At first, I liked this feeling of helping the mums. I’ve always liked, and still like, being useful. But in these conversations about my diet, I heard some of the mothers talk about food in ways that weren’t familiar to me. They used words like ‘good’ and ‘bad’—words I was already very sensitive to. They also talked about calories, and counting calories—things I’d never had any real exposure to. My own mother had always been very careful in her use of language around food and weight. Although she claimed to be ‘as vain as they come’, her approach to beauty was very low key in comparison to most. She didn’t shave, didn’t wax, didn’t dye her hair, paint her nails or wear foundation. She occasionally wore mascara and lipstick. She washed her face with water. She put on Nivea cream or Oil of Ulan in the morning, but that was about as far as she went. She was naturally slim, and got slimmer during times of stress. So beyond a copy of the book Fit For Life, and occasional phases when she would suddenly start eating lots of Pritikin bread and make her own kombucha out of a big blobby scoby that was growing in a glass jar in a shadowy corner of the living room, she never really talked about diets. Even though this was the opposite of her intention, her lack of interest in these things left me a little defenceless against the strong opinions of some of the other mums—grown women who mustn’t have known any better. Must not have realised how closely I was listening, and wanted to copy.
The praise about my slimness kept coming, and after a little while it began to dawn on me that my feeling about it had changed. There was something uncomfortable stirring in me now: something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Until I got thin, I’d had no idea what a big deal this whole ‘fat’ thing was for people. Most people in our community treated me so differently now it was almost as though they saw me as an entirely new person.
I understood it—I think I understood it—but I began to feel overwhelmed. I felt a little bit angry, even, that people didn’t seem to understand I was exactly the same Clare I’d always been, just thinner.
My mind was having trouble catching up. Sometimes I still forgot I was no longer fat. When I look back on photos of myself at this time, I am shocked at how thin I really was. I still felt most myself when I wore baggy clothes and my body was covered.
When I was fat, I tried never to swim in public. Being in my bathers in front of other people always seemed to lead to someone saying something about my body that hurt my feelings. Now that I was thin, I decided I would allow myself to swim, but the ghost of all that teasing does not easily disappear. Because I was still scared of what people might say about my body, I took to wearing a big t-shirt over my bathers—one that covered my bum and the top of my thighs. I hoped no one would notice.
But my friend’s mum did notice. When I showed up at the beach in my long t-shirt, she said playfully, ‘Darling, you can take off the t-shirt. You’re not fat anymore, you know!’
I pretended not to hear her and ran to the water, sinking my body low, where nobody could see it and comment.
That was the last time I swam in public for a decade.
My life as a thin kid was certainly much easier than my life as a fat kid.
I still remember how lovely and easy it suddenly felt to run. Before losing weight, I’d never known it was possible to move that quickly around a basketball court. I was not only tall and fast, I’d become a decent shooter as well and, when the opposing coaches yelled out to their players to keep on me, I was not the ‘big girl’, rather I was the ‘tall girl’.
This change in my status came with an increasing amount of confusion. After basketball one day, I heard my friend Jane’s dad ask, ‘Who’s the new player? She’s good.’ I’d known Jane and her father since kindergarten.
‘It’s Clare Bowditch,’ Jane replied, unaware that I was listening. ‘She used to be the fat one, remember?’
‘It is not Clare Bowditch!’ bellowed her father. He actually thought she was joking.
He turned to look for me, then walked over and said, ‘Are you Clare Bowditch?’
‘Yep,’ I replied.
‘My God! You used to be so fat! Look at you now!’ He looked me up and down, then he made a face that, for some reason, I just didn’t like.
That year, I won a trophy for being the runner-up best and fairest in the team. It was the first time I’d won a prize since The Dais Incident in Year Four. It felt good, and yet, curiously, not quite good enough.
Although I no longer worried about my big stomach, because I didn’t have one, I had lots of other worries; ones that were difficult to make sense of.
As intoxicating as the attention was after I became thin, it came at a cost. When I was fat, even though I was sometimes teased, I was still quite sure of my world and my place in it. I knew my value. I knew where I belonged. But now, as a thin kid, I saw a crack in my universe that just hadn’t existed before. I saw that when you were thin, people seemed to like you more. And that just wasn’t right.
I ached sometimes for the old me—the one who didn’t know that it wasn’t just the mean kids who had an opinion on my body. I used to believe my mother when she said
