Siena Ritter, 2023
Sophia’s legs tally marks across the photograph, disappearing when I lower my half-moon eyes. Her form is an abstraction; a stratus cloud stretched taught across the skeletal sky. I look away.
The photograph is from 2007: the summer she stopped wearing shorts.
For most of our childhood, I thought my little sister was a wild creature. She scaled oak trees and slept with the leaves still in her hair. When peach juice dripped from her chin, she wiped the sticky-sweet residue on my shirt, slinking away before I could retaliate. Her laugh was like water boiling over, frothy and vapid. I thought it was the sweetest sound.
It’s the procession of nostalgia, growing in intensity as I age, that memorializes her laughter. Nostalgia has a way of illuminating exactly what the mind wishes to remember, exiling the rest to a nearly unreachable place. As it constructs Sophia’s wilderness into something vast and beautiful, it leaves behind the understory.
The summer she stopped wearing shorts was also the summer she started measuring her circumferences. She was six years old, and her uniform until that point had invariably been jean shorts and a tank top. Her monkey-legs were free to swing from tree limbs in that outfit, though it didn’t offer much protection against the ground, and her knees were perpetually the color of ripe strawberries. It wasn’t until we were adults that she explained the sudden switch. It didn’t seem significant at the time– Sophia was headstrong and prone to bursts of stubbornness (My mother often called her Testadura, which in Italian means hard-head), so her sudden and vehement opposition to tight-fitting clothes didn’t warrant much attention.
For the next five years, my sister’s shirts became larger and larger on her frame, and her pants drooped at the waist, encircling her legs in a column of khaki. She despised dresses and blue jeans and the concept of growing older. Though it wasn’t much, she was still eating in these in-between years; it was the fifth grade that marked a revolution, a new facet of my sister, la testadura. Suddenly, she refused to go to restaurants on account of all the germs. She refused to eat my mother’s cooking on account of its poor nutritional value. She refused to eat bread, then meat, then milk and cheese, until her diet was confined to tiny portions of fruits and vegetables. She was refusing sustenance, life.
I watched her face go from cherub cheeks and skin the color of almonds to something angular, pallid, lifeless. Her body swelled at its joints and sunk everywhere else. I remember thinking she had taken on the image of a deflated balloon. Nobody noticed at first, then it became unavoidable. She was eleven years old and barely larger than a third grader, heads below everyone else and sunken beyond her years. My parents tried to revive her softly at first, but their kindness soon morphed into impatience and, eventually, anger. Though they were well aware of the issue, they refused to take her to treatment. I, too, was angry – the big sister kind of anger that blossoms under a pretense of concern, though it really has more to do with control. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t just pick up a fork and get over it, move on with life, and accept that physical growth is an inevitability. I thought she was simply scared of getting older, and that her condition was reactive. It would be a long time before I understood the urge to disappear.
Sophia never truly recovered. In high school, she took up running because she thought it would make her smaller. At first, it seemed like divine intervention; she fell in love with the sport and soon realized that to get faster, she would have to put more fuel into her body. The moment our parents observed her new volition to eat, they claimed she was cured and promptly forgot to check up on her again. Then, the culture and competition of cross country caused her to boomerang back into restriction.
I’ve never written about this until now. A few months ago, Sophia and I were hiking in our hometown when I brought up the subject. I had been struggling with depression, and for the first time in my life, I had a turbulent relationship with food. Naturally, she was my confidant, though I didn’t expect much openness from her. I was astonished when she admitted that the reason she boycotted shorts at age six was because she thought her thighs were huge. She is not a vulnerable person by nature and had never spoken so candidly about this before.
I have spent my whole life trying to fit into a smaller body, she said. It was the only way I felt in control of myself.
Those two sentences sent me reeling. How could a child have such dysmorphic thoughts? I thought eating disorders were for teenage girls with braces and boy problems, not kindergarteners. But as soon as my sister learned how to count on both hands, she began to quantify herself. It’s a mathematical disease rooted in numericals: pant size, weight, circumference, and calories. Subtraction, subtraction, subtraction. A disease of deficits. Once you subscribe to this logarithmic landslide, it’s hard to find your way out.
These are the things that went through my head when I looked at the photograph. It was one in a dust-covered box of hundreds, but I couldn’t bring myself to sift through the others. This picture, marked 2007 in orange, digital print, wasn’t of a carefree child hanging from a tree. It was an image of a girl under a great and invisible pressure, teetering on the precipice of collapse. This, I thought, is the condition of women everywhere: superficial standards propagated by male voices, burrowed deeply under our skin, all the way to our bones. Growing up is a constant search to reclaim childlike freedom, but how can we find this liberation if even our infancy is marred with expectation?
With the photograph in my hand, I imagined a world in which I was a mother, and in that moment, I made a promise to my unborn daughter. When – if – you come into this world, I promise to teach you how to treat yourself with love and only love. I promise to remind you that you are enough, always. I promise…
All of the things I wish I could have promised to my sister.
Presently 