Tierney's Story
Once upon a time, I was born...
Okay, September 14th, 1970 was the exact time, and Rochester, New York was the exact place. I grew up in Fairport, and right from the get-go, I had problems. I did not fit into the cookie-cutter suburban lifestyle that surrounded me. I lived on a horse farm. My classmates all lived in McMansions. Their parents had fancy cars (and by "fancy," I mean "not spackled with primer or held together with duct tape"), while we drove an old green station wagon. My dad was a teacher, and my mom was a stay-at-home creative. We never seemed to have any money. Whenever we drove through the housing tracts, I would look through the window at the houses and yearn to trade places with whoever lived inside. Much of my childhood was spent admiring things I couldn't have and people I could never be.
As I was living through it, my childhood seemed both chaotic and challenging. I didn't know that all the mismatched, misaligned, misfittiness of it was a gift. My brother, my sister, and I were free-range kids long before that was a thing. We had the run of over 70 acres of land. We had a horse named Phyllis and a patient, long-suffering Shetland pony named Dolly, who accompanied us on our adventures and would stand for hours while we played beside her. We had a creek that emptied into a pond. When I was very young, the land was all swamp, but one summer the town came in and cleaned the area up, removing all the cattails and black walnut trees so that the creek could properly drain. Now we had a pool, of sorts. While I yearned for the safe, sanitized pools of my classmates, I canoed in the twilight and found duck eggs under our "troll bridge." Often, I took my little brother and sister to the haymow, where we raked the hay into a huge pile, climbed a rickety ladder, and did swan dives and backward falls into it. Or we hefted bales on top of each other to make mazes and forts. I remember one summer where we spent days recreating the interior of the Millennium Falcon, and fought like hell to preserve it whenever my dad said, "Throw some of those bales of hay to the horses. They need to eat." While my classmates were playing Little League and Pop Warner football, I was flying spaceships and fighting dragons.
I didn't feel so at the time, but clearly, I got the win.
That misalignment had a cost, however. No one ever told me, "It's not you. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just mismatched with your environment, that's all."
Well, my mom probably told me that. Maybe a lot. Maybe all the time. But what kid really believes the parent who gives that Ugly Duckling/Beautiful Swan speech? That's what moms are supposed to say.
So I internalized all that misfittiness, and I compensated for it by snacking. I snacked my way through adolescence and into young adulthood. French fries were my crack. I didn't care if they came from McDonalds or Burger King, as long as they were hot and salty. I drank gallons of soda. All of that running around and jumping and swimming on the farm was overwhelmed by fat and grease and sugar. When I graduated from high school, I weighed 179 pounds.
It was the lightest I would ever be.
I put on the freshman fifteen, and the sophomore twenty, and whatever cute name one might give to two supersenior years. When I finally graduated, I was well over 250 pounds. I gained more when I moved home to start working. I remember one doctor's visit where the scale topped out at 298 pounds. I resolved to do something about it. I modified my diet, choosing whole-wheat tuna fish sandwiches instead of fast food for lunch. I joined the YMCA and worked out on the Stairmaster. I lost 90 pounds that year--enough to convince my future husband that I was, in fact, date-able. I moved to North Carolina to be with him, and managed to gain forty pounds as I planned our wedding. I kept gaining, surely and steadily, as we moved back to New York, figured out our careers, and decided to start our family. In February of 2003, I found out that I was pregnant. At the end of March, I lost the baby.
French fries were a cold comfort, but they were better than the emptiness I now carried inside of me. I ate my way through the miscarriage and the emergency surgery that saved my life when I went septic. And suddenly--or not so suddenly, I guess--I weighed 327 pounds.
