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Catherine
Hi, welcome to Backwards Sweater. In this episode, I'm gonna talk about mustaches, orthotics, and diets, the sexiest thing about me.

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Speaker 1
You mean to tell me it's been on backwards the whole time?

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Catherine
I'm Catherine. I'm a 59-year-old mother of seven, and I'm a Chi Chi to three. My journey has been messy, meaningful, and full of pivots. Everything changed when I shifted my perspective and turned my sweater around. Join me on this never-ending journey of entertaining the what-ifs, finding your voice, and breaking free from limitations. It's time to live authentically with no itchy tag.

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Catherine
This is where I'll spill the tea about me and I'll invite others to the room.

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Catherine
Welcome to Backwards Sweater.

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Speaker 1
I take a few steps forward Maybe one too side I've got a backwards sweater And I finally fit straight

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Catherine
When I was about 10 years old, I remember I got to serve lunch in the cafeteria at Carroll Catholic grade school. And one of the little people coming through the lines said to me, "Why do you have a mustache?" And as a 10 or 11-year-old girl, I went home crying to my mother, who in her kindness went out and got me jolene mustache bleach. What that did was made that beautiful black peach fuzz, now became blonde peach fuzz, and that mustache became my nemesis. Every single day, I would just pray that nobody would see it, that they would notice it, that I could get through a day without someone saying something about it. Fast forward to when I worked it quick and easy. I remember one nice man who had just pumped his gas, came in to buy cigarettes, and he said, "You can grow a better mustache than I can." In my silent self, of course, I did not say, "I bet you're jealous." I just shrunk a little bit more and got a little bit more quiet. Fast forward to student teaching the night before my big day, my big debut in the classroom with all the little ones. I prayed again that no child would talk about my mustache, because all the numerous families that I babysat for in my lifetime, every child, in their young inability to censor anything that they say, always noticed my mustache.

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Catherine
Being Native American slash Greek slash mutt of all things, I got this mustache from a very early age, and I got really hairy arms. And so that night before student teaching, when I was praying that nobody would notice it, I got through a full day without any child saying one word about my mustache. Then my grandmother and her kindness decided to offer me electrolysis. Electrolysis is when you can take the mustache out with a needle, and it goes into the little fine hair follicle, and they gave me all the ins and outs of the cycles of the hair follicle. And hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars later, my grandmother paid for that. So it made that peach fuzz a little bit thinner. Then one day I decided, well, actually my sister told me, you know what you can do?

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Catherine
Shave it. And I said, excuse me, shave it. And that day changed my life. So one of the sexiest things I do now is I shave that mustache, but that mustache made me a very insecure child and a very insecure woman. And when people would say, what would you take to a deserted island? What would you take? What would be the one thing you would take? And I always said I would take a tweezers so that people would know that they would be rescuing a woman. I don't know why I didn't say razor. Razor would have been easier. But now in this 21st century, there's so many things that can take care of that mustache. And I wish that my mom had known back then that there was thing called waxing, shaving, that I really didn't have to go through all those embarrassments and all those things. I could have gotten rid of it a lot earlier. But again, like I said earlier, a lot of these lessons helped make me who I am today. And then along with the mustache, I had orthotics. Because in the fifth grade, I had size 10, 11 feet. And you can't go into stores and buy shoes with that size of a foot. So the only places that I could get shoes as a young girl were in those special stores that sold orthotics. So my shoes, when I was at the ripe old age of 10, 11, 12, really impressionable times, were orthotics. They were lace-up shoes. And they were very large and clunky. While all of my girlfriends, and to those of you that are out there listening, you know who you are, because I know some of you will be listening. They were what's called ballet flats. Tiny, dainty little shoes with bows on them. And during recess, not only did I have a mustache, but I had the orthotics. And the orthotics then were the dress-up shoes for everybody else. So we took our shoes off and we were playing. And so everybody would wear my big shoes and they would giggle about how big they were. And between that and the mustache, it started that feeling in my mind that I was not very attractive. Now let's talk about the diets. I was on Weight Watchers at 10 too. So let's layer these things together. A mustache, big feet, slightly chubby. Now, when I look back at pictures, I think I wasn't chubby, but I sure did not feel comfortable in my skin at Weight Watchers every week, weighing, counting my points. And so began the cycle from a very young age where I monitored everything that went into my mouth. Tuna fish drained in water with a can of green beans, had three points. If I stayed under my points for the day, I was good. If I didn't, I was bad. If I'd lost weight, I got compliments. If I was chubby, I did not get compliments. That layered on top of the orthotics and the mustaches created a really insecure little girl. The day I knew I was chubby was the day that we had those physicals. The kind that you go into the gym and they have stations, everybody went to different stations and got different things done. And the scale was the tall kind with the little weight that you had to balance. And I was so proud that mindset of one, five, four. And I was in sixth grade and I remember coming up to the classroom after I had gotten on that scale and gotten all the things done. And I was given my little sheet of paper and I went into the room and I heard someone yell out,

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Catherine
"How much do you weigh, Kathy?"

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Catherine
And I said proudly with my mustache and my big feet,

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Catherine
"154."

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Catherine
And they said, "154."

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Catherine
And because of their shock and amazement at that number, quickly changed the number too. I said, "No, 104."

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Catherine
Because the 154 obviously was not accepted as a number that was normal. So from a very young age with my mustache, my hairy arms, my big feet and the consistent diets being taller and bigger than everybody else, set me on a course of wondering if I was good enough or why I wasn't like everybody else, adding to the feeling of having on a backwards sweater. I never got the cute boyfriends like the, I'm just gonna call the names out because it would be really funny if they were listening now that the Brian Brackneys and the Tad Martins, I didn't get those boys. I didn't get them. I did just recently see Brian and Walmart back in Lincoln, Illinois, and Brian looks really good. So I just wanna give a shout out to you, Brian. You do look very handsome. So you've aged very well, but I didn't get those boys. I was different than everybody else. Taller, bigger,

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Catherine
hairier, all the things that made me feel like I had a backwards sweater on. You know, it's interesting talking to people who have grown up and have shared the same story. And maybe it is that we all felt that way. I don't know, maybe everybody felt different, but there was a baseline of normal and it was petite, ballet shoes, no facial hair, and nobody was on Weight Watchers at 10 like I was. I remember fast forwarding to, I had gone to college and I came back home and I went to a party and I asked someone to give me a ride home. And this someone, I won't mention this person's name, but said to me, "Wow, you've really changed." And I remember thinking to myself, "Yeah, I don't have a mustache. "I'm not wearing a thotix and I'm not fat." Those are the things that always went through my mind when people would say things like that. Or now my exterior is accepted, but my interior was amazing this whole entire time. And as I've gotten older through this journey, especially after going through all the things that I talked about previously,

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Catherine
I realize that I am the one who is in charge of telling myself I am okay, even if I had a mustache and orthotics and a diet. The funny things about diets is all of my life, I've been on a diet. I'll start out at the beginning of the day on keto or intermittent fasting and then I'll have something and then I'll be like, "Oh, well, I'm still under calories. "So today I'm gonna be calorie counting." And then by the afternoon, I've gone over my calories so that I'm gonna go back to keto because everything I've had is just fat and beef. It's like the turmoil that's been in my head around diets because I had started at such a young age. I know now that I don't wanna live the last third of my life worrying about what diet I'm on. I want to raise up my voice and my soul and curate a healthy, hair-free person. And I relish in myself now. I love who I am now. And I look back at the girl that was struggling with the mustache and the orthotics and the diets. By the way, I still can't go in and buy shoes off the rack. And I think that that's great because it saves me a lot of money as shoes are really cool and I have to order them. So there are slight blessings in these things that at one time were curses for me. But I look back and I think about how hard it was to grow up looking different than everybody else. How hard it was to grow up with things that were not accepted by society, that were different. But I can see now the goodness in my health. I was a healthy child and I can look back and I can be grateful for all of those things, but they certainly weren't easy. And still to this day, when we talk about bodies and things like that, I do notice that we live in a world that certain constructs, certain things are considered better than others. But when I entertain the what ifs and I say to myself, what if you just told yourself you're perfect? What if you told yourself there are other people that would kill to be your height? What if you just told yourself that big feet help you be more balanced? And what if you told yourself that your dark, beautiful black hair, which caused you to be really hairy, some people would kill for that. So with my mustache and my orthotics and my diet, the things that made it really hard to grow up as a child and feel normal, I actually have embraced them now. And because I can entertain the what ifs and tell myself a different story and shatter those limiting beliefs, I would not trade me for anything.

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Catherine
So when you're thinking about your childhood or even now, thinking about things that make you stand out or make you different, like my mustache, my big feet, my body, my weight, your nose, anything about you, sometimes that's what makes you unique. That's what actually makes you beautiful.

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Catherine
Make sure to join me next time when we talk about God, Google and my newfound faith. Till next time friends, make sure your tag is in the back and if it isn't, just enjoy the itch. But most of all, don't forget who you are.

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