jolee sullivan

Growing Pains

I thought that she was staring at my boobs. It happens—kind of unfortunately often—and I didn’t want to embarrass her by signaling that I noticed. I tried to remember, without looking down, what shirt I had on. It was new: trendy and sheer with blue flowers, from a popular store in the mall. It was clearly made for small-chested girls, so I’d been nervous about any slight show of cleavage, but I’d have cleavage in any shirt and tried to go for confidence. Now, only an hour into the school-day and mortified, I resolved I’d have to pass it down to my sisters—or, better yet, throw it away altogether.

This wouldn’t have been the first time that I’d felt this frustration of being cheated out of wearing cute clothes, clothes I wanted to wear. In the fourth grade my classmates ran flat-as-boards and free in tight sparkly tank tops while I tugged uncomfortably at the elastic of the plain white training bra that hid underneath my t-shirts. There was a girl in our grade, Rebecca, who came back from summer vacation and was immediately noticed for suddenly having boobs. Over lunch-line nachos and my homemade peanut butter sandwiches, my friends and I leaned our elbows on sticky wooden benches and marveled over her actual padded bras. I thought nothing of the gossip until one day, during reading-time, a friend loudly asked me, “What’s under your shirt?” When you’ve got boobs in the fourth grade, it becomes your identity. At nine years old, this was something I was starting to become painfully aware of.

It was early September when my mom took me to get my first bra. It wasn’t a discussion we had- we didn’t have those types of talks. My siblings and I followed her through the fluorescently lit aisles of Target, our Saturday routine. We all knew that these trips were the wrong time to whine or complain or, God forbid, ask her to buy us something. So, when we turned and began walking through the girls’ clothing section, I was intrigued. Were we taking a shortcut to the produce aisle? And then, we stopped right in between two tall walls covered in bras, and Mom turned to me and said, “Do you want to get a bra.” Her tone implied that it was more of a suggestion than a question. I was at once mortified at the intimacy of the situation and relieved that I wouldn’t have to ask her first. Overwhelmed and terrified that I’d be seen looking at bras, I chose a plain white one that looked like it could’ve been a tank top cut in half. When we got home from the store, I rushed to my room, ripped off the tags, and immediately put it on. Standing in front of the rectangular dollar-store mirror propped against my off-white wall, I did something I hated to do: examined my body. I didn’t look cute wearing a bra, the way the women in Mom’s InStyle magazines did. Flipping through the pages where adult women smiled at me with bodies smaller than mine, I felt like some sort of grotesque mutant-child. I wished to tug the stupid thing off and toss it to the pile of dirty clothes that littered the old carpet that came with the house. Instead, I pulled a camisole over it, looked at myself, noticed the difference it made, and begrudgingly accepted that I was now a girl who wore bras.

After that, the uncomfortably acute awareness of my body and the space it took up became more powerful over time, especially as every part of me seemed to get larger and larger. In order to dodge the blows of anxiety provoked by my insecurities around cute boys and girls who were prettier than me, I avoided hanging out with anyone other than my closest friends. Even then, the time felt dictated by the voice in my head that told me I was uglier than them, bigger than them. I couldn’t tell them that, though—those were thoughts reserved solely for the pages of my diary.

Anyway, it had turned out that she wasn’t staring at my boobs. While she administered my Spanish-speaking exam, as I stared straight ahead and formed choppy sentences in a foreign language, Mrs. Farley was staring at the fleshy pale underside of my left forearm and the neat stack of thin, red cuts that lined it from wrist to elbow. I pieced this together four hours later when a bony blonde guidance counselor sat across from me and demanded to see my arm.

I’d been laughing with a friend about the food-fight that had broken out at lunch while we set down our backpacks and scooted into our lab stools. That’s when our science teacher informed me that I’d been called down to the main office, and that I should probably bring my belongings with me. My friend and I exchanged glances, and agreed that we’d probably all be getting called down, probably to get scolded for the food-fight. I walked slowly through the empty hallways, rehearsing what I might say. I’d never gotten in trouble at school before, and I was concerned about my clean record that I’d been relying on to get me to college, and how I might be punished, turned into a self-proclaimed disappointment, if my parents found out.

Five minutes later, I shifted in the itchy blue chair across from Mrs. Ennis who was, apparently, my guidance counselor. It was two months before I’d be graduating middle school, and I’d never met her. Her eyes were huge, an icy blue, eyelids undetectable. Her office was tiny and square, with plain white walls, a neat little desk, and a calendar with horses on it amongst other horse paraphernalia. I stared out at the bus circle, watching the busses arrive, wondering what I’d be missing in class. She gave a tight-lipped smile and asked, “Do you know why you’re here?” I disliked her immediately.

“No,” I squeaked, aware of the shakiness in my voice, the heavy beating in my chest.

“How’s things? Classes a little overwhelming?” The beating steadied.

“Good! Um, a little, maybe.” I smiled weakly. I knew she must’ve had my record pulled up, my near-perfect GPA.

“What about at home? Everything alright?” She tilted her head to the side, ever so slightly.

“Yes.” I swallowed.

Then she asked to see my arm, and I felt certain that I would faint. My heart pounded so hard that my eyes hurt. Feebly, I held up my right arm, turned it around for her, tried to feign confusion. She wasn’t duped.

“How about the other one?” Her voice was quiet, but there was a challenge in her tone. She wanted to be right. She wanted to expose me. I imagined her receiving the report from the main office that one of her students, last name M-Z, was found to have cuts on her wrist. I pictured her going over my record, a girl she’d never met, excited for an appointment that didn’t involve changing a student’s schedule, finally being able to make use of her social-working degree.

Eventually, feeling trapped, I showed her. Insisting to myself that I’d never again wear short-sleeves, I turned my left arm over just enough for her to see, then shakily extended it towards her. It hadn’t ever occurred to me to tell her no, to refuse to bare my vulnerabilities to this cold, strange woman. Later, when she called Dad and he picked me up with my brother in the front seat, the only thing he said to me was that I should’ve told her no.

There was a long, painful hour or so that was filled mainly by my sobbing and her staring at me with her head tilted ever so slightly to the side. Then, smugly, I thought, she informed me that she’d have to call my mother and that no, I wasn’t allowed to leave the room while she did it. This, in effect, was my nightmare. When my mother’s cell phone didn’t pick up, Mrs. Ennis called her at work, on speakerphone.

“Hello?” Mom’s work voice was high-octave, polite, sweet. I cried silently. Mrs. Ennis did the introductions and broke the news, and then told my mother that I wanted to speak to her. Physically, I felt, I couldn’t do that. After a long silence, over the impossibly large lump in my throat, I spoke something about feeling bad about my body. My mom was silent for a long minute, then said, in a quiet voice I hadn’t heard before, “I tell her all of the time that she’s beautiful.”

No memories came to mind. Instead, I thought about a time when we were cleaning up after dinner; I can’t say whether it was the memory of one specific night or, rather, a collective memory of sorts that encompassed how most nights went back then. There was the usual fight between my siblings over who had to do the dishes.

“I do it every night,” Kayla whines.

“Um, actually, you don’t do shit.” Ben says, scraping leftover mashed potatoes into the garbage.

“Sari, did you eat three of those rolls?” My mom says, peering into the bread basket, counting the leftover biscuits. And without waiting for an answer, “Kayla, how many did you eat?”

In my head, I scream: what’s the difference? She made them for us, she wasn’t going to eat them. She rarely ate what we ate, or if she did, it was a fraction of the portion: the hamburger flat on the plate, no cheese or bun. It’s possible I did ask that question aloud, maybe not that night, but at some point. When I challenged her this way, she’d usually respond with a long, silent stare, then look away or say, with force, “Dry the dishes.” At this age, it wasn’t yet clear to me that these things my mother did that I pegged as plainly mean were the byproduct of certain mental illnesses, coupled with a fairly severe eating disorder. So, on days where merely going to school felt monumentally exhausting, it was desperately frustrating to me that these were the conversations I came home to have with my mother.

Once the dishes were dried and put away, and the pots and potholders and forks and napkins and crumbs were cleared off the stained wood table, she packed our lunches. Peanut butter on potato bread, Capri-sun, a plastic sandwich bag of Oreos, an apple. We only bought lunch on Fridays. On Fridays, they always served pizza. It was the only day of the week that they served the same thing, and we hated it. We’d pin the school’s lunch calendar up on the fridge, and circle the days where they were serving nachos or tater tots. We always bought on Fridays, though. My friends found it amazing that my mom packed our lunches every day. I, plagued by that incessant, illusory belief that my life was unfair, found it humiliating.

My mom packed her own lunch, too. On the kitchen table next to boxes of Frosted Flakes and Coco Puffs, she’d lay out a plastic sandwich bag that held four raisins and four candied pecans, and another with a small stack of Wheat Thins. In a crumple of tin foil the size of my palm, some slices of cold-cut turkey. For as long as I can remember, this was the lunch she brought with her to work, after her breakfast of black coffee and yogurt.

That horrific afternoon stuck inside of Mrs. Ennis’ office was more of a turning point in my life than I could’ve recognized at the time. At the very least, the heavy, long-kept secret of my pain was acknowledged by someone other than me. And suddenly, I’d had the most intimate conversation with my mother that I’d ever had. Even then, I think we both knew that she didn’t call me beautiful “all of the time.” Although her claim to my guidance counselor evoked a bit of that old, familiar frustration, some part of me could understand that maybe, she simply didn’t know how to.

We didn’t have a long, heartfelt talk when we saw each other, and I wasn’t expecting to. When she arrived home from work that day, though, she came into my bedroom and handed me a plastic Target bag. Inside was a journal with a smooth leather cover entitled Life Balance: A Journey of Self Discovery. It then struck me that all of my other journals, regular and blank, had been birthday or holiday gifts from her that I’d just become accustomed to receiving. This one had prompts intended for, as titled, self-discovery. I peeled off the tag, and got to work.