My Body and All Its Scars
Duffy Lott
April 1, 2001
From the very beginning, I was a dancer. When I was three, my mother enrolled me in a tap dance class. I still remember the big pink bow in the blonde beehive hairdo of the large pink teacher with black lashes. I remember the smell of the studio. Three might seem young, but I had been dancing long before three, long before tap. I began dancing with my first swish inside my mother's womb. I have always danced. At five, I started modern dance classes. New realms of movement opened up as I experimented with becoming the floating tufts of a dandelion dancing in the air and with twirling myself up in my Ginny gown only to unfurl and leap across the wooden floor as a rain cloud. These new adventures in expression contrasted with my family life, which I began to realize was complicated, quiet, distant, and confusing. Wandering through the maze of childhood alone, I did what any rat in a maze does—get through it as well as you can, and aim for the reward at the end: food. It was particularly hard when my older cousins came to stay. Always wanting to be included, but always at a disadvantage because of my age, I both longed for and lamented the sleepovers with my cousins. I would wake up cross and moody, but junk cereal or chocolate pancakes always awaited us in the kitchen, and so I indulged in the comfort of the tasty treats, gagging myself into silence about all that had happened the night before. Food was the all-purpose comfort in my family. Birthdays, special occasions, Dad shooting four over par, anything and everything was celebrated with food. The manipulation of food substituted for punishments and rewards. I learned that in my family the way to express, or squelch, any emotion was to shove food down my throat. Often, I hid ...
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