On my 13th birthday cake, my dad wrote, “Happy Birthday, Chicken Legs.”
Chicken Legs Are Out
My dad and my cousins always joked with me about my skinny legs and bony frame, but now, as my friends’ bodies were starting to develop, I didn’t want to be reminded of my “chicken legs.” Didn’t my dad know that I was growing up and that “chicken legs” were no longer in, that we had begun to move on to curves and breasts, of which I had neither? I was a beanpole who was knobby at the joints and whose rib cage showed when she lifted her arms.
The school became a challenge during that time. Everyone started to develop curves and even get thighs! I noticed this probably more than the girls themselves did because I just stayed skinny no matter what I ate. My mom said that was just the way my body was — skinny. I felt frail next to my friends, who at 15 were beginning to look like women. They wore tight jeans to show off their hips and butts. They wore tight shirts to show off their blossoming breasts. I wanted to cover up because all I had to show was that I was skinny. I was five feet two inches and 90 pounds and nothing I ate changed that. I had been that weight for more than two years.
The Nasty Rumor
Then the worst thing happened. Someone in my junior high started a rumor that I was bulimic. They said that one day they saw me running into the bathroom and throwing up my lunch. Bulimic! I couldn’t believe it! I talked to my best friend about it to find out what everyone was saying, and she confirmed that the rumor was going around. Supposedly, I was so skinny because I had been throwing up my lunch every day.
This really hurt. It’s one thing to be self-conscious about your skinny body and another thing to have girls circulate rumors. I didn’t know what to do. To top it all off, we began studying eating disorders in health class, and when we got to bulimia, several girls laughed at me. The health teacher realized what was going on and told the class that bulimia is serious, not a laughing matter. She said that young girls die from bulimia all the time and that if anyone we know may have a problem that we should tell her.
Maybe I’m Lucky?
I thought for sure that I would be called into the health teacher’s office, but I wasn’t. I wondered if the curvaceous girls realized the harm in spreading such a mean rumor. While I was at the doctor’s for a routine checkup, my mom asked if maybe there was something wrong with me because I seemed to be underweight. The doctor said nothing was wrong with me, that different people have different body types, and I just happened to be skinny. Maybe I would grow out of it, and maybe I wouldn’t. My mom said that she thought that I was lucky. Lucky! To be bony and breastless!
Well, sure enough, people at school even began to tell me that I was lucky not to have to worry about being overweight. Apparently lots of people, even at my age, worry about this. I had no idea. I was always worried about being underweight!
Slender v. Skinny
I began to feel less uncomfortable with my body, seeing that so many people seemed to be uncomfortable with their own bodies. I thought that maybe I could even make the choice to be happy with my skinny frame. I was just a skinny girl but no less beautiful or womanly I told myself. I didn’t want body image to take over my life, and up until then, it was something that I thought about all the time. I promised myself that I would try to make the switch from thinking of myself as skinny and bony to something more positive like slender and petite.
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