The Heavy (2 page)

I look back on my early new-mom worries with some amusement. Our kids eventually learned to sleep through the night (though as toddlers they were both tough to get to sleep before ten or eleven sometimes), and I trust that one day David’s taste buds will wake up. But even as I know that no one misstep will completely make or break our kids, I tend to take each new decision point seriously. Raising a child is, after all, a pretty major responsibility.

Fortunately, Jeff and I generally are of similar mind. We are crazy about Bea and David, but we try to impose limits and order. Not necessarily so well (see cooking pasta to make peace and delayed bedtimes above), but we try.

When Bea and David started eating actual meals, I did what was expected of modern New York moms and fed my children healthful, well-balanced meals that reflected the latest knowledge of nutrition. Long gone was the USDA-approved food pyramid of the 1970s, which, to my youthful delight, rested heavily on a wide foundation of starchy carbs and included a picture of ice cream in the “dairy” category. Now our carbs have to be whole-grain, and anything with more than five ingredients or an additive your child himself can’t pronounce is suspect. You even have to stress out about what kind of water you give him—and it should be in a reusable bottle, but not a plastic one!

Breakfast was not spectacularly nutritious in our home—we ate bagels fairly often, and cereal the rest of the time. But lunch always had a protein in the form of ham or turkey, a piece of fruit, carrot sticks or cucumber slices, and some kind of healthy-seeming organic-ish snack, such as Pirate’s Booty or whole-grain pretzels. And never anything other than water to drink.

Dinners consisted of protein (meatballs, chicken cutlets, broiled fish filets), a small side dish of pasta or rice, and vegetables prepared without fat. After-dinner snacks varied from a cheese stick to crackers to a frozen fruit pop to a banana. There was no junk food in our house. At that point, my husband and I had nearly complete control over the kids’ diets, and we saw no reason to introduce overtly “bad” foods quite yet.

Parents today can be pretty sanctimonious about what they’ll feed to their children, and while I certainly cared about preparing healthful and nutritious meals for my family, in my mind I mocked the moms who were overly concerned with the organic lineage of their kids’ food. At a party celebrating Bea’s graduation
from the two-year-olds program at preschool, I watched as a little girl asked her mom whether she could have an all-natural frozen fruit pop. The mother inspected the ingredient list and said no. I am not sure what the objectionable additive was, but it set a pretty high standard for what that kid was allowed to eat. I think she was permitted a clementine, and that was it. I would never have expressed my feelings to this woman—her kid’s eating was her business, as far as I was concerned—but the extent to which she was controlling it seemed absurd.

On the other hand, I also silently disdained the moms who let their kids drink soda or eat fast food. I cringed when I saw fellow mothers on the subway hand their babies a bottle full of some garish pink beverage. And as for parents who had fat kids? Well, the theory that kids are who they are from the start and “just come out that way” went out the window on that one. This was their parents’ fault. A lack of discipline or a failure to set limits was at play. These people were either actively feeding their children badly, or passively letting their children feed themselves badly. Either way, logic told me they were to blame, and they were harming their innocent children.

As Bea’s weight stayed in the healthy range—maybe even a bit below average for her height—I felt good about the food and activity choices I was making for her, and sometimes looked down on the moms of fat kids the same way I looked down on the moms of poorly behaved kids: maybe the way Bea had turned out was just luck—probably it was just luck—but maybe, just maybe they were doing something wrong, and I was doing something right.

Another thing I was sure we were doing right: Jeff and I did not discuss food and eating in terms of “fattening” or “calories” in front of the children, and I would recoil when anyone else did. Those words had been thrown around casually by parents—
including mine—in the 1970s and 1980s, but now they felt too loaded. Those weren’t terms little kids should hear. Since she was a girl and thus, in my mind, more prone to insecurity about her body, I felt Bea needed particular protection from that kind of talk.

At lunch one day in a diner in Queens with Bubby, my grandmother, Bea was enthusiastically chowing down on a piece of my chicken. Bubby gently touched her arm to slow her down.

“Don’t eat so fast. You’ll eat too much and get fat,” Bubby said.

I was horrified. “What the hell, Grandma?” I blurted out. “She’s two years old!”

It was during the year after Bea turned three that our little girl started to bulk up. With her increased age came additional opportunities for urban exploration and socializing, and with that, exposure to previously unseen cuisines, including junk food.

The first time I ordered Bea her own meal at a restaurant, I was pleasantly taken aback by how voraciously she ate. Fried chicken with peas and potatoes, it was. She pincer-grasped those peas and fed them into her little mouth with tremendous patience, and chewed up more of the chicken than I would have expected for someone so small.

At birthday parties, she sucked juice boxes dry, ate every morsel of the pizza and cake, and enthusiastically consumed whatever candy happened to be in her goody bag. I wasn’t bothered by it but did notice that the other little guests didn’t do the same. Every block in our neighborhood seemed to feature a cupcake shop, a smoothie joint, a pizza place, or a hot-pretzel vendor, and as we walked, Bea peppered me with entreaties for snacks. Her brother
didn’t. She loved all foods, including dishes that I found inedibly spicy (chicken with hot peppers) or weird (grilled octopus). She complained constantly of being hungry. She polished off adult-size plates of food. Other kids didn’t.

Comparing her growth chart to that of her brother, I see that between the ages of two and six, David gained about five pounds each year, and Bea put on an average of twice that amount. At her checkup when she turned three, her weight was in the 99th percentile. A year earlier, it had been in the 75th-to-90th percentile range. Something was changing.

At a conference with me at Bea’s preschool that year, one of her teachers gently sounded an alarm about her eating. “She doesn’t self-regulate,” she noted. In the classroom, there was a snack table, a dress-up area, an art studio, a writing center, a library, a blocksbuilding section, and a music station. Guess where Bea spent most of her class time? She’d start off at the snack table and stay there long after her classmates had moved on to other activities. Though she would eventually join them, she’d make frequent stops back at the food for additional nibbles throughout the class period.

Ten pounds a year between the ages of three and six is a noticeable rate of weight gain. At first we saw this merely as a transition from being a slim toddler to being a slightly chunky one. There were other kids who, like her, were carrying around a bit of baby fat. It was sort of cute. Definitely not a big deal.

We also didn’t really spend a lot of time worrying about it because, frankly, we were too busy enjoying other aspects of Bea and David. Since they were both healthy, we paid much more attention to their emotional development than their weight.

Bea grew bigger still. She occasionally skipped entire clothing sizes. Jeff pointed out that the size-5 wardrobe I’d been dressing her in when she was four was unbecomingly tight. By the time I brought home a bunch of size-6 replacements, it was too late: she’d outgrown them, too. By the end of that year, she was wearing clothes meant for eight-year-olds. We started having to shorten the legs of jeans meant for much older (and taller) girls so they’d fit her.

I realized this was one of those situations where our response to her behavior, rather than the innate behavior she exhibited, was going to be the determining factor in this issue. But, afraid to send her down an unhealthy path of food obsession and body image problems, I kept my mouth shut. If there was any chance that Bea’s weight might not end up being an issue for her physically, I didn’t want to make it one psychologically.

But aside from the obvious health problems associated with being overweight, I worried about the emotional implications of letting Bea stay heavy. Were we going to let our daughter be the fat kid in the class? Would her schoolmates tease her? Would she start to hate how she looked? Might she be ostracized in the lunchroom or at recess? What if she grew into an obese adult, as half of overweight six- to eleven-year-olds do? Would her social life suffer? Her self-esteem? Her job prospects? Her potential life span?

I wanted Bea to feel good about herself and her body, but was preaching this kind of self-acceptance wrong if she was actually overweight? Should I teach her to be comfortable with a body that the rest of society disdains, that the medical community cautioned against, and that her father and I personally tried to avoid?

I still held out hope that this was a passing phase that wouldn’t require any major action on our part. In light of Bea’s appetite,
I was careful to make sure the foods she did have access to were nutritious. She could finish a pint of grape tomatoes or an entire small melon for a snack, so I could only imagine what kind of damage she could do to herself if I’d instead handed her Cheetos or Chips Ahoy cookies.

At that point in Bea’s childhood, junk food was not unheard of, but it was still pretty rare. I wouldn’t have dreamed of giving a four- or five-year-old kid soda. We almost never ate at fast-food restaurants—maybe once or twice a year. I doled out the kids’ Halloween candy haul parsimoniously and raised my voice sharply at grandparents who attempted to sneak them an extra share of dessert at a restaurant. Not because of Bea’s weight, but because I felt those were good, healthy habits that I should try to instill in my kids at a young age. No crappy food, no overeating, moderation. Obvious.

When Bea was five and her weight once again barely fell within the confines of the top of the medical chart, her pediatrician still was not overly concerned. She hoped (as I so desperately did) that the problem would work itself out, that Bea would hit some kind of growth spurt that would eliminate the problem naturally. Bea was also tall, so while her weight was in a high percentile, so was her height. Her annual weight gain, while significant, was staying constant year after year. Her problem wasn’t getting better, but it also wasn’t getting worse.

The pediatrician waved away the need for any major intervention at that time. She urged us to avoid desserts and sugary drinks. But I knew that wasn’t the culprit. We fed Bea nutritious food, and she was no less active than lots of kids her age. Though no athlete,
Bea walked around town, played in the playground like everyone else, and took dance class every week. We confirmed that she had no metabolic or other medical problem causing her weight gain. She just plain ate too much.

When Bea was a happy, productive first grader, our adult friends began to acknowledge her weight. “You just can’t let her eat like that,” one outspoken member of our extended family said. “Get rid of all the processed food in your house,” advised my co-worker at the time. “You should get her to exercise more,” ventured a mom of one of Bea’s classmates. Not that we’d asked.

Bea was catching on to the fact that she was starting to look different from other kids. One afternoon, as we were heading out to a family get-together, I found her in my bathroom putting on my lip gloss.

“So people won’t look at my belly,” she explained.

Her words cut me to the core. I don’t like people looking at my belly either, but I’m in my forties. I hadn’t even been aware of my stomach as a potential source of shame until I was years older than Bea. To see her feeling embarrassed about her tummy at such a young age seemed like a premature loss of innocence.

Sometimes, as we cuddled in bed or when she’d get dressed, she’d say, “I’m fat.” It seemed disingenuous to contradict her, but unthinkable to agree with her. So I’d dodge. “You’re beautiful and healthy. You’re growing. You don’t have to worry about being fat.”

But secretly, I was, increasingly, worried. I asked myself how much of my concern over the superficial, physical aspects of her being overweight was a result of my own ego or vanity. Was I
afraid she made me look like a bad mother? Did I worry that other moms thought I was overly lax? Unconcerned with her health? Neglectful? Lazy?

On the flip side, if I tried to put a stop to her patterns, would people think I was overreacting and not giving her time to grow out of her heaviness naturally? I didn’t know when the “right” time was to declare war on a child’s weight, but I thought age six definitely seemed premature. (Apparently not: a college friend who works in the medical community later confided that when she saw my family that year, with my husband’s weight at an all-time high and Bea seemingly following in his footsteps, she was worried. She felt our decision to help Bea did not come a moment too soon.)

So, sure, I wondered what other moms thought about me, and how they might judge my actions or inaction. But I was much more concerned about the judgments Bea herself would be subjected to. I wanted to protect her from the problems inherent in growing up as a “fat girl.” I knew people were beginning to view her that way—it was impossible not to—and that their associations with that label were almost always negative. It saddened me to think that people were looking at Bea with anything other than the awe and admiration I felt she deserved.

No matter her weight, I could not love Bea more. And when her belly swelled under a bathing suit or peeked out prominently under her pajama top, my only inclination was to want to kiss it. No weight gain or loss was going to change my opinion of her. Yet while I know a fat Bea would be just as amazing as a thinner Bea, I worried about other people regarding her differently, treating her differently because of her weight. I didn’t want people thinking of her as the “fat girl” throughout her childhood. Or ever.