Why keeping my weight on is my pushback…
One of my biggest regrets in life is that the only pictures I have of myself and my daughter when she was weeks old are hospital pictures and one single picture of me standing in front of a Holiday Inn in Downtown Atlanta; my friend had insisted on taking that picture.
I have multiple pictures of me being pregnant, I had tons of hospital pictures. As a new mum, I was going to take some rest and when my husband (as he then was) comes, I was going to go out and take loads of family pictures and have fun. Life had other plans for me.
From when my child was three weeks old, all I heard about myself was ‘fat’, ‘bloated’, ‘Why does your stomach look like that?’, ‘Don’t get fat like my sister who left herself’, ‘I don’t want to take pictures with you’, ‘Why do I have to go out with you?’, ‘You irritate me’, ‘Let it not be that I have to switch off the light ‘cos I will be turned off looking at you’.
When I tried to push back and complain about how unfair and hurtful a lot of those things were, I got ‘You like when people lie to you’, ‘I’m not being hurtful, I’m being factual’, ‘So I’m not allowed to state what I prefer to see?’. What hurt more was pretending and keeping up appearances that this person was an amazing person. I boiled inside so much that it hurt but I was determined to please. I had a short-term plan to shed all that weight, look super hot and get the love I felt I deserved from him. Life was not done teaching me lessons.
