Conditione sine qua non

Over the years as an adult, in times of stress, I tend to gain some weight. Nothing dramatic, never beyond  the 20 pounds, with the exception of when both my parents and my second sister died within just 3 years of each other. There were a whole set of circumstances, of betrayal, hubris and tragic illnesses, and in the chaos and shock, I gained 58 pounds. I joined Weight Watchers and lost the weight within less than a year. But the experience brought to the foreground how being judged on what your weight is, without seeing who you are,and why it is you are struggling with it, can be very painful. My mother always treated me as if I had stopped being a member of the family when ever I gained any weight. I have often thought of my youngest sister who took her own life by hanging herself at age 35, and who was among other things, struggling with her weight at the time. She was not heavy by any means, just about 20 pounds overweight, a taboo in our mother's eyes. I can just imagine how that humiliation and rejection must have hurt. I even remember my skinny mother talking about this at my sister's funeral, and she talked about this as a source of social embarrassment, that her daughter was overweight, such a social faux pas, don't you know. I was too stunned to react, now I would really set her straight on her shallow, irrelevant notions. I remember at my other sister's wedding, where I was overweight by about 25 pounds , at the most, and how my mother was avoiding even being near me in the presence of her well-heeled new in-laws. She was heartless. Her whole deal was that as one of her daughters you were treated with contempt if you were not like her, that is, skinny, narcissistic, and a nymphomaniac. She was also a skilled and silk tongued manipulator and an alcoholic. She hated me for for seeing through her, and for refusing to be seduced by her schemes. It took me a long time to see and understand who she really was, and how she really only loved herself. Her thing was conditional love, and woe to you if you refused to go along. You simply ceased to exist, you became invisible. If only I had never struggled with my weight, if only I had married for money, if only I had embraced her devious ways. I so regret how she turned her children against our father, and how I did not realize what she was doing until it was too late for my father, and she had already turned him out of his own home, and exiled him, already ill , to a nursing home in Belgium. Conditional love, it is not what comes to mind, together with lies and contempt, when you think of a loving mother.