Not Attractive Any More

He said it after the second baby. Casually. Like informing me the car needed a service. Just information. Just facts. Just the complete demolition of a woman’s relationship with her own body delivered over toast.

“I just don’t find you attractive any more.”

Nine words. Toast. Tuesday morning. The baby was seven months old. I’d grown a human being inside my body for the second time. I’d pushed that human being out of my body. I’d fed that human being from my body every three hours for seven months. And the man sitting across the table with marmalade on his thumb had looked at what was left and decided it wasn’t enough.

He abstained from sex after that. His decision. Presented as if it was neutral. As if desire is a light switch that someone else flipped and he had no choice but to stand in the dark.

But I knew what it was. Punishment. Control. Another tool in the same toolbox as the comments about my clothes and the questions about the cleaning. If I wasn’t attractive, there was no sex. If there was no sex, I was the problem. If I was the problem, I’d better fix it. Lose weight. Try harder. Perform better.

I didn’t fix it. I didn’t lose weight. I didn’t try harder. I went to the bedroom and I closed the door and I lay there and I let those nine words land on top of twenty years of other people’s opinions about my body until the pile was so heavy I couldn’t move.

The eating disorder came back. Obviously. Like a guest who’d been waiting in the hall the whole time. Not dramatic. Not hospitalisation. Just the counting. The skipping. The standing on scales at 6am like the number could tell me something I needed to hear.

Nine words. That’s all it took to undo a decade of trying to be okay in my own skin.

He doesn’t know that. He probably doesn’t remember saying it. Men say things like that and forget them by lunchtime. Women carry them in their bodies for the rest of their lives.

I’m still carrying it. In the mirror I avoid. In the compliment I deflect. In the part of me that still, after everything, wonders if he was right.

He wasn’t right. I know that. Somewhere underneath the pile.

I just can’t always reach it.