TW: fat hate, mistreatment (abuse?), general meanness to a child

My stepmother and I do not get along. I sometimes think she believes I’m fat to spite her. As a child, she was especially hard on me because I was too scared to talk back; one day sticks out in particular. When she and my dad moved to a new neighborhood I was unfamiliar with, she asked me to go for a walk with her. I was overjoyed that she actually wanted to spend time with me. It was a hot summer day so I figured we wouldn’t be out for too long. I was wrong.

We ended up walking around for close to two hours. I vomited in someone’s bushes. I almost passed out. I didn’t know how to get back so I just had to keep following her, and of course I was a kid so I didn’t have a cell or change for a payphone. Looking back, I probably could’ve run to someone’s house or to a store and asked for help, but what would I have said? She insisted this was good for me, she was doing nice things for me by taking an interest in my health, and she was just worried about me. “You’re getting sick because you’re happy being fat. If you exercised more, you wouldn’t be like this. It’s your own fault you keep throwing up.” I tried telling her I didn’t think this was ok. I thought she was hurting me. She said it was just exercise, and exercise couldn’t hurt my fat self.

I could never really adequately explain what happened to my parents. They didn’t understand why I was so upset she took me for a walk. They assumed I was mad because I was lazy, that I was overreacting and would’ve gotten that worn out from any length walk. The actual physical harm that was done to me was ignored, and because it was permitted, it continued.

The only time I was ever allowed to eat at her house was when my dad fed me himself, and that was usually only dinner. What he saw was a kid he assumed had been fed normally all day gobbling down food and begging for seconds. He found snacks I’d brought from my mother’s house (where the granola bars were not numbered to identify if any were eaten without permission) and hidden, so again, he saw what he assumed was a fat girl obsessing over food. I think he just couldn’t believe the woman he loved enough to marry was starving his child. Of course a fat girl hated going on a walk, she’d rather be sitting on the couch watching TV; of course a fat girl was complaining she was hungry, she just wanted to eat junk food all the time.

I’ve never really told anyone about that. The few times I tried were met with “oh, she just cared about your health. She wanted you to exercise and eat healthy.” Starvation and exercise to the point of illness are not caring, and I know she wasn’t “just strict” because my (thin) sibling was not mistreated. She was allowed to eat when hungry. She wasn’t terrified of what would happen if she asked for food. I know I can’t have been the only kid that went through that, and it breaks my heart that I don’t know how to help the ones that are suffering now.