FatChyck

When the sitcom Roseanne first came on television in the ‘80s it made my mother cringe.

It’s true that Roseanne’s brash nasal harping made lots of people wince. But my mom couldn’t stand her for other reasons.

“Uucchh, look at her, she’s disgusting,” she would say.

Here’s the catch: My mom looked a lot like Roseanne. She had that same Russian-Jewish, almost-Asian straight black hair, a moon-shaped face with cheeks that broadened like the horizon with her smile, and a laugh that flew out of her apartment window to echo on the street below. She was barrel-bellied, and wide like Roseanne, but like the sitcom queen, had the energy of an Alpha girl.

At first my mom wouldn’t admit her hostility was because Roseanne was fat. She said it was because she was poorly dressed – which she was. My mom had a fabulous, flowy Maude-goes-lesbian fashion sense and couldn’t take Roseanne’s plaid shirts and stretchy pants.

But years later the truth came out. My mom visited me at college and praised me for becoming thin. There I was floating lightly about my hippie college wearing a skimpy tie-died tank top and Indian skirt, free of my years of Lane Bryant dowdiness.

But her praise wounded me. I knew in my heart that this skinny was on short loan. My diet wouldn’t last. I still saw fat in the mirror. And I didn’t want to be chided for who I had been and who I still was inside.

“You hate Roseanne, because she’s a tub of lard, you freak …” is what I suddenly hissed at my mom. We were sitting in the newly built, sunny student union eating German potato salad on a lovely spring day that just began to thaw Ohio.
“And you fucking look like her!” That’s how I really made her feel the pain.

I had no idea where the Roseanne comment came from. By that time in the late ‘80s, Roseanne had married Tom Arnold, her sitcom family had won the lottery in a Happy-Days-esque, shoot-the-dying-puppy kind of plot twist, and people were cooling off on their love-hate relationship with America’s first fat lady.

My mom became completely quiet. At first she looked like she wanted to scream at me as if I were a rude child. Then she narrowed her Asian/Roseann-Barr-ish eyes and said, “I hate her because she’s ugly and fat.”

“So you hate yourself.” I spat.

“Yes. I guess so," She responded.

She had lauded my thinness because she didn’t want to hate me ... the way she hated Roseanne.