing I was experiencing could possibly compare with what Rowena was going through as she battled her mysterious illness. As loud and frightening as these thoughts sometimes became, they were preferable to trying to fathom what was going to become of my sister, and whether what was happening to her was going to happen to me too.
These accusations ran through my mind like dark mantras I couldn’t get rid of. The harder I tried to ignore them, the stickier they grew. There was something wrong with me. I took up too much space. I was too big. Too much.
They say the best way to survive a career in stand-up comedy is to begin your training in childhood, as a fat kid. That makes perfect sense to me.
Not long after Rowena died, I started my school life at Sacred Heart Primary School, Sandringham. I was cheerful and fat, and fortunately had very good friends, most especially Elly and Lynette. I liked using my size as a place behind which the smaller kids could hide. One of the legacies of Rowena’s death was that I always wanted to make things right, so protecting the little kids from the bullies was as useful for me as it was for them. But although I was excellent at standing up for others, I was shithouse at standing up for myself.
My size, and the world’s insistence that girls be smaller than boys, made me an easy target for teasing at school, and a gang of older boys made sure I knew it. When they saw me coming, they’d yell out, ‘Here comes Big Bird.’ When I ran anywhere, even just down the corridor, they’d say, ‘Look out! Fatty-boom-bah on the loose.’
They found it funny. I found it brutal.
I didn’t like it when they told me I was different. This feeling of not belonging sat big and heavy in my chest. My shame about my size was compounded when, at the age of six, I started to notice that there were no fat Barbie dolls, no fat Miss Worlds, no fat ballerinas, no fat newsreaders, no fat female pop singers, no fat girl role models on TV—in fact, no starring roles for fat kids at all, not unless you were a cartoon character called Fat Albert, which, clearly, I was not.
I soon came to realise that the best option for a fat kid like me was to put myself down before they did and get myself a little laugh.
So when the boys teased me, I played into the stereotype of fat as grotesque and limped towards them like a hungry monster, making munching sounds and yelling, ‘NOM NOM NOM! I’m hungry!’
It worked.
Now, when the other kids laughed, it wasn’t just at me, it was also with me—at least to some degree. I was hooked.
Soon I had a whole coterie of impersonations in my back pocket: I was Fat Albert, Miss Piggy, Chunk from The Goonies, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. I’d make fart sounds, swear, wiggle my bum, squish up my face with my hands and recite nonsense. They were cheap laughs, but they worked.
My life at school took a turn for the better.
My career as an entertainer had begun.
My parents were a little concerned.
They saw how the world treated fat kids. They knew how hard it was for me to find role models, or even just clothes that fit, and they worried. If it was difficult now, how would this play itself out in my teen years? They never ever spoke about my weight to me, and I heard them defend me against the insensitivity of other adults—mainly one male relative who felt compelled to express
