Our Mothers’ Diets
- Jul 28, 2023
- 2 min read
by Rebecca Kilroy
Our mothers’ diets were our third parents, hovering around the kitchen since we were kids. They packed us sandwiches on whole-wheat bread and 100 calorie snack-bags in our lunchboxes. They hung weight loss posters on the fridge next to our fingerpaint drawings. We saw them as soon as we learned to read.
Our mother’s diets watched us. They poked out at us from mirrors. They gathered in the soft, helpless places — breasts and hips and thighs. They watched over our plate at the dinner table and held back the last slice of pie.
Our mothers’ diets helped us get dressed for the first day of school. As we grew and starved and bled into adolescence, they were always willing to offer advice.
Our mothers’ diets were warning labels and instruction manuals. They told us how to live with all the ungainly inheritance of womanhood. “Here’s the trick,” they whispered. “Here’s how she kept it in. Here’s how you will too.”
Our mothers’ diets held our mothers’ fears.
Our mothers’ diets were yokes we had to slip, like too-tight bathing suit straps, off our shoulders. At sleepovers, over brownies and pizza and ice cream, we’d pick apart the skinny girls in our class, say they only ate air and had heads full of it.
Our mothers’ diets came to pick us up the next morning and asked if we’d had fun.
Our mothers’ diets invite us to the gym now, invite us to split a cookie with them, invite us to go shopping for clothes.
Our mothers’ diets are a shared project. We help them find zero-sugar lemonade in the grocery store. We tell ourselves our mothers’ diets are keeping them well and for that we’re grateful. We want them here to stay with us as long as they can.
Our mothers’ diets taught us sacrifice and guilt and grief. They taught us wanting and wishing and will. They taught us all the mother tongues women are supposed to speak. Except forgiveness. Our mothers taught us that themselves. And if they didn’t, we learn it on our own.
Rebecca Kilroy is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist from New Jersey. Her work has been featured in oranges journal, Fatal Flaw, and Capulet Magazine. Most recently, her short fiction appeared in the Haunted Words Press anthology “We Will Not Stay Buried.” She writes about history and families with a touch of the speculative, magical, and weird. You can find more of her work on Instagram @rebecca_kilroy9
