Memoir: Medium

Medium.

How long has it been, since I was a Medium? I think it’s been at least twenty years. When I was three years old, my mother gave me a baked potato for dinner. I asked for butter. She told me we didn’t have any. I complained. I wanted butter! She explained to me that we were poor, we didn’t have money to buy butter. She said someday we would have more money and then I could have all the butter I wanted. She told me to use salt instead.

I have spent my life avoiding having that happen again. Piling on the butter. Eating like every meal is my last chance to have whatever it is we are having. Eating when I’m not hungry. Eating when I’m already full. Eating fast, and eating the last thing I do before going to sleep. Once I start eating, I keep eating. More than once, I have eaten myself sick.

At forty pounds overweight, my clothes don’t fit, my knees hurt, my self-esteem is shot. And all this to satisfy a three year old who didn’t get what she wanted. With all the formidable determination of a three year old, I have never let that happen again. It became a habit, a lifestyle, a compulsion.

What would it be like to be free of that? Maybe it’s time to find out.

Signed,

Extra Large

Memoir: Letter to a Nun

I never understood why your face was always bright red. Your cheeks were perennially flushed, as if you were really excited about something. But the rest of you was hidden in the black and white, starch and folds of your nun's habit. The beaded crucifix clinked and jangled against your chest as you moved about, always seeming to be in a hurry, always rushing to catch up. We never knew with what.

You were a small, round, swirling tornado that never touched ground, not quite connecting with us in the real world of the concrete and asphalt of our school yard, inside the six foot tall cyclone fence. When we were inside it, we minded you, because you were so quick to swing the yardstick. Or leave an impression of your fingers on our cheeks.

But all I ever learned from you was how to duck.