“How fat do I look in this shirt?” my mother asked me, grimacing as she stared at herself in the department store’s tri-fold mirror. All three versions of her fussed in unison with the shirt’s delicate buttons.

By the time I was in the sixth grade, this was not an unusual question. “Mother,” I started, my voice lingering on the last syllable, dragging the er into a nasal whine. “You look fine.” 

She touched the soft skin around her mouth. “I am getting so old,” she whispered despondently as if she hadn’t heard me at all. And then, moving her hands to her hips, she added, “I am such a fat ass.”

I stepped closer so I could see myself too. “Mom, stop,” I muttered, avoiding eye contact with all three of her mirror-faces.

“I can talk to you about it if I want to,” she snapped back. 

In the dimly lit dressing room, the beige half-door clumsily locked behind us, what I had once only suspected became suddenly clear: my mother’s body, the body she hated so loudly, and my body were basically the same.

I was nine when I first learned something was wrong with my body. “See?” my mother said suddenly one morning before school, pointing to the dark specs across the bridge of my nose. My nose was my father’s nose, triangular and pointy, and my mother dug her fingernails into the skin of it, picking at what she told me were blackheads.

“You can’t walk around with those things on your face!” she said, as if it was something I should have already known.

That was the same year my mother began worrying about my weight. After a weigh-in as part of the presidential fitness program in the fourth grade, my mother insisted I join the swim team and then started limiting what she packed in my lunch. A couple weeks later, she forbade me from drinking soda. “I don’t want you to end up fat as an adult,” she warned me. “It’s no way to live.” 

Out and about that year, she began pointing and whispering at other women. “I’m not that fat, right?” she would ask me. “God, if I’m that fat,” she would say, clutching my hand tightly, “you have to tell me.”

That year, and for most years afterwards, I got in trouble if I finished a snack in the pantry. “How could you finish those?” my mom scolded me. “You really ate them all?” She shook the empty package dramatically as if it were a Ziploc full of weed she’d found in my bedroom drawer. 

I began leaving larger crumbs, two cookies in the box, three crackers in the long, crinkly sleeve, just enough so she wouldn’t notice I had eaten, wouldn’t inspect my body later for the evidence.

Between puberty and my mother’s louder and louder anxieties about weight, I started to avoid my body. By the time I was thirteen, I wasn’t even sure what I looked like naked, though I’d begun to be interested in other people’s nakedness. Flipping between channels while my parents gallivanted at some bar late into the night, I found E!’s coverage of fashion week and watched with cartoon bug eyes as slender women walked the runway in sheer slip dresses, their breasts, even their nipples, visible through the wafer-thin fabric.

That was the year I discovered masturbation. Alone at night, my parents out drinking later and later, I plunged myself into the tub and let the faucet run over and over the most private parts of me.

“That’s where we don’t let anyone touch,” my mother had told me for years. Later on, she would add almost out of the blue, “you know, Emily, I’ve never had an orgasm.” 

Sometime that same year, my mother tried to come out to me, turning her body so far towards mine on the drive home from swim practice that I worried she might crash the car. “I really need you to like my new friend Lauren,” she said to me with an urgency I didn’t understand.

Lauren’s name only sounded vaguely familiar. When she had visited a few months earlier, I’d been preoccupied with a boy I met through a friend of a friend and only talked to on AIM (if I never met him, I thought, he wouldn’t have to consider my body either). When my mom brought Lauren’s name up again that afternoon out of the blue, I could only remember that she was from St. Louis, that my parents had met her while my dad was running an air show there, that she really liked baseball, the Cardinals in particular.

“Okay,” I shrugged, dismissing my mom’s weird demand. What did I care about her friends?

One way of understanding the body is to consider it the physical and mortal aspect of a person as opposed to their soul or spirit. That’s what my mother tried to explain to me when she finally used the word gay in front of me, maybe seven or eight years after she first told me about Lauren without really telling me about Lauren. “I’m not gay,” she declared emphatically one day, “I don’t care about a person’s body, just what’s in their soul.” 

I had my first crush on a boy at age nine. His name was Aaron, and he had a perfect blond bowl cut and looked, to his credit, a little like teen heartthrob Jonathon Taylor Thomas. After I broke my arm rollerblading down our neighborhood hill, he walked me all the way back home, staying by my side until his own parents called him for dinner. For the most part, boys had always been nicer to me than girls. My father, after all, bought me carefully picked out trinkets from each of his work trips and deployments, won me what became my favorite stuffed animal at a county fair back in Maine. When my mom started getting onto me about my weight, my dad sat me down and stroked my hair. “I was chubby as a kid,” he told me, smiling softly. “It’s okay. You are beautiful just the way you are.”

The next day as if to punctuate his words with an exclamation point, he packed my lunch instead of my mom, stuffed my small purple lunchbox with two pieces of fruit, extra chips, and a can of the ice-cold soda I was no longer supposed to drink. “You’re a kid,” my dad said, “I don’t want you to worry at all. You and your body are perfect.”

Sometimes I wondered what the difference was exactly between me and my body, why they were talked about like separate entities if I couldn’t actually separate them, if I couldn’t actually swap my short, fat body for a tall, slender one at will. As my body continued to change, to get bigger and wider as it grew, I learned to stand as far apart from it as possible, to view my it as an obstacle to, rather than a stand in for, desire and connection.

Maybe that’s why it’s only in memory, in retrospect, that I can identify my first crush on a girl, so much harder to see than the blond boy’s hand on the small of my back guiding me step by step up the hill, my roller blades clutched under his free arm. It’s only if I look back closely and slowly that I can pinpoint it. A friend in college. We had gotten caught in the rain on our way back from class. And then, she was taking off her shirt in the dorm hallway. Her flesh dew-dropped. Honey. Her hair began to curl from the wet. Droplets of rainwater fell down her shoulders, beaded across her chest. She shook like an animal after a bath. 

“Do you want to come in?” she asked at the door of her room and inside me a river I hadn’t known was there warmed.

My mother grew up taking sacrament, eating what the priest called the body of Christ, the thin wafer placed tenderly on her tongue once a week. There’s no real way for me to know if she ever loved my father or if it was the body of Christ, the years of Catholic school and accompanying guilt, the harsh rules and expectations of Christianity, that had compelled her to live the way she’d been taught: marry a man, have sex under the covenant of Biblical marriage, and of course, become a mom.

These days she calls Lauren my stepmom though she’s still never come out directly to me. “You’ll need to know what kind of boxers Lauren likes when we’re in the old folk’s home!” my mother jokes sometimes when I visit her now. “It’ll be sooner than you think!”

From her couch, my computer on my lap like armor (I’m too busy, I text her sometimes while bingeing Love is Blind), I chuckle back softly, the connection between us no longer thick and rough like water. Only thin, empty. Air. Though the human body relies on air, I think, trying to avoid my mother’s eyes, water makes it what it is; after all, both my mother’s body and my body are made up of sixty percent water. 

For years thinking of my mother, of the way I desperately wanted to live my life differently from hers, I avoided experiencing my own queerness. But one day in my early thirties, my body, the size twenty you-have-to-tell-me-if-I’m-that-fat body my mother worried I’d one day have, finally under the soft body of another woman, there was no more denying what I’d once so thoroughly swept under the rug. Like the central heterochromia that circles our pupils in gold, my bisexuality is a connection between my mother and I that I cannot undo. 

I avoided disclosing this commonality for almost five years. I had wanted to give my mother nothing in return for the nothing she had given me, but that boundary got too hard to keep. Became porous as water.

Standing waist deep in Panama City Bay last summer, my children scuttling after fish near the shore, their laughter a warm breeze, I couldn’t stop myself. “You know, I’m bisexual,” I said suddenly, gulping from my beer as if the words might disappear into the can and become unsaid. “Though I shouldn’t have to tell you since you never came out to me,” I added, looking down at the slippery bodies of minnows near my feet.

“Oh, Emily! That’s great!” my mother said, her voice lilting upward. Her eyes almost sparkled in the stupid June sun. 

I wanted so much to feel joy, even love in that moment, but whatever positivity radiated outwards from my mother ran into my body instead like terror and shame, and I wanted desperately to hide again, to bury myself under the sand the same way I had hidden my body back in middle school under my thick swim parka and JNCO jeans. If you can’t see me, I thought, you can’t hurt me. 

But as my mother has said, as she has told me time and time again over the years, all mothers hurt their daughters and all women hate their bodies. 

“It’s whatever,” I told her, swigging again from my warm beer.

What other words could I give her that wouldn’t somehow take away from my own? I turned defiantly and trudged towards the beach, one fat thigh rubbing against the other as if I could start a fire right there in the warm waters of the bay. Being close to my mother has always created the same kind of friction, the same kind of rash that happens if I walk too far or too fast in my fat body, my skin red and raw where it’s touched for too long, and so I learned to turn away from her each time she got too close, the push and pull of our relationship as back and forth, as in and out forever as the tide.

-Emily Lake Hansen

Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, bisexual, and invisibly disabled poet and memoirist and the author of Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as two chapbooks: The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press) and Pharaoh's Daughter Keeps a Diary (forthcoming from Kissing Dynamite Press). Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Pleiades, OxMag, So to Speak, Atticus Review, and Up the Staircase Quarterly among others. A PhD candidate at Georgia State University, Emily lives in Atlanta where she serves as nonfiction editor for New South and teaches at Agnes Scott College.