Growing up, my siblings and I had the good fortune of having one of our Grandmothers living with us throughout all of our childhood years. We loved her very much and she us. She was very Italian, in fact, spoke no English all the days of her life here in America. She was an excellent cook. And therein lies the reason for my bringing this up. She knew how to cook and she knew how to eat, God bless her. As far as we, her grandchildren were concerned, and we might have been truly concerned, or we might have been just teasing her, I am not sure, but we always thought she was fat. Frankly, we loved her, and it didn’t matter to us whether she was fat or skinny, in fact, we loved her just the way she was. But that didn’t stop us from teasing her or showing concern every once in awhile. We were kids. And truthfully, we heard the a doctor or two had told her she had to loose weight or she wouldn’t last long. Guess what, she out lived the doctor and passed at 99 and 11 months.
But the point of my bringing her and her weight up is this. When we would tell her that she was too heavy, she would look at her stomach and grab her dress and pull it away from her body while saying, in Sicilian, “I’m not fat, it’s just the this dress is too big and it bunches up here.” When we caught on to her “story,” we would tell her this all the time, just to hear her tell her story, no matter what day of the week or what dress she was wearing… and we would laugh.
For my Birthday this past June, a friend of mine, who has really good and expensive taste, gifted me a really nice shirt. I wanted to wear it right away, for the party, but unfortunately it didn’t fit. It was too tight. When my friend saw me not wearing the shirt and wanted an explanation, I immediately responded that the shirt was cut in a very fashionable way, but because of the cut, it fit me too tight. My friend said jokingly, “you’re too fat.” I insisted, and I truly believed that because of the way the shirt was cut it didn’t fit me correctly.
That week, I made a trip to the store where the shirt was purchased, and noticed the price tag. I was right, this was one of these shirts that had a higher price tag than I had spent on a shirt before, and I was happy to be exchanging it for a larger size so that it could fit me for a long time to come. I wore this shirt at a subsequent occasion in the “correct” size and my friend happened to be there and saw me wearing it. My friend was puzzled that I was a wearing the shirt that originally I had said didn’t fit, but I quickly explained that I had exchanged it for a larger size. “That’s too bad,” my friend said, “because the size I got for you was the perfect size.” Once again, I retorted that it would have been, had the shirt not been cut the way it was cut.
I wore that shirt that one time and that was it, since the season didn’t call for such a shirt. As the seasons changed from Summer to Fall, Fall to Winter and now Winter to Spring, it is finally time to wear this shirt again, and I looked forward to wearing it many times this season and for years to come. But in the course of these Season changes, I changed too. I dropped over 30 pounds of weight. When I went to put on my still very new shirt tonight, I found the shirt to be way too big. I couldn’t understand since the last time I had worn it, it fit just right, now I couldn’t wear it because I looked like I was a child wearing my older brother’s clothes.
All of a sudden I recalled my friend’s words, “that shirt was the right size for you, you’re just too fat right now.” And then I recalled my words. I truly believed that I was not that much heavier than I wanted to be and that the shirt was truly cut in an odd way. Finally, I recalled my Grandmother’s words. I was saying almost the exact same thing that my Grandmother used to say and believe. I wonder if she truly believed that her dress was too big and that is what made her look “fat,” like I truly believed the shirt was cut oddly.
I guess it is true, until we change our beliefs we cannot see another way of being. And I just couldn’t see it. Now because of an old belief that I had, I have a perfectly new, perfectly beautiful, perfectly expensive shirt that I only wore once, and will never be able to wear again. Argh! Well, what can I say, Life Changes, and I learned. Anybody want a cool shirt? 🙂