Curvy Jones on: The Beginning

The Easy Stuff:

This is post 1 of a series of posts, simply so that people don’t have to read a thesis on my life– and neither do I, when I read back. There’s a bit of “about me” stuff floating around the Diary already but I have provided some background for better understanding. If I don’t know where I’ve come from, I won’t be able to guage where I am or where I am going.

Edit: My mom sent me an email tonight to tell me that my dad is in town. Until the 10th. >insert blank stare here< I decided to go ahead and post this so that I can appropriately freak out tomorrow and people will have more of an idea of why I am freaking out.

Also a note: many of the  things I am going to write about, I know others have experienced. If you’re like me, you like knowing that you’re not alone, and it’s comforting to recognize yourself and your experiences staring back at you through someone else’s words. If you don’t want to reply in the comments, I LOVE email. Please drop me a line at curvyjones [at]diaryofcurvyjones(.com)or mocahgirl[at]gmail(.com) if you want to comment or speak privately.

So, the beginning. I was born on an Air Force Base in Oklahoma in March of 1974. I have two siblings, whom I refer to as BigMike and Joe. BigMike is a year younger than I am. Joe was 11 years younger.

This seems to be an anthem among people I know lately, but we were poor, growing up. From what I remember, my mom had quite the shopping habit. She spent hundreds of dollars at a time and then would apologize and dad would pay it off and then there were these shoes she had to have. I think that she did what I do, now—overcompensate in adulthood for what she didn’t have in childhood. My dad did it, too. His stepmother would hide the food from her stepchildren, for some strange reason. They would go hungry, night after night, for reasons never explained to them. So when he had children, he made sure there was always food available. If you go to my parent’s house, you will still find the shelves, the pantry, the deep freezer stuffed with food.  When my parents hear of a family that is going without, they load up some bags and deliver it. I guess because they know what it’s like, to not know where your next meal is coming from. In that respect I am a lot like my parents. I hate the feeling of going without, it hurts my heart. I like to be generous where I am able to.  Spending money makes me feel terribly guilty. It took me forever to decide to buy my car. I could afford it, I just felt really guilty about spending the money.

Dad is an avid sportsman. He hunts in the winter and fishes in the summer—now for pleasure, but back then it was for food. He would buy meat when it went on sale and stock up but we mostly ate fish and game. We always had deer or rabbit or some kind of fish in the freezer. Yup, I can scale and gut a fish, skin a rabbit and cook them both up for supper. SOMEBODY needs to put a ring on it!

There was always a lot of tension about money in our house and they were just barely making it. The Armed Services doesn’t pay much if you’re not an officer. My mother dropped out and wouldn’t get her GED until I was in High School. The most she could do was work menial, labor jobs. We regularly ate government issued food (the stuff in the white box with black lettering that just says PASTA).  We really did eat government cheese—it came in long blocks and we’d cut them into chunks and freeze them or they would go bad. Thank goodness for Joe, because we could get WIC (Women, Infants and Children program provides dairy and essentials for children under a certain age). That got us all the milk, peanut butter, etc we could eat. Have you ever had frozen milk? We froze milk all the time. Butter, too. That allowed us to stock up on that, too.

My dad regularly gave blood, worked part time jobs, clipped coupons and bargain shopped to make ends meet. My mom worked one, then two jobs. The stress was palpable. Life sucked. My dad also had an anger problem and took it out on us, though he never hit my mom. And for the most part my mom was not abusive.  I got slapped across the face here and there but she wasn’t much of a disciplinarian. She just let it happen.  There was a lot of  ”discipline” in ways that I haven’t opened my mouth to describe in a very long time. Not being dramatic but the memories are painful. None of us really talked about it. It’s just another one of those things that I’ve shoved way down. My parents and I have talked and talked and talked and supposedly I forgave them. That’s what I said, anyway. And now that I am an adult, we have a different relationship, but the memories stick around. And I have a hard time telling my parents that they were good parents when we were younger– I just can’t bring myself to say that. Having an okay relationship now doesn’t negate the first 18 yrs of my life.  All three of us ended escaping before we even graduated from high school.

Sometimes I see people who have great relationships with their parents and I am terribly, horribly jealous of them. My parents have no idea who I am. They have never known me.

I needed an escape or I was going to lose my mind, likely. That’s when I started reading and writing. I could escape to worlds created by other people or I could create them myself. Either way, I didn’t want to live in the world I was stuck in. I spent a lot of time alone. I was very, very quiet. Mousy. I still love corners. I find one and sit in it and watch. Take everything in. I never look like I am enjoying myself but I am in my mind having a ball.

Of course, if I was mousy and nerdy and withdrawn, I didn’t have many friends, I wasn’t that popular, I was not cute in the least (very late bloomer and I knew that I wasn’t pretty because everyone always told me how smart I was, not how pretty I was), and I was socially awkward because I never talked to anyone.  We were never allowed to go anywhere– we always had housework to do.  When I did get around people, the pendulum swung wildly—I either didn’t know what to say so I clammed up, or I tried too hard and it was uncomfortable.  I still do that, sometimes. The day you wake up and realize that you’re ‘that girl that tries too hard’, you want to crawl under a rock six feet under ground. I pretty much stay quiet to keep from being that girl that people whisper about later.

There was no sexual abuse at all—don’t get me wrong, there. I was very afraid of my father, though. That translated into being afraid of boys. That translated into being afraid of men. And maybe watching my brothers fight with my dad helped with that? I’m not sure.  I mean, I love men, I just… don’t know what to do with them.

My dad tells me that when I was in high school, they worried about me.  He said that I was so quiet that they didn’t know what I was really doing. He wanted me on birth control. My mom said no. Actually, what my mom said to ME was that sex before marriage is a sin, only hussies lay down with boys, so control myself and don’t even form my lips to ask for birth control. Keep my legs closed and don’t show up on her doorstep pregnant because she wasn’t raising no grand babies. You should see her spoiling her grandsons born out of wedlock. If I knew then what I know now.

I am literal. If you tell me something, I take it at face value. I took her words at exactly that.  In my mind, I guess I equated that fear of getting pregnant or going to hell, or catching something with boys. Boys scared the living snot out of me.  SEX scared the snot out of me. I was never taught about love or emotions or all the things that surround sex and relationships. I wasn’t witnessing the best relationship, and I wasn’t being taught what a healthy relationship was. I also wasn’t made to feel like I could make my own damn decision about it. I was told what I would be doing and I did it. I avoided all boys and regarded them like they were going to infect me with the bubonic plague. Today, it’s still hard for me to relax around men in a setting that’s not ‘friends’. I am on guard at all times. ‘No’ comes naturally to me. I shy away and shrink from men that try to talk to me. I already know what he wants.  He can’t want to get to know me, he has to want something else. He isn’t getting it.

Some things I attribute to how my parents were raised. We do the best we can with what we know and when we know differently, we doo differently. Still, I feel like things could have been… better.

I was not nurtured as a girl, turning into a woman. I learned about my cycle at school, not from my mom. My dad got mad one day and yelled at my mom about my underarms and legs. She reluctantly showed me how to shave them. I can’t even talk about… femmescaping… but I didn’t know that women went bare (my friends call it installing hardwoods) until a few years ago.  I developed early and filled out quickly. I didn’t have bras that fit. I was a C-D cup in a training bra, in hand-me-down clothing that was too big, so boys were staring down my shirt when I bent over. Looking back, I blush at myself and I’m embarrassed at the young, budding me who had no idea whatsoever what was going on.

When I turned 16, I got a job that didn’t involve watching other people’s children. YAY for not having to be at home. School was an escape, too. I LOVED going to school. I got to leave the house. Work gave me another excuse to not be home to hear my parents fight, to hear my dad stomp around the house, to not get in trouble over ridiculous things like not putting the lid on the garbage cans. The things we ‘got it’ for just astounds me.

What also came with that job was so much food I didn’t have to pay for. Even after my parents bought their house, times were still so tight. Even tighter, I guess, since there was a mortgage and insurance and what-not. My dad was the King of making a big pot of something and that’s what we ate all week. I really don’t eat leftovers, as an adult. I just… I can’t eat the same thing more than twice. When I went to work, I could have anything I wanted, pretty much. Fresh food, ‘expired’ food (food that had been sitting out too long, desserts stocked past the freshness date’, a stray 2 piece and a biscuit, some chicken littles, a hot wing and 4 french fries here and there) was all there for the taking. Taking I did. I went from a curvy 115 lbs to a whopping 150 lbs, size 16. I had huge thighs. My dad called me Thunder Thighs for years.

The freshman 15 turned into the freshman 30 and so on and so on. I was over 200 lbs when I graduated from college. I’m well over that, now. I’d love to say that I’ve been on every diet known to man but I haven’t really. I like food. I like good food.  When you don’t talk much and keep to yourself and there’s so much going on inside and outside and in your world, food becomes medicine. I use food like someone might use alcohol or drugs. To bring me up, to bring me down, to celebrate, to make me feel better.  I would eat blindly, subconciously, without even realize I was eating. I would eat way past full, because I wasn’t eating out of hunger. I was eating out of feeling and trying to fix something. I became a binge eater– not a purger– and I have spent the last few years working on those behaviors.

And now I can’t get myself to eat three meals a day or eat often enough that I don’t get a hunger headache. Hilarity. I’m so black and white, right or left. The pendulum with me swings so drastically.

I guess that’s just me.

Coming up: The College Years and Beyond

Curvy Jones is a northerner playing a southerner who is living, working, playing in metro Atlanta.

Curvy Jones

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Tags:  2010 · Series: All About Curvy