"Do I Wear Spanx to Family Court?"
On co-parenting in diet culture.
Looking back, Heather, a mom of two in Northern California, says she kind of knew her marriage was over when her then-husband, Paul, insisted they drive as a family to his CrossFit competition two hours away when their younger son, Leo, was just eight weeks old. Paul’s CrossFit obsession had begun four years earlier after they had their first baby and it was already a stress point in their marriage. “Neither of us had ever been gym rats,” says Heather, who asked to change all of their names. “[Before kids] we loved food. We were part of this cooking club together and most of our social life revolved around building these huge multi-course meals with friends.” But when Paul joined CrossFit, all of that ended. “Overnight, it was ‘we can’t have any carbs in the house.’ And everything revolved around his gym schedule.”
Heather was frustrated, but she wanted to support her husband. “I would say, ‘Babe, it’s great you found this hobby but it’s not my jam,” she says. “I don’t have any problem with carbs.” Her frustration leveled up when Paul decided that they couldn’t “poison” their then-toddler Sam by feeding him carbs either. “I was like, ‘There is no science that this is good for a two-year-old,’” Heather says. “So we had stress in our relationship.”
Then Leo was born and Paul told Heather he couldn’t take any paternity leave from his job as a medical device salesman. But he did want them to go cheer him on at his CrossFit competition, which he spent hours training for every weekend. And, during his work day. “Paul’s assistant told me he was taking two hour lunch breaks every day to go practice his routine for the competition,” Heather says. “But he told me he couldn’t take any time off for the baby?” When they got to the competition she saw how completely Paul was wrapped up in this new world; using the lingo, talking about diet hacks, obsessing about his performance. She sat in their hotel room one afternoon trying to make Sam and Leo nap and had “this huge epiphany of ‘Oh my God, he’s gone.’”
Heather didn’t leave though. They went to couples therapy and when Paul said he wanted Heather to go to CrossFit with him—to bond, but also, to “get her body back”—she tried. They even went to CrossFit Prom. “It was so weird,” she says. “I just wanted someone to teach me to do a sit-up so I could someday not pee my pants. I don’t want to do workouts with people watching and cheering for me.” And when Leo was 18 months old, Paul told her he wanted a divorce. “I always tell people now: My husband had a midlife crisis, found a cult, and left the marriage,” Heather says. Six years later, he’s still in it. And Heather is still trying to figure out how to co-parent their kids (now 12 and 8) with an ex-husband locked firmly in diet culture.
One of the first pieces I wrote for Burnt Toast when I was starting to build out the newsletter was an essay called The Thing Your Husband Really Needs To Read. I wrote it in response to a reader with a diet-y husband, but I could have written it for Heather when she was still married, and for any number of other women who have written to me since about how to bridge the divide around food and bodies in their relationships. “To be overly gendered about it: You’ve got all these women running around healing themselves and their relationship with food,” says Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC, cofounder of the Center for Body Trust. “And no one else in their family has to come along?” To Hilary’s point: I also hear from queer and trans married and partnered folks about this issue, so it’s absolutely not just the cis men who aren’t okay. But because our culture socializes women to do most of the labor around food and health, and most of the emotional labor in a family, period, and because this same culture socializes cis men to both avoid that labor and avoid their emotions and equate self-worth with physical prowess—a lot of these guys aren’t okay. And it is both tough to be married to them and tough to be divorced from them, if you’re still co-parenting.