Mammoth Complex, Part One: Tiny and Adorable

Mammoth Complex is a three-part essay series on my life in my body.

Content Warning: Eating disorder, body image, and fat phobic issues

This essay represents my recollection of events and does not necessarily reflect the experience of other participants. Names and identifying information have been changed for privacy reasons. Certain weightist relatives have been made into composites.

three-year-old-erica-poses-with-bathing-suit-on-beach-awaiting-body-image-issues-and-mammoth-complex — Erica J., Age 3

I was three years old when I first got the clear sense that I was too large. Too large to feel weak. Too large to be protected. Mainly, too large for my mother.

In my life’s great mythology, it all starts with a trip to the Toronto zoo. My sister and I skip along in our sundresses, pausing at the elephants and the giraffes, who we learned on Sesame Street grew their long necks so they could reach the leaves at the top of the trees. The sun feels warm as we make the boardwalk rumble with our feet, our parents close behind. “Let’s go this way,” I announce to my family, and I go that way. But no one follows.

I remember feeling calm and safe, sure that my family is right there with me. I remember watching adults pet the tigers from behind a wooden fence and this can’t be true, but in my three-year-old mind, it seems just right. Why not pet the tigers? As I get closer, perhaps to take my own turn, I feel someone grab my shoulder.

When I turn around, I see a tanned woman with big sunglasses and reddish-brown feathered hair.

“You are lost,” she tells me, though I do not feel lost. She leads me, the little girl in the blue dress, the one everyone is looking for, back to my parents, into my weeping mother’s arms. My father must be somewhere in the background, but I can’t remember. Maybe he was somewhere looking for me.

Meanwhile, my mother is sobbing so hard, it feels like she is melting away.

“Oh my god, I thought you were gone. Oh my god, I am so, so sorry.” Her tiny bird arms seem too small to contain me. And as her jutting collar bone digs into my toddler flesh, I get the distinct feeling that I don’t fit. I am too large and life is too hard for my tiny and fragile mother.

In my life’s great mythology, my family refers to that day as, the time Erica got lost at the zoo, and Mommy broke down.

Team Tiny and Adorable

I have a friend who remembers her mother wailing in the changeroom because the clothing she wanted didn’t come in a size ten. Barely a size two, my mother wailed about other things. Somewhere between size two and size ten, I invented the term Mammoth Complex and it refers to the perceived notion that you are or are on your way to ballooning toward becoming the size of a mammoth, even though, by all accounts, you are a very reasonable and human size. A Mammoth Complex becomes particularly apparent amidst delicate, tiny, and adorable humans. I had such humans as my mother and sister.

Throughout my childhood, I remember them as this tiny and adorable unit. Together, they would weep as a chorus, at every goodbye, as my mother attempted to read Hallmark Cards, as we’d watch devastating dog movies with no purpose but to soften the hearts of psychopaths. Where the Red Fern Grows, Homeward Bound, Old Yeller. As the movie star dog took its last breath, one by one, my mother and sister would disintegrate into our flimsy red IKEA couch. From my side of the couch, I’d watch my father alone on the chair. In my memory, he is shaking his head and, I’d get the sense that he was judging them. I’d get that same sense whenever he stood next to me in a church pew as people sang or bowed or prayed. I am not saying my father is a psychopath. But clearly he was not part of Team Tiny and Adorable.

Even though I was four years younger than my sister, by the time I was three, I knew that like my father, I did not belong on the team. That I’d grow up to be taller, wider, more solid. That no one would look at me and worry that I’d crumble if life got too hard.

In my child mind, I already believed in Tiny and Adorable Privilege. As long as you were small, you could get angry, and people would be less likely to write you off and call you a b!?$#. If you didn’t get what you wanted, you could play the I’m little and helpless card, and oppressive parties would be more likely to concede. Best of all, if you were weak and defenceless, nobody could reasonably expect anything of you. You were allowed to cry and everyone would think you were so sweet and pitiful and they’d take care of you. Instead of being overwhelmed by your wide, red face and snot and tears. Instead of wishing you would stop.

I realize there are deep fault lines in my three-year-old logic. But a chunk of it stuck and it would become my life’s work to never ever get too large.

Your Legs Are Huge

At the end of grade nine, I spent my second stint as a mother’s helper at a beloved relative’s cottage. The first summer, I’d been lean and fit from the swim team. I managed to perfectly balance swimming around the island and chasing after my cousins with spoonfuls of cookie dough and cobs of corn without butter. But the next year, I had quit the swim team and despite a neurotic workout schedule, felt certain I was doomed to obesity.

One day, I emerged on the dock in my Speedo and my cousin, barely three, confirmed my greatest fears.

“Your legs are huge,” she exclaimed. With no Mammoth Complex in sight, my darling cousin likely saw everything as huge. I needn’t have taken her comment personally. But of course I did. She’d revealed what I already believed to be true—the peanut butter, the grilled cheese, the mint chocolate ice cream I often inhaled after a day of fasting—it had all made it straight to my thighs.

Professional Eating Disorder

“Eating disorders are about control.” People love to say this. Throw in a few airbrushed YM magazine covers, and you’ve unlocked the key to why the last few generations of teenagers have filled our journals with angst about our fat thighs and stomachs, the ice cream we did or didn’t eat, the five to thirty-five pounds we absolutely must lose. We’re all just a bunch of control freaks, most of us women. When we grow up, we might become mothers, doctors, writers, world leaders, only to mourn our arm flags and double chins on the side. Look at us, wasting our enormous potential just to get a sense of agency.

Like the Mammoth Complex, I invented the term, professional eating disorder and it refers to a career in counting mileage versus calories in sandwiches, squeezing your ass cheeks in car rides and sneaking crunches under the bedcovers, even after an endless and neurotic exercise routine. Eventually it would devolve into yellowy, vomit-worn enamel and laxative overdoses that would land me in the psych ward.

But the first traces of my professional eating disorder began when I was ten. That summer, I started counting my steps as I walked the dog. During the swimming season, I’d lost all my baby fat, partly from a growth spurt, partly from cranking up my swimming schedule, perhaps also from becoming the kind of vegetarian who just cuts out the meat and lives on mashed potatoes and peas and carrots. I always had the summer off the swim team, and I feared I would balloon out, like many of the college students who returned from university at Thanksgiving, their flesh poking over the elastics of their swimsuits. They ploughed through the water in their foreign bodies. I felt like the coach and everyone else was judging them. Perhaps I too was judging them. Somehow I had internalized that fat was the worst thing that could ever happen to you.

Erica-J-Schmidt-age-10-entering the point of counting steps, and calories, trying to not get too large, on chair at grandma's house — Erica J., Age 10

Mayonnaise

Though my father is a relentless exercise person, my parents never dieted or talk all that much about their bodies. But weightist talk reigned amongst my extended family.

“Look, it’s McDonald’s,” said my little cousin, barely four, pointing from the back of a minivan.

“See that woman,” said Weightist Relative One. He was referring to a woman in leggings waddling through the doors. “She should not be going to McDonald’s.”

My Weightist Relatives were lovely people, but their Mammoth Complexes had to go somewhere. They projected them onto my unfortunate cousin Alistair, not the son of the McDonald’s Admission Committee Chair. As a teenager, Alistair had a small belly, nothing serious. But my relatives treated his excess flesh as an emergency.

“Alistair, what’s that?” Weightist Relative Two gasped one summer at the cottage. We were on the dock, and I was around seven. Alistair’s pale stomach was budding above his swim trunks. He didn’t answer. Weightist Relative Two continued. “Well, it’s either from eating too much or not getting enough exercise.”

Alistair listed all the exercise he got. Swimming, skiing, tennis, you name it. Wrapped in a towel, I listened from my lounge chair. It sounded like lots of exercise, but clearly it wasn’t enough. You had to be very careful, or else people would shudder when all you wanted to do was go for a swim.

A few years later, and Alistair still didn’t seem to be getting enough exercise. There were probably eight of us seated around the table at my grandma’s house making sandwiches.

“Alistair!” all the Weightist Relatives exclaimed as he spooned out a blob of mayonnaise onto his kaiser.

“That’s way too much mayonnaise,” said Weightist Relative Three, as Alistair dropped the spoon.

“Is that fattening?” asked my little cousin, now seven.

“Very fattening,” said Weightist Relative Four.

I didn’t have any mayonnaise on my sandwich yet. Or butter. I decided I didn’t like either and vowed I would never eat mayonnaise ever again.

Alistair did not grow up to be thin and fit, perhaps from being constantly chastised about his weight. He doesn’t show to many big family gatherings and whatever he’s up to, I hope he’s eating as much mayonnaise as he wants. In my head, I am cheering him on. Way to eat the fucking mayonnaise, Alistair! I rediscovered mayonnaise late in life, and I’m pleased about it.

Thin Privilege and Fat Days

When I was 25, I cancelled all the vomit in my mouth. Then on my 30th birthday, I tried to cancel fat days. I was about ten pounds down from the Divorce Diet—a precarious existence of Ryvita crackers and tahini butter, crunched down with organic carrots from California. My weight loss would be intensified during a four-month break-up trip to India where I met with rollercoaster digestion and eating challenges.

By then the world had invented something called Thin Privilege. Even at my healthiest weight, despite my Mammoth Complex, I would almost certainly attain a Thin Privilege Badge should such an award exist. As a person with Thin Privilege, I can feel grateful for my ability to fit into an airplane seat and not have to worry about judgmental sighs from my seatmates, to walk into a clothing store and expect to find my size, to go to the doctor and have my concerns heard instead of meeting with suggestions about going to the gym and cutting down on greasy foods. Cashiers don’t scrutinize my shopping cart. I can eat in public without attracting stares of disapproval and bewilderment.

But thin privilege doesn’t protect you from a certain grief and loss that comes with cramming so many years with a professional eating disorder. I often wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t spent so much of it terrified of getting fat. Could I have become a brain surgeon? An astronaut?

Thirty-seven years in, my relationship to food and exercise is more liberated than it has ever been. It’s quite unlikely I will ever get fat, even if I’ve taken up whipped cream and refuse to use a FitBit. I am happy to give myself a pass at the diet fads and workout kicks that often follow people into their middle age. What a relief not to have to constantly negotiate “being good with food,” with “Oops, it’s a cheat day. Better hit up the gym tomorrow.” And yet, if I’m radically honest, part of me often continues to believe that becoming larger would mean that I would no longer deserve to eat. Or have feelings. Or belong to my family.

The Short-Skirt Test

My Tiny and Adorable Mother is on her way to becoming a little old lady. Every time I see her, it seems like she has shrunk even more. She’s hungry. At the breakfast table, she eats her oatmeal with great voraciousness. Still, I feel myself becoming self-conscious, as though eating is an optional activity.

At dinner parties, my mother rushes back and forth from the table to the fridge, making sure everyone has enough wine and butter and sauces. When she finally sits down, she inhales her meal in minutes.

“Oh wow, I’m so full,” she gasps, barely pausing before rushing for everyone’s plates.

“Erica, you have great legs,” my grandmother exclaims as I rise to help. “You can wear that kind of short skirt. I see some people, and they really shouldn’t be wearing such revealing clothing. You know what I mean?”

Yes, Grandma, I know exactly what you mean. And if ever I were to become that sort of person, I’m sure I’d hear about it.

My grandma remains one of my life’s greatest treasures and nobody means for their loved ones to grow up hungry or with a Mammoth Complex. Surely there are worse burdens to bear than crossing your fingers that your legs pass the short-skirt test.

Pass the Kleenex

While I never got to be tiny and adorable, I did become a crier, and almost at the same calibre that my mother and sister modelled so well. In my adult life, I have wept on countless sidewalks, in every drugstore aisle, even at or under company desks at my day job. I am not a delicate weeper, and my sobs are overpowering and pitiful and snotty. And yet, the world has contained me in my tears. All kinds of strangers have passed me Kleenex, in cafés, or on the train.

“Ça va ?” they ask as they pass me wailing below the underpass.

I nod, sometimes mumbling, “It’s okay. I’m just like this.” Or, “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

Perhaps it’s my thin white privilege that earns me this public sympathy. This right to dissolve into tears.

In the prettiest town in Ontario where I go back to visit my mother, I find I am forever considering this right. Who gets to feel? Who gets to weep? Who gets to eat?

Back in my hometown, I cry less freely, even at funerals. These days, my Tiny and Adorable Mother is stretching herself extra thin taking care of her ancient parents, my grandparents. Visits are like signing on with my mother’s geriatric catering company.

Every morning I bring my mom coffee and enjoy the 20 to 45 minutes of quiet chatting before the day spirals into a frenzy of breathless errands—roasting flailing red peppers, making sure there’s a creamy innocuous salad dressing for the people who don’t like garlic.

At some point, the adrenaline will run out, and my mother will crumble in stress and fatigue. And grief. Her father who lived in her home for a year just died. Her stepdad and mother are 95 and 96. Every day brings some new health calamity. Fading eyesight. A catheter. Loss or the promise of loss. Frantic caretaking until there’s nothing left to take care of.

These are the times when you’re meant to break down, whether or not you’re tiny. It’s like when you lose your child at the zoo. At these moments, crying is all very reasonable. I’ve cried more at much less. But whenever I hear my mother erupt into sobs, I just sit there feeling like an oversized three-year-old. A stunned and frozen mammoth. I love my mom and I’m not always sure what to do about this.

End of Part One