Emerging Women

By Sherrie Lowly

“Now I become myself. Now to stand still, to be here, Feel my own weight and density!”

I began saying “no” to desserts and experimenting with my control over food intake at a very young age. No one ever told me that I was fat or not fat. This disorder of the mind and body takes place inside, in the stomach and the soul. I grew up hearing my Dad make jokes with my Mom; “I think I’ll run off with Mina,” my dad would joke (Mina Feikema—a single woman at the church who was quite thin and always trim and a friend of my mom—in comparison to my mom’s rounded body). My mom’s learned silence in deference to my father lay like a stone in my stomach. In my body I identified myself with my mom while desperately wanting the power and approval of my dad.

“Do you think you really need that piece of pie?” said my Dad with a smile, blurring the lines for me between need and desire; between pleasure and need; between eating as a function of bodily nutrition and eating as a social and physical event. I ingested a web of control; of withholding approval tied up with religion, with discipline, with saving money, with power of the will over all that is not “good”. I carried with me a constant perception that I am fat. I caught myself between two worlds—male and female gender; fat and thin; pretty and not pretty. What I put into my mouth or did not put into my mouth was one thing over which I had control. I thought it was the way that I could gain my father’s attention and blessing; the way that I could gain my self-esteem.

“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”
~Frederick Buechner, (author and theologian) was interviewed about his daughter’s near death experience with anorexia nervosa and tied it to his own depression.

I left my father’s house for Central Michigan University carrying in my stomach the stones of silence and control, of saving money and being “good,” no, not only good, perfect. “Be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”. I chose a cafeteria meal plan with no breakfast and I had a work/study job serving food in the cafeteria of the men’s dorm. It was the perfect set-up for feeding my secret desire. I made up the rules of this secret world as I went along; no breakfast; no drinking milk; nibbles of food rather than a full meal. It was a secret, this not eating. It was a secret way of covering myself up; of desiring to look like the boy-child that could be like my Dad. I could not please him being a rounded, curved woman, yet secretly I could make him look at me and make him be pleased with me because of how thin and boy-like I could become. Combining my stomach control with rebellion of house and church rules I drank alcohol and joined in the cruel jokes of fellow roommates and dorm mates of a “nerdy” and “ugly” woman I shared a room with. This led to a thinness of body and spirit that barely contained my secrets and guilt. I don’t know how much weight I loss that year—getting down to 110 or even 100 pounds or below was a goal. I often fell asleep in class and I went without my period an entire summer.

I believed that I could not find unconditional acceptance as a “fat” woman. I could not feel my own weight and the density of myself. I lived lost in my secret middle world, caught in a web of making myself sick by being good. To unweave this web is nearly impossible without friendship and growing a community of trust coaxing the secret soul out of its prison. One of the first of such friendships for me was with Lois Dorman. I admired this woman whom I met in a campus Christian fellowship group. Lois was tall, big-boned, and beautifully rounded. She, along with some other women friends taught a female sexuality class as part of their studies at CMU. Feminism with all of its liberation and freedom was new to me. Lois introduced me to this world and I found a community of women who were living and exploring them selves with gusto. I ate it up and it sustained my body and spirit. Yet the community of university is short-lived and I returned to my father’s house after graduation. Unable to reconcile the growing density of my self-image within an environment where I blamed a heavenly father for inaccessibility and an earthly father for indifference, I searched for communities of acceptance and for women who loved their selves and their bodies.

Through many years I see sawed up and down in my body weight. I carried with me a depressive weight of shame at the pit of my stomach that I could not let go of. Anorexia nervosa—this lingering image of myself as fat—remained with me. The birth of my daughter Temma with severe brain damage began the final unraveling of the tight web of shame, guilt, perfection, and secrets. Temma’s severe and profound mental and physical disabilities nearly crushed me. I starved my love and fed my guilt and shame. The church community that I was a part of at the time of Temma’s birth kept me alive. When I had no hope, other community members kept hope for me and for Temma.

For her sake, I could finally break the silence and gain the professional help that I needed to work at reconciling my inner and outer images of self. Within a supportive community of twelve, all of us together studying at a Master’s degree program in Pastoral Counseling, I engaged in my own therapeutic relationship. I spent three years unraveling the knots of shame and silence tied up with pleasing authority and punishing myself for my daughter’s brain damage. Three years into the therapy I remember the exact place that I was sitting when my counselor repeated to me something that now, finally, I could hear and allow to sink inside of me. “You did the best that you could,” she said. And I had done the best that I could. I began the long process of forgiveness, to settle into my own self and my own weight.

Sherri Lowly is currently pastor at Berry United Methodist Church located on the north side of the city of Chicago. She lives with her husband and daughter in the parsonage of Berry Church and they have living with them a wonderful couple and their two beagles. Their small intentional community home life revolves around care of her daughter Temma who is severely, profoundly impaired, and 25 years old in September.