jennzjournal

So obviously as my subject line suggests, I'm not in the best of moods today. I really should be in a good mood considering I'll be out of this place in three weeks, and that alone should be enough to lift the spirits of even the emoiest goth kid in the world. It's just I can't seem to get into a good mood since my mother has come home despite the vainest efforts of those who love me the most.

The thing about my mom is that she has a lot of problems with herself, and her means of escape is alcohol. She is a full-blown alcoholic. She drinks when she's happy, sad, angry, etc. I mean if someone were to ask me, "Hey, what's your mom doing?", nine times out of ten I'd be accurate in saying she's probably well into her second six pack. I'm not exaggerating either.

I'm not saying that I'm perfect or anything because my vice is food, but at least with my vice, the only one I'm hurting is myself. With alcohol, my mom is completely unpredictable. Sometimes she can be sweeter than molasses. She'll stroke my hair and tell me how much she loves me. Sometimes she'll be really sad. She'll cry and carry on about how horrible her life has been. She'll tell anyone who is within sobbing range that she's going to commit suicide. More often than not though, she'll be angry and downright mean. She'll tell me that she hates me and that she is so ashamed of me. She'll even tell me that she no longer has a daughter and that she never wants anything to do with me again. When she has felt mean in the past, she has gotten my step dad arrested twice and has made me cry innumerable tears.

I'm not writing about this because I'm feeling sorry for myself. I'm just telling the truth. You can ask just about anyone who has ever been exposed to my mother while she's going through any number of her drinking bouts. Just about any of those people can testify to her many degrees of craziness while she's drunk.

I wish I can say that I've gotten used to her fits and that I no longer let them hurt me, but I don't think I'll ever get used to them. I don't cry as easily as I used to, but that doesn't mean that I'm still not deeply affected by what she does or says. The one thing that I can say is that I've given up trying to impress her. I know that no matter what I do, I'll never be good enough to be her daughter.

When I was younger I used to work my ass off trying to make her proud of me. I got straight A's in school. I never drank or went out with the "wrong" crowd. I would never voice my real thoughts or opinions to her. I even developed an eating disorder to try to please her.

I didn't always used to be overweight. When I was a child, I was skinnier than a rail, but I guess that's when I was my happiest. When it was just my dad and me, I was a fairly well-adjusted kid. I was extremely spoiled, but I knew my dad really loved me. Even when he got married to my wicked stepmother, I managed to stay active by playing with my friends all day long, but when my dad was re-stationed to an air base in Greece, I was forced to move in with my mother, who lived in Hawaii at the time.

I remember first stepping off the plane and onto Hawaiian soil. I was carrying my dirty, old once-white polar bear that my dad had bought for me. I was unsure of what to expect because the last time I saw my mom was when she had visited me the previous year, but I remember being a little excited because she had spoiled me so much that visit. I was greeted at the terminal by my mom and Jerry, her then live-in boyfriend and now husband. I wasn't expecting him, and I was displeased to say the least. I mean I know now that I was just jaded by my experiences with my stepmother, so I never gave Jerry a fair chance as a child.

Well, life in Hawaii was completely different from my life in Colorado with my dad and stepmother. I still had to walk to school, but this school was a lot closer to home. From the start, I didn't fit in at my new school. All of the other children were pure Asians. Most of them were Japanese and Chinese. I was the only half white, half Korean kid in my school. In addition to that, none of the other children were very nice to me. From my very first day, they made fun of me and call me a "haole" which meant someone from the mainland or a non-native. Moving to a new school is always hard on a kid, but it was especially hard on me, an 8 year old whose entire world seemed to be flipped upside down.

It wasn't just school life that was hard. My mom and Jerry both worked long hours and wouldn't come home until 2 or 3 in the morning, so because they were never home and because I didn't have any friends at school, I spent most of my time alone. Sometimes I would swim in the swimming pool at the condo, but most of my time was spent in front of the tv. Despite all of the evil my stepmother had committed while I lived with her, I could at least say that her stringent limitations on my tv time to half an hour a day left me to depend on reading, doing school work, and playing outside to pass the time.

My eventual weight gain was due to a combination of my lack of physical activity and a lack of parental control on my diet. My mother, who initially thought I was too skinny when I first stepped off the plane, would give me ten to twenty dollars a day to spend at the local gas station & mini-mart for my meals. Now, a child, if given free reign over his or her meal choice, is obviously going to pass up eating healthy salads and such for ice cream and chocolate. I have always been an eater, but because I was so active when living with my dad, I would incinerate all my calories in a good two hours of playtime. I remember being able to almost eat an entire medium pizza on my own at the age of seven, but I never gained an ounce of weight. Several months of my sedentary lifestyle and my limited diet of chocolate ice cream and potato chips resulted in an astonishing 30 pound weight gain. I went from being a healthy 60 lbs. to being over 90 lbs.!!!

In addition to that, I was starting to approach puberty, and for a girl that means increasing levels of estrogen which leads to a slower metabolism, which is the body's natural way to increase the fatty tissues in the breasts and the hips and to start the whole ovulation process. Once I started getting "fat", my mother started to berate me on a regular basis. She would yell at me if she caught me eating anything other than a vegetable, so I started to associate eating with feelings of guilt which led me to overeat in secret. The result was seen on the scale. I started to gain more and more weight, and by the time I left Hawaii, I was 9 and a half years old and 120 lbs.

I didn't actually leave Hawaii voluntarily, but I was an out of control kid who needed the attention that my mom and Jerry just couldn't or wouldn't give. They both thought it would be best for me to live with my dad's parents in Tennessee, so they packed me up, dirty teddy bear and all, and shipped me out.

The move to Tennessee was probably the best thing to happen to me emotionally and mentally but the worst thing for me physically. My grandmother is a typical southern Grandma, so my diet shifted from ice cream to deep fried chicken and pork chops. I lived with her for about two and a half years, and by the time I hit middle school, I had ballooned up to 150 lbs. My dad returned to the country with my wicked stepmother in tow at about that time, so I moved back in with them. My weight gain started to slow, but I was still incredibly heavy and increasingly unhealthy. The damage was already done because where I used to relish physical activity, I now hated it. Eventually, I would move back in with my mother and Jerry, but this time I moved to Las Vegas.

Once there, I started my junior year of high school, and my mother continued to berate me because of my weight. I gained about 35 more pounds that year. One night the following year I hit my all time high and low. I hit my highest weight and my lowest point emotionally. On that particular night my mom had been extra mean before she went out for a night of excessive gambling and drinking, I had gorged myself on 2 pork chops, 4 bowls of rice, and a couple of fried chicken legs. I felt so disgusting that I needed to purge myself, so I spent a lot of that night with my head in the toilet.

After forcing myself to vomit for the very first time, I decided it was either going to be more of that or to stop eating completely. I chose the latter. I limited my diet to 1 salad a day which I ordered from Wendy's. Everyday I would order the regular garden salad with non-fat ranch dressing. The salads at that time were all pre-made, so after I got the salad home, I would spend five minutes picking off every single piece of shredded cheese and all of the croutons. I started losing weight very rapidly on this diet. I lost about 20 pounds in the first month. After another month, I lost an additional 15 pounds. Then I decided to become a vegetarian because one of my thin friends was a vegetarian, so I thought it would expedite the weight loss process. Over the course of the next two months, I started to incorporate exercise into my routine and lost another 25 pounds. The last 10 pounds I wanted to lose were the hardest, but I kept up with my routine.

By the start of summer, I weighed 125 pounds, and my mother, while happy about my weight loss, asked me when I was going to lose more weight. See, at 5'5" and 125 lbs., I still wasn't as skinny as most Korean girls, but my mother failed to see that I was half white (a mix of German, English, and Irish blood) and half Korean. This just means that I have wider hips and a broader upper body, so I will never be able to be waifish thin like most Asian girls. Still, I kept trying to get thinner and thinner just to make her happy.

During the summer and at the start of college, I kicked up my exercise routine to include jogging every morning. My diet now consisted of eating a cup of raisin bran with fat free milk and 1 piece of fruit for breakfast and a salad for dinner. I started to get obsessed with working out as well. I would not only jog every morning, but I would take advantage of the free gym on campus and work out for a couple of hours a day. Eventually my weight dipped down to a little more than 110 pounds, but that didn't stop my mother from starting everyone of our telephone conversations with "So did you lose more weight yet?". At 110 pounds, my hip bones, collar bones, rib cage, and shoulder bones were visible to the naked eye, but I still thought I was too fat. Eventually, I started to develop fist sized bruises on my legs and arms, and I stopped menstruating.

My weight might have continued to drop if it weren't for a nearly crippling leg injury I sustained during my sophomore year. I tore my lateral meniscus in my right knee which put an end to my running days. Every time I would try to run, my knee would lock up, and I would fall down. I started to get depressed and started eating again. Over the next few years, much to my mother's dismay, I gradually gained more and more weight. Now here I am almost at the same weight as I was in my junior year of high school. My mother's resentment towards me grew as my weight did, but the only difference between now and then is that I now know that no matter how thin I get she'll never be proud of me. This time around, when I decide to lose weight, I'm going to do it the right way. I'm not going to starve myself and over exercise myself until I'm little more than skin and bones.

Even if I were to get thin again, it still wouldn't be enough for her. She would just find another flaw I have and criticize me for that because she would think that it's a proven method. When I get thin again, I'm going to do it my way and when I'm far away from her. That way I can show her that it's got nothing to do with her. I will be thin again because I want to be healthy and happy not because I think it will make her happy. That's just a lost cause because she's already told me how much of a disappointment I am to her.