tt_Part 2: My mother-in-law gave me a dress three sizes smaller for my birthday just to make fun of my weight in front of my whole family
My mother-in-law gave me a dress three sizes smaller for my birthday just to make fun of my weight in front of my whole family, and yesterday when her house flooded and she came to my door to ask me for lodging, I took the two suitcases to the patio under the downpour and returned the dress to her face so that she could learn to respect; what neither Camilo nor I knew yet was what was stored at the bottom of that soaked suitcase, and why Doña Gloria crossed half the city in the rain in order to get home before her own son.
😱😮⚠️
I am 29 years old and I have been married to Camilo for three years.
All my life I have been chubby. Since I was a child. I’ve gotten used to people thinking about my body as if it were their business.
But no one like my mother-in-law.
Doña Gloria had a comment ready every time she saw me. “Oh, mija, another omelette?” “Put on something looser, mija, your belly is marked.” Camilo asked her to shut up and she just laughed. “It’s mother’s advice.”
The strange thing, and that’s what I’m thinking about now, is that he told me without laughing inside.
Sometimes I would turn around suddenly and find her watching me eat with a face that was not mocking. It was something else. As a scare. I didn’t even realize it then.
Because what no one took into account is that I hardly ate. Seriously, comadre. And even so, the last two years my body swelled on its own. The rings stopped going in. In the afternoon my ankles were like bombs. I said it was age, which was sitting all day at work.
In Camilo’s family there had been another daughter. A sister, Rosario. No one named her. Once I asked and Camilo just said “he left us very young” and changed the conversation. Doña Gloria left the room when someone said that name.
Last month was my birthday and Camilo organized a meal at the house.
My mother-in-law arrived with a very elegant gift box. In front of my parents and my siblings he forced me to open it.
It was a tight dress, made of a transparent synthetic fabric, three sizes smaller than mine.
When I pulled him out, he burst out laughing for all to hear.
“I bought it for you motivationally, mija. Let’s see if seeing it hanging gives you so much willpower and you stop eating. Camilo deserves a wife who takes care of herself.
My face boiled. I saw my siblings get serious and my mom bow her head in sheer sadness.
I didn’t cry. I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure.
What seemed strange to me, although at the time I didn’t stop to think about it, is that that dress didn’t have a store tag. It was washed, soft, like clothes that someone had already worn. I thought I had taken it out of a second-hand bag to humiliate myself cheaper.
I kept it in the box with all my courage.
Life takes many turns. And mine gave one on Saturday.
Doña Gloria got water through the drainage of the colony and the entire ground floor was flooded. He arrived at my house by surprise at six in the evening, carrying two huge suitcases and a carry-on bag, assuming that he would stay in my guest room for the next two weeks.
Camilo still hadn’t come home from work.
I opened the door for him. I saw his suitcases. I let her into the living room.
As he settled into the couch complaining about the traffic, I grabbed the two suitcases.
They weighed a lot. Too much for a lady’s clothes, I thought, but I was already up with courage ahead of me and I didn’t stop.
I dragged them to the back yard and left them on the cement, just below the roof, where a tremendous downpour was already beginning to fall.
I came back. I took the same birthday box out of my bag, with the little dress inside, and put it on her legs.
He looked at me without understanding.
I stood in front of her and spoke to her calmly.
“Look, Doña Gloria. Since this house is mine, because my parents inherited it from me, here the rules are set by me.
“Their suitcases are already back there, underwater.
“If you want to go and rescue them, I suggest you wear that dress you gave me.” As it is three sizes smaller, it will fit well and protects it from the rain.
—Let’s see if that gives you so much motivation to look for a hotel.
It rose like a spring. White, white of courage.
He didn’t answer me.
He ran out to the yard, threw his two suitcases dripping with water and left my house insulting me at the top of his lungs, dragging everything along the sidewalk in the downpour.
I closed with insurance. My hands were shaking, but inside I was happy. At last he had returned it to him.
At night my sister-in-law spoke to me, furious. That I am resentful. That I exposed an elderly lady by leaving her underwater. That a comment about my physique did not justify ruining his things in such an ordinary way.
I hung up on him. I slept peacefully for the first time in a year.
Camilo arrived very late. I told him everything proudly, hoping that he would laugh with me.
He didn’t laugh.
He turned white just like his mother. He asked me where the suitcases were. I told her that she had taken them all wet.
He put his hands to his head. She told me that her mother had not come because of the flood.
He told me that on Thursday Doña Gloria went to the IMSS. Not because of his own, as he had told me. It was because of me. He went to pick up something with my name on it that I hadn’t dared to go and look for.
I went out into the courtyard in the rain. On the sidewalk, where my mother-in-law dragged her suitcases, an envelope from the laboratory had been left lying around, soaked, with my name on it.
I picked him up with trembling fingers. And until I opened it I understood that that dress was never to make fun of my weight, that Doña Gloria had been watching me swell for months just like her daughter, and that the size three times smaller was Rosario’s, the one from the year before the whole family told her that she was only eating too much:
I opened it standing there, in the middle of the sidewalk, with the rain hitting the paper and watering down my ink.
It was an IMSS sheet. Some analyses and one of those references that urge you to go.
I understood almost nothing. Pure doctor’s words.
But there were some underlines. With a pen. With the trembling handwriting of Doña Gloria.
“Fluid retention.” “Renal function.” “Edema.” “Cardiological evaluation is urgent.”
And at the bottom, in his own handwriting, a note: “Mija, it’s not fat. Please go.”
I stared at those three letters—edema—until the water ate them off the paper.
She wasn’t fat.
I had been getting sick for two years, and the only one who had noticed was the woman I had just thrown in the rain.
Do you remember the ankles that swelled like balloons in the afternoon? Of the rings that stopped going in?
I called him fat. He told him age. He told her to be sitting at work.
It was my body screaming for help, and I covered her mouth with shame.
And I still didn’t understand the worst. I didn’t understand why that woman, if she knew this, had shouted it at me in a dress in front of my whole family instead of telling me nicely.
That’s what I’m going for. Hold on to me.
Camilo went out into the rain behind me. He took the sheet of paper from my hands without saying anything and read it. His jaw trembled.
“My mother went to the Insurance Facility alone,” she told me. With your CURP. He fought at the window to get an appointment. You had been saying for months that you had nothing.
I remembered. It’s true. The doctor at the health center had told me to check my kidneys and I told Camilo that it was pure old woman’s paranoia, that they saw me as fat and that’s it.
“I’ve been begging for weeks to take you,” Camilo continued, his voice breaking. And I didn’t want to hear it. I swear I didn’t want to hear it.
That’s when I got the first twenty.
The “oh, mija, another omelette?” The “you should take care of yourself”. The “Camilo deserves a wife who takes care of herself”.
I heard it as a joke. Like a bitter old woman messing with my body.
But she was a terrified woman telling me the only thing she could say, in the only horrible way she could think of, because I never listened to her.
And yet. Even so, the dress didn’t fit me. It’s one thing to worry. Another is to humiliate yourself in front of your mother.
That piece was missing. And when I found it, it broke me in two.
I entered the house soaked. Camilo stayed outside talking on the phone to his mother, who did not answer.
I sat in the living room, where two hours earlier I had put the gift box on Doña Gloria’s legs as a revenge.
The box was still there. The dress inside, wrinkled from when I threw it at her.
I took it out. I spread it on my legs.
And I saw it for the first time.
It wasn’t a tent dress. That had already seemed strange to me on my birthday, but with courage I didn’t stop to think about it. It had no label. It was washed a thousand times, soft, the fabric already transparent from so used.
It smelled like an old perfume. A sweet one, a lady’s, that was not Doña Gloria’s.
I pressed it to my face without knowing why, and I let myself cry without knowing for whom.
I’m going to be honest with you, because if not, this won’t work.
I hated Doña Gloria for three years. I hated her with enthusiasm. Every comment of his I kept as a stone to throw it at him one day. And yesterday I threw it all together, with suitcases and rain, and I felt free.
What I haven’t told you is what I felt when I saw her run out into the yard, old lady, to retrieve her things underwater.
I felt good.
And that’s the part I’m not going to forgive myself.
Because while I was feeling good, that woman was saving my life and I didn’t even notice.
There was a daughter in that family that no one talked about. Rosario. Every time someone named her, Doña Gloria left the room.
I never asked too much. But that night, with the dress on my face and that sweet perfume stuck in my nose, a cold fell on my back that was not from wet clothes.
I grabbed the car keys.
Camilo yelled at me where I was going in that rain. I didn’t answer him. Some things are not explained before. They are made.
Doña Gloria was at my sister-in-law’s house, the girl, the one who had spoken to me at night to tell me she was resentful.
I played. My sister-in-law opened the door with a swollen face from crying, ready to fight me again.
“I’ve come to see your mother,” I told him.
Doña Gloria was sitting on the edge of an armchair, with her two suitcases still dripping on the floor at the entrance. He hadn’t opened them. A soaked seventy-year-old woman, hugging her bag.
He saw me come in and didn’t say anything. He looked down.
I knelt in front of her. I don’t even know why. It came out of my body.
“Doña Gloria.” I’ve already read about the Insurance.
He raised his eyes. He had the face of someone who has been waiting for years to be believed.
“Why didn’t you tell me normally?” I asked. Why the dress? Why in front of everyone?
And there, for the first time in three years, that tough woman fell apart.
“Because you don’t understand,” he said. Just like her.
“Same as whom?”
He pressed the bag to his chest.
“My Rosary was thirty-one. His feet swelled. We told him to take care of himself. That he would stop eating so much. That he go on a diet.
His voice broke in his name.
“I said to her with affection, mija. With a lot of love. “Take care, chubby, please.” Every day with love.
“And I buried her.
The fourth ran out of air.
“It was the heart,” he said. The thing about the feet was the heart asking for help. And we only saw his belly.
My sister-in-law was crying on the wall, covering her mouth. She had told him that too. She also told her sister that she overate.
“When I saw you swell just like that,” Doña Gloria told me, “with the same ankles, the same face… My God. I felt like it was coming at me again.
“I told you that with affection for a whole year. You didn’t listen to me. Just like her.
“So this time I wasn’t affectionate. I was cruel. By the way. So that it would burn so much that you had to go to the doctor even if it was to shut me up.
He looked at me with red eyes.
“I preferred that you hate me alive, than cry for you dead.
I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say.
Three years thinking that this woman despised me for being fat.
And it turns out that the only one in the world who was willing for me to hate her in order not to bury me was her.
I stayed for a while kneeling on my sister-in-law’s floor, with Doña Gloria’s hand in mine. Both are cold.
And I made the decision that there is no return.
I stopped. I grabbed one of his wet suitcases, the one that weighed so much and that in the afternoon he had dragged to the yard as a punishment.
“Let’s go home, Doña Gloria,” I said. Both. You stay with me as long as you need. And early tomorrow he takes me to the Insurance, because I don’t dare to do it alone.
My hands were shaking. It was not a pretty scene. It was a soaked daughter-in-law carrying the mother-in-law’s suitcase that she had thrown into the rain two hours earlier.
Doña Gloria got up slowly. And before leaving, he stopped me by the arm.
“You don’t open that suitcase,” he said. Leave it to me.
But he had already opened it. The zipper came off by itself, swollen with water, there at the entrance.
And there were no ladies’ clothes inside.
There were girls’ clothes. Sweaters folded with years of care. A rag doll. Photos in an envelope. And small shoes, first as a girl and then as a young woman, arranged as if on an altar.
When her house was flooded, with everything she had, Doña Gloria put Rosario’s things in two suitcases. The only thing he couldn’t let drown him.
And he crossed half the city in the downpour, his dead daughter in tow, to get her to safety in the only dry place he trusted.
In my house.
And I threw it into the yard, in the rain.
I burst into tears like I had never cried before. On his knees, on top of the open suitcase. Asking forgiveness from a girl I didn’t know, for letting the rain fall on her again.
Doña Gloria knelt down with me. And for the first time he didn’t tell me anything about my body.
He just hugged me.
To the bottom of that suitcase, wrapped in Chinese paper, was the empty space of a single garment. One that was missing.
The dress.
The one she had given me “motivational” in front of my whole family. The one I threw in his face. The transparent synthetic, without label, washed a thousand times, with the perfume of a sweet lady.
He was from Rosario.
It was the last dress her daughter wore while healthy, the size she was before she started swelling, when she could still be saved.
Doña Gloria gave me the only thing she had left of her girl. She put it in my hands in front of everyone and let me laugh at her and hate her, as long as I saw myself in that size and understood in time what Rosario understood late.
He didn’t give me a joke.
She gave me her daughter, so as not to lose another.
I have the dress hanging in my room. He was left with a stain of mud from the patio that no matter how much he washed, it does not come off.
I’m never going to wear it.
I have been in treatment for four months. My ankles don’t swell anymore. Every month that dress is a little less big, and every time I try it on I pray in a low voice to a girl I didn’t know.
Doña Gloria comes on Sundays to check that I took the pills. She sits in my room, in front of the hanging dress, and remains silent.
We both stared at that stain that doesn’t go away.
None of them yet dares to say Rosario’s name out loud.
But we both say it, quietly, every Sunday, in front of that stained dress that one day will fit me.
