Flotsam

I remember learning, in the third grade, about voluntary and involuntary muscle responses, and how the mind controls the functions of the body. The leg bone is connected to the hip bone is connected to the next bone and so on, all the way up the chain of command to my brain, my clever, capable brain pulling the strings. I’ve written before about my lack of trust in my body—I have always considered it a bit of a loose cannon, the Roger Clinton to my gray matter’s Bill. But I was, in a way, comfortable with that. It wasn’t like it was in charge, after all, my body. Occasionally it would make a foolish attempt to wrest control from my neurons—there would be a skirmish, a sickness, a panic attack, an overthrow of logic by my roiling chemistry, but my brain always regained the upper hand. Until now.
It’s like this:
You know how sometimes, at a dinner party, there will be one loud guy at the table, talking so much and so loudly you can’t squeeze in even a syllable yourself? Eventually you lean back in your chair, away from the conversation, and drink your wine, maybe twirl the glass in the light. You give up. You let Rob or Mark or Eric run roughshod over the discussion, because he will anyway.
Or, like this:
When I was in elementary school and junior high, every time my father returned from a stay in the hospital, his memory wobbly from shock treatments and his handwriting newly unrecognizable, I believed him cured. He was jubilant and full of plans—not his usual manic plans, nothing that involved spending hundreds of dollars on office supplies to start a business or removing 3000 books from his shelves to cross-reference them. These were calmer plans—therapy, job, food, sleep. And then a week or a month later, when I was back at my mother’s house, the phone would ring at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning and it would be him, babbling and sobbing, and Here We Go Again. By the time I was 15 I listened to his rehabilitation schemes with inward raised eyebrows and no expectations. I didn’t worry, or watch him for signs of collapse. When my phone rang in the middle of the night I simply unplugged it from the wall.
Some things are just bigger than you are. And to struggle against them amounts to nothing more than running in place.

This weekend, The Nearly broached the subject of my appearance, or rather my lack of concern for it. Now, before anyone starts growling at him, he wasn’t saying Why don’t you dress up for me anymore? but rather is worried that my rumpled slept-on hair and omnipresent house pants were a symptom of something darker. And he is right, they are, though I only now understand what that something darker is. I think it began over a year ago, when I started gaining weight so fast that my lower body exploded in stretch marks. From behind, my naked ass looked as though I had been mauled by a tiger. In 18 months I went from the 98 pounds I had been since puberty to 145, and from an A cup to a D. I know now that this was PCOS related, but at the time it felt as sudden and inexplicable as if I had eaten some magical, Alice-in-Wonderland growth crumpet. I stopped buying new clothes because I simply couldn’t keep up. And then, once my weight stabilized, I still didn’t buy them, because surely, soon I would lose some weight, enough that I wasn’t embarrassed to run into people I knew, enough that I could find a pair of jeans that didn’t leave angry red marks on my belly. Regular clothes felt uncomfortable by then, anyway. They cut into me in new places, bound me up and pulled at my edges. I returned home from work and my bra was off before I set my purse down, I stepped out of my trousers on my way to the bedroom to put on my soft, forgiving house clothes.
And my plans for my life—formerly the province of my mind—were under a temperamental new regime as well. My fresh, powerful desire for a child left me confused and breathless. I went from thinking idly I want to have children to feeling that want thrumming behind my ears. The discovery of this yearning was followed speedily by the discovery of my fertility problems. I got knocked up and my body slapped me back down—my second miscarriage. My dictatorial, unstoppable hormones simultaneously made me crave motherhood and endeavored to make it impossible. I pleaded with my body to be logical, to listen to reason, but I’m sure you all know how well that works.
And so eventually my brain withdrew from the conversation, unplugged the phone, gave up. I know when I’m licked. Some things are just bigger than you are.
This is what I told The Nearly—that my mismatched clothes and bare, pale face are the uniform of a ruler in exile. If my tyrannical body demands a rasher of bacon with a pint of cream for a chaser, fine. If I wake up too exhausted to wash my hair, who cares, really? I’m not a pretty spectacle, I know, but I don’t have the strength to revolt.