“How much do you weigh these days?”

I love my Grandmother. Really, I do. But there are days…

Grandma and I have been over and over that I don’t care about weight, that I’m not ever going to be on that roller coaster again, that I’m more concerned with real indicators of health, such as blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, stamina and energy to fully engage in my life.

She doesn’t get it. She’s never gotten it. When I first gave up dieting, she accused me of just giving up. At the time, I agreed with her. This was years before I found Size Acceptance and Health At Every Size^®.  At the time, it was giving up. But after doing everything I could for years, I realized that I was just not going to be able to lose weight.

Then I found this community (with everything that went with it, great people, warts, and all), and I realized that I didn’t have to give up health to give up trying to maintain an unrealistic standard for my body. For myself.

And while she never understood, she did stop asking about my weight.  I thought that maybe she’d finally learned to accept my boundaries. I found out this week that she still has the delusion that I’m going to fit society’s standards.

Right now, my grandma is in the hospital with some health problems of her own. She broke her arm and, through treatment for that, a couple of other issues presented themselves. At 91 years old, it’s not surprising she has a few health concerns.

Those concerns are aggravated by the fact that my grandmother is a product of her upbringing: she lived through the worst of the US Great Depression, and while her family never lost their home and her father had a steady job through the whole Depression, they did have to do without some luxuries they’d grown used to.

Couple that with the fact that people didn’t “just go to the doctor for every little cough,” and you have a woman who will deny she’s having a heart attack, even when she’s in the hospital emergency room being told by the doctors that she is, in fact, having a heart attack.  To this day she maintains that she was just out of breath from parking a ways from the doors on a hot day, and those doctors didn’t know what they were doing! True story.

So, Grandma ending up in the hospital isn’t especially surprising.

What was surprising was that in the middle of asking her how she is, why she’s not eating (the nurses told me she was refusing to eat), she asks, “So, how much do you weigh these days?”

Bwah? She caught me by surprise. I started to feel defensive. I started to feel defeat for having “given up.” I felt the familiar self-loathing begin because I couldn’t do something so “simple” as lose weight. You know, not even for my health.

All the years of her bargaining and manipulating came rushing back to me: promising a shopping trip worth $500 in new clothes — in the early 80s that was a LOT of money, threats of “future illness” if I didn’t achieve a “healthy” weight, and discussions of how little self control I had because I couldn’t stick to anything)

That one simple question pushed my buttons really hard.

But I’ve learned a few things since I was a teenager or young adult, and and I took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “I don’t know.  I’ve not weighed myself in over 4 years.”  I hoped that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t, of course.

The thing is, I didn’t let her get to me.  When she insisted I name a number, I told her I couldn’t.  When she stated a number, one I know she thought was exceedingly excessive, I said, “Sure, that’s as good a number as any.”  Once she had a number, she allowed me to redirect the conversation to other topics.

It’s hard to stand up to family and say, “My weight is not your business.”  It’s very hard, especially around the holidays, when we call or visit so much, to sidestep the landmines that family seems to like to throw at us.  “I only ask because I’m concerned about your health/well being/ability to do your job/whatever the concern is.”  “Hey, are you really sure you need to be eating that pie/cheese on crackers/dark meat turkey/fruit cake?”  (Yes, I love fruit cake.  Deal with it! 😉 )

I’ve found two things that make it easier for me to deal with them, yes, even in the midst of feeling like a teenager who’s desserts are being hidden by other family members because “Bronwen doesn’t need to eat that!”:

1)  Just because they want me to feel the shame, accept the blame, that doesn’t mean I have to.  I have worked very hard to not feel ashamed of my body.  There is no shame or blame in learning to love and accept myself.
2)  They are still brainwashed by the common assumptions our culture bombards them with.  This does not absolve any of them for being concern trolls, but it does make it easier for me to reply with soft words, and sometimes even humor, instead of starting an argument.

My Grandmother is likely never going to get that I can be healthy no matter what my weight is.  That’s okay.  I don’t need to change her.  What I need to to do is remember that I don’t have to allow her to inadvertently hurt me through her attempts to “make me better.”