In Which the Only Good Bird is a Lyre

Isabelle Quilty

Many girls first notion of womanhood is an imitation of their mother. They steal her makeup to mimic her blue eyeshadow look, stumble about in her heels and try on her jewellery with hushed giggles.

I never liked her makeup or her gold jewellery. The only thing I copied from her was a way of restrictive eating that landed me with an eating disorder in my teenage years. She was the matriarch, controlling everything in the household, but especially the food. No-one’s choices were entirely their own. Chocolate was a sin, double carbs should land you in jail and don’t even think about ice-cream. Despite her restrictiveness, she’d been overweight most of her adult life. It haunted her, I think. She always mentioned her sister, beautiful and thin and everything she believed a woman should be. The sister she’d always been compared to. She wanted to spare me this fate, she claimed. And so snacks became a crime.

Femininity was lithe, skinny. All things pretty and pink. To be dainty, fragile and submissive was to be a girl, defined by my mother. I was roughly hewn edges with dirt under my fingernails, messy hair and a tomboy at heart. Never overweight, but never dainty. No feline grace, but a boisterous child. I didn’t fit the outline she painted for me before I was born, and I never will.

Perhaps the idea of the feminine will be forever locked in nails, gossip and clothes in her mind, an affirmation pushed in her childhood in a traditional Indian upbringing she herself strayed from in order to define herself. Some wounds run deeper than flesh. Some perceptions of fluid concepts like gender roles and presentation remain in older generations subconsciously. It’s when these perceptions rise and are pushed onto others, especially children, that real harm comes about. While I took on my mother’s harmful and toxic relationship with food, it is my future-self greatest mission to never impress this behaviour onto my child. It would be my greatest failure as a human being, I think, to hurt someone the way I’ve been hurt.

I was raised to be a bird with colourful feathers, but I think I’ve found more kinship with bears.

Not a creature typically associated with femininity outside of the ‘Momma Bear’ trope. In my teenage years my aversion to dresses and typically feminine clothing led to a further dissonance between us. My ‘rebellion’ was more so a refusal to wear something that I felt didn’t express me in the slightest. It felt more like playing dress up. I still didn’t embody the child she’d wanted so badly, so it must be me that was flawed. Imperfect, masculine, curvy. She never missed an opportunity to remind me of my & wrongness. &

At fifteen, I picked up a job at a grocery store.

At sixteen, I was at one of my lowest points.

At sixteen, I learnt to fill the void where love and attention was meant to be with junk food.

In some ways the job helped alleviate my social anxiety. In many other ways it made it worse. It also gave me access to money and the junk food to spend it on. Every shift, I’d bring my work backpack. Then, after every shift I’d fill it with sweets, chips and everything I could. I’d throw the backpack onto the verandah near the second door of the house. Then, once inside the house and safely past my mother I’d grab my backpack and hide it under my desk. Beneath my desk became my stash for food and a bottle of Jack Daniels.

I had no idea I had an eating disorder until I was eighteen, and learnt what a binge eating disorder was. Eighteen, when my mother found my stash on my birthday and threatened to cancel all of my plans. Eighteen, when I left home to live with a boy I barely knew. Eighteen, when she sent me pictures of my stash and called me slurs, demanding I move out.

Binge eating is sort of like a patch, crudely crafted and stapled over a gaping internal wound.

Sugar and salt become replacements for love and affection. When you have a disorder like binge eating, it makes you feel akin to a hollowed out tree. The rain falls, your roots grow, but you know in your core there’s something always missing. Without therapy and any true idea that there was anything wrong with my behaviour, I couldn’t seek a way to get better.

I got lucky, and the boy I moved in with treated me well and helped me seek therapy, helped me avoid triggers and get better. I’m still with him now and can’t wait to make him my husband. He knows I still struggle even now, but he’s also proud of how far I’ve come. And every day I’m still taken aback at the healing power of having just one person see you and love you for who you are. Eating disorders have a way of deteriorating your sense of self-worth, eradicating inward positive perceptions of yourself and how you think others see you. You check the mirror, sneer at every flaw, and take any compliment with a grain of salt.

I became in many ways, the lyre. The mimic. Stressing about the fat in the milk of my coffee,

fearing carbohydrates. I was given a legacy of anxiety and self-hatred. Distance from all that I once was has helped greatly, I think. But even so, I suspect I’ll feel the lingering effects of the disorder for a good long while. It hasn’t defined me in the same way no eating disorder ever defines the person. It is simply a parasite.

Just as any child grows up from what their parents perceive them to be to embrace who they really are, I grew from a clay bird with petty splotches of paint to the bear I am today. Bristling, tomboyish with square-shoulders, curves and a masculine voice. The bear that has slept beneath my skin for so long. The bear and the brown-feathered bird that will only ever disappoint my mother.

Because to her, the only good bird is a lyre.