Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It (16 page)

THERE IS NO
greater motivation to be successful than being homeless. Okay not
homeless
homeless, but without home to the point you have no roof over your head and are forced to move your family of five back in with your parents and their nine pugs and get on public assistance.

You are probably thinking right now, this sounds weirdly like the life of J. K. Rowling, and I would agree. We live basically mirrored lives; she’s a billionaire living in London writing about wizards, and I’m in Ohio famous for writing about my crotch and stretch marks.

I bounced a dark-eyed baby girl on my knee as we sat in the pale mustard-colored room of the downtown courthouse. The only window faced a brick wall, and I bit the inside of my cheek and focused on the rain running along the rusted metal pipes outside to keep from crying.

“I think we’re the only ones who brought a baby to a bankruptcy hearing,” I whispered to Andy.

“Well, we didn’t have a sitter and I don’t exactly know the rules,” he snapped before softening and grabbing my hand in his.

Stuff like this wasn’t in your vows. The officiant didn’t ask me to say,
I Brittany, take you, Andy, to be my lawfully wedded husband, in happiness and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, in wealth and in the absolute humiliation that comes with bankruptcy, as long as we both shall live.
It’s not that I wouldn’t have committed to the vows, but a heads-up would have been nice.

We had been doing so well. Andy was working in IT for a large car manufacturer, and I was home with the kids, picking up part-time income from the advertising that ran on my blog on the Internet. We had bought our first home, a quaint yellow two-story farmhouse in the country that reminded me of the
Gilmore Girls,
and Andy traded in his sensible family sedan for a sports car that he leased on his twenty-eighth birthday. We hosted family Thanksgiving gatherings and Christmas morning brunches, took vacations, and sent our boys to private preschool. Andy and I were living the American dream I’d always wanted. No struggling, no stress, no empty stomachs.

Who could predict that an hour before I gave birth to our third child on April 30, 2009, breaking news would interrupt my labor and a TBS showing of
Clueless
to inform us that Chrysler had declared bankruptcy. And thirty minutes after that, Andy’s phone would ring telling him that he, and thousands like him, no longer had a job. There were no work, no answers, no medical insurance, and no way my single income could support our new family of five.

“This baby cannot come out right now,” I pleaded with the doctor whose hand was wrist-deep inside me.

She laughed uncomfortably, unsure if I was serious, and asked the nurses to ready the room for delivery.

“I’m serious. Andy, please,” I begged Andy, clawing at his hand
with every contraction, “Do something; we can’t have this baby on the day you lost your job!”

I cried with every breath and every push, until finally our third child appeared, her cries in competition with my own guttural wailing. Just as we had built our lives on our own, accepting no help or handouts from Andy’s wealthy family, we had lost it all on our own as well. It was a blow to our bank account, as well as our ego.

I sat in the parking lot of the health department in my two-year-old navy Dodge Durango. I’d loved it because it was big and strong, and I felt safe and untouchable powering through the streets with babies in the backseat. It was my very first new car, and it held its own each day in the car line outside my kid’s school, among the Escalades and the Hummers. Now it had taken me someplace very different: to the Fulton County Health Department to apply for public assistance.

You see, there is very little room for pride in parenthood. When you have three children and are living right at or slightly above your means, it takes almost no time at all to run out of money. Two months into Andy’s layoff, bills began to fall behind and our meals became less frivolous and a bit more purposeful; meat for energy and carbs for fullness, the bulk of our money going toward diapers for the baby and whole milk for the boys, and even that grew tight. Eventually we had to ask for help.

WIC stands for Women, Infants, and Children, and it’s an income-based nutritional supplement program for children and expecting or postpartum mothers. Upon acceptance, you receive a coupon book each month for milk, cheese, fruits, vegetables, and grains. I am not sure where conservative politicians get their
information, but I can assure you there is no sense of ease or entitlement in government assistance. I wasn’t a blip in the system or exception to the rule. I sat in the waiting room with three children at my legs, surrounded by parents who looked just like me: tired, down on their luck, and embarrassed. Once called back to the patient room, the children and I were questioned about our diets, had blood drawn to check our iron, and then weighed.

“Are you pregnant again?” the small blond nurse asked me as she adjusted the metal bar of the scale.

“No,” I answered. “I always look this way.”

There was no part of this process that wasn’t humiliating, from having your life judged and documented by government workers to pushing your cart full of children and WIC coupons up and down the aisles of Walmart, looking for the kindest cashier with no line to check you out.

We were on WIC for eight weeks, and as the auto industry perked up, Andy eventually got his job back, but it was already too late. Four months was all it took to break us.

I’d spent the evening before our bankruptcy hearing packing up our belongings, nursing the baby, and watching marathons of
Roseanne
on Nick at Night. As a kid,
Roseanne
was a show I had trouble watching. It hit a little too close to home for me, and I swore I would never let my children grow up in a house where the lights were shut off or the refrigerator was empty. Andy joined me on the couch as I cried watching Dan and Roseanne Conner love each other fiercely, despite being down and out more often than not, with equal parts irony and inspiration. Bankruptcy was a moment. Walking into the health department for public assistance was a moment. Moving back in with my parents for a few
months while we got back on our feet would be another,
oh my God long
, moment. These scary things we were going through were just moments in a life filled with millions of way more amazing moments, and we could either let them drag us down or we could stand up, use them, and keep on loving each other fiercely.

“Gibbons?” The clerk called from the doorway of the courtroom. “Mr. and Mrs. A. Gibbons?”

“After you, Mrs. Conner.” Andy stood up and reached for my hand.

“No, after you, Mr. Conner.” I smiled.

We sat across from a court trustee as he flipped through a binder of our creditors. Credit cards that we’d maxed out buying groceries and gasoline. Overdue water bills and disconnection warnings. The receipt of repossession for Andy’s sports car, which had been picked up from our driveway only days before, me watching it being towed away from my front porch, my neighbors watching from their living rooms.

None of our creditors showed up to the court hearing, though they had every right to do so in an attempt to enforce payment of debts. Maybe in terms of the big picture, what we owed wasn’t worth the trouble. Maybe they hated showing up to court to face poor people. Whatever the reason, I was thankful to look behind me and see only empty seats.

“Will you be keeping your home or surrendering it back to your mortgage holder?” the trustee asked softly. No matter how many times a day he was made to say this he was still careful to give it the pause and grief it deserved.

“We’re giving it back,” Andy responded quietly.

“Just sign here.” He placed a paper on the table across from us and shoved two pens our way. Signing away our home was the last significant act of the day. I walked out of the courthouse broke and without a home.

If I learned anything from that experience, it was that I would never put myself or my kids in a situation where the loss of one job would destroy our lives. It was more than just making better choices or creating an emergency fund. I had become far too dependent on my husband, and for the first time in my life, I felt drive, ambition, and blind hunger for my own success and security.

I started a blog in 2007, after having watched a news story about a mommy blogger who quit her full-time job to write about diapers and cleaning products from home, for money. I had long since quit planning weddings at the country club, and was staying home with two toddlers at the time. The only opportunities I thought existed as a writer were working for magazines or publishing a novel, two things that felt very out of my reach without the degree or the time. But writing on my own terms online was an exciting notion. I’d always been tech-savvy, creating a GeoCities website in college and throwing myself into social networks and forums while the children slept.

I went to work building my site, never calling myself a “blogger,” because that’s a bizarre word (think: moist) and because in my opinion a blog is simply a medium. I’m a writer. I just happen to put my words on the Internet because it’s the twentieth century and I’ve forgotten how to hold pencils. I’ve also forgotten how to properly fill out checks. Whenever I am forced to do it, I always end up having to google how to accurately spell out the numbers and I treat the “memo” section as a tiny to-do list that serves as a much-needed reminder by the time the bank mails the check back to me.

“Oh look, the electricity company cashed our check and I still haven’t called about that blood in my stool, I’m on it!”

The very first blog I created was called Barefoot Foodie, reflecting my then status as a stay-at-home mom with grand visions of becoming a famous food critic or television chef. There were a few problems with this plan. The first as that the only restaurants close to my house were a McDonald’s, a drive-through Subway and a seafood restaurant, and it’s really hard to critique shellfish in a landlocked state. Second, none of my recipes were healthy, and 2007 was the beginning of world domination for the vegan-gluten-paleo folk. And third, it was just a really sucky blog. I mean, there are only so many adjectives at my disposal to describe a bite of food, and eventually everything was just nutty and earthy and acidic.

“I can’t put my finger on it, but this cut of steak almost has a nutty quality to it. Very earthy, and yet borderline acidic.”

It was just gibberish. I didn’t like to write about food, I liked to eat food, and that’s not entertaining unless I’m doing it naked on a webcam and you’re paying $9.99 a minute to view it. Which I would do, by the way, as long as it wasn’t soup. I don’t eat soup in front of other people, and I especially don’t eat it naked.

After the demise of Barefoot Foodie, I began a two-year-long adventure of simply playing on the Internet. My sweet spot was always humor, so I would update the defunct food blog every few days with humorous anecdotes about marriage and babies, the two things I happened to be elbow-deep in at the time. And suddenly, people started reading it; real people, not just my mom and my therapist, Tom, who frequented my writing to look for cries for help. The posts were read and shared and shared again between women and work friends over coffee and in emails between sisters.

My readership grew larger and larger simply because other women were relating to what I was saying. It wasn’t anything particularly poignant, but it was honest. Marriage was hard. Motherhood was hard. Remembering to be a woman through all of it was
hard. There were so many examples of women online and on television flawlessly pulling off their lives—great clothes, clean living rooms, trendy children—that women began looking for someone to admit how messy and mistake-ridden it all really was.

I was crude and sloppy, entwining four-letter words with detailed exploits of my sex life and my periods. By the end of 2009 I had a monthly readership of over 100,000 as I wrote from the couch in the one-room garage apartment of my parents’ home, and it kept climbing. I had outgrown the confines of the mom demographic and was being devoured by girls in college, empty-nesters, and husbands desperate to relate to their wives. Companies that had previously shunned me for my language and explicit content began buying ad space, attaching my name to campaigns and advertisements. I was making more money through my blog than I’d earned at any of my previous non-Internet jobs, and I didn’t even have to put pants on to do it. I’d saved up enough for a substantial down payment on a house, and we moved out of my parents’ garage into a large home in the country, and two years post-bankruptcy, I began to out-earn Andy, and it’s been that way ever since.

For the very first time in my life, I had a career and I had a purpose and I was popular. I had built a huge community of readers, and they were emailing me, sharing their experiences and relating to my posts, even though in truth, I was functioning at a pretty anonymous level. Sure, they knew my first name, and saw me through carefully crafted and cropped photos on the Internet, but they were accepting my cockiness and confidence at face value. I wasn’t either of those things in real life, and I couldn’t talk about what was really happening, because it wasn’t always hilarious and it wasn’t always fun to read. I wanted to talk about the way my stomach made a slapping sound when I ran, the horrible things I said to myself when I put my jeans on, how disappointed I was in
my size, and how some days I barely left the house because I hated what I looked like so much.

Just like high school, I lived in constant fear of outing myself as a fat girl, until one day, someone else did. It was a comment on a photo on Facebook from the baby shower of a fellow social media personality. I had carefully posed myself behind the mom-to-be and some of her friends, but despite the creative concealment of my body, someone left a comment declaring that I was too heavy for the outfit I’d worn. It was the first time I’d experienced shaming on the Internet because up until that point, I had controlled the discussion and characterization of my story. It was my safe place, and losing that terrified me. Side note: is anyone else grateful social media wasn’t a thing when they were a teenager? It’s like Draco Malfoy and all three Heathers smooshed into one invisible organism that thrives on Internet memes and passive aggression.