"Fat": A Lifelong Label

The school sent home their BMI reports last week. These reports inform parents of their child’s weight, height, and body mass index. They also let us know where our kids fall on the scale of underweight to obese. I’m assuming they also share this information with the government and that’s how states track their childhood obesity rates.

When I was a kid, schools did something similar although BMI had not been created. They did make us line up in the nurse’s office to be measured and then checked our spines to make sure they were straight. I hated this day. Well, actually that day never registered on my radar until after third grade. Third grade was the year the doctor informed me that I was fat. It was the year my mother started watching what I ate. It was the year that food became an obsession. Prior to that, I didn’t have any real memory of what I ate or whether it mattered.

When I look back on my childhood pictures, I did start to look a little chubby around third grade. But I wonder now, if that isn’t normal. Kids seem to begin to grow wider faster than they grow taller in the years before puberty. I have to wonder whether my doctor did me a disservice by labeling me. I wonder if I had been allowed to continue on my course, if my weight wouldn’t have just leveled out on its own.

Instead, his pronouncement set me on course for a life time of dieting and obsessive exercising, interspersed with periods of weight gain in which I would throw in the towel and remind myself that I’ve always been fat. More than that it gave me a new picture of myself: I was fat and therefore according to our culture I was unattractive. That fact colored my adolescence and undermined my confidence. These days my weight falls in the top of the healthy weight on the BMI index, but that number does nothing for my mental and emotional assumptions. I still feel fat. I think I probably always will.

Odd Kid (and Parent) Out

“How come we don’t have cable TV?”

“Why won’t you buy Doritos?”

“How come I can’t have a game system?”

These questions are most commonly followed by, “Everyone else has them!” and sometimes, “Why do you have to be so weird?”

I’ve given up imparting my reasoning for all of these parental decisions, because my kids have heard it before and all it elicits is groans and eye rolls.

My husband had a conversation with my daughter this weekend that led to the unveiling of a reason even more compelling than my desire for my kids to grow up physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy. To my mind, these are perfectly logical reasons for cleaning the cupboards of junk food and not allowing someone else’s idea of “entertainment” in to my home, but to my children they are simply more evidence of my questionable mental state.

This weekend, frustrated by the snack and entertainment options, my daughter cut to the chase and asked, “Why do we always have to be so different?” My brilliant husband replied, “Do you want to be like everyone else?”