Free My Mans Best Friend (9781622860241) by Tresser Henderson Page B

like she enjoyed inflicting pain upon me.
    The only thing positive about going to her house of horrors was my father. He was there, and I loved him dearly. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t bother to see Mother at all. But since he was still her husband, I had no choice but to continue to visit the mother from hell.
    Looking at my sister Emory, I just smiled. She knew deep down where my bruises came from. Maybe Emory was waiting for me to tell her. But this was something she already knew of. Even if I told her, what could she do about it? All Emory knew how to do was walk the straight and narrow playing little Ms. Goody Two-shoes, pretending the things in her life were majestic. I loved her with all my heart, but I knew one day her perfect little world would come crashing down. I just hoped Emory would be strong enough to handle the devastation after her collapse.

Essence
    â€œUrrrrhhhh,” my body jerked as my knees dug into the tile of my bathroom floor. The toilet was calling my name, and I answered with heaves. My morning breakfast came up with a force that made my body tremble. Coughing, I tried to pull my hair back so puke wouldn’t coat the strands of my long auburn-colored locks. At this point, I wished I had pulled back my hair in a clip so I wouldn’t have to fight with it, the toilet, and my puke.
    Finally happy that my upchucking was over, I sat on the cold floor, leaning against the wall wondering why I did this to myself. Why was it every time I ate, I felt like I needed to get rid of the food within me? Oh, that’s right. I didn’t want to be fat. Fat was not an option for me. Fat was my enemy combined with the fear of cellulite, rolls, and public humiliation.
    Growing up a chunky kid, I was ridiculed for the way I looked. I was always the big girl with the cute face that my grandparents loved to grip in the palms of their hands.
    â€œYou have such a cute face,” they would say like that was the only part which existed of me. I had a body attached to this face, but I guess it wasn’t cute by society’s standards, nor by my family’s.
    I didn’t see myself as beautiful, which is why I made a promise to myself that as soon as I found a way to get the weight off, I was going to keep it off in order to fall into the category of beautiful. Diets didn’t work for me because I loved to eat. Portion control and salads weren’t doing it for me. I refused to go on the crack diet. It did seem to work for some family members of mine though. I heard the drug made people skinny, but maybe it was all that running around they did stealing and selling merchandise that keeps their weight down too. Still, I didn’t want to resort to such drastic measures.
    Back when I was growing up, they didn’t have weight-loss surgeries, so I had to suffer through it. And suffer I did. I wanted the weight to simply vanish without me really putting too much effort into it. We all wished for that magic potion that would make you lose pounds in days or even weeks. And it didn’t help that I was unlucky enough to inherit the genes of my parents who were considered big boned. Both sides of my family were considered big boned. We were what you called Southern, which meant everything was fried and cooked in a lot of fat and butter. Even corn bread was made to taste like soft slices of cake, and Kool-Aid had enough sugar in it to make two gallons off of one pitcher. Southern was a heritage I loathed, but now I could embrace it with love since I was skinny. I could eat whatever I wanted by just sticking my finger down my throat to make those same delectable calories come shooting back up and not land on my thighs.
    I was enjoying fitting into a size five/six jean. My stomach was flat, my tits sat up, and my inner thighs were not rubbing together, ready to catch fire and have everything around me go up in a blaze. I loved myself now, despite the stigma around bulimia. That’s