Can We Fat Talk?

Can you picture her? The girl in your same grade who constantly asked, "Do you think I look fat?" Maybe she was your best friend or the bane of your existence. Maybe she had the strong core of a ballerina or the strong calves of a star soccer player. Maybe she was rail thin or gorgeously curvy. The facts of her figure didn't matter. The resounding chorus of her being was the same, like a broken record, replaying the same few notes over and over. Am I fat Am I fat Does this make me look fat Do you think I look fat...

The chorus began to lose meaning, so diluted by its frequent play. The question became a rhetorical one that begged no answer. It was symptomatic of issues much deeper, but how to broach those?

***

I received an advance release copy of Rachel Simmons' Enough As She Is: How to Help Girls Move Beyond Impossible Standards of Success to Live Healthy, Happy, and Fulfilling Lives which just released in the last week. I've already delved into it and even though this book primarily offers guidance for parents of daughters, there is one chapter that has universal appeal for women.

The "Can We Fat Talk?" chapter is grounded in current research and offers a very sobering portrait of what a social media-saturated girlhood is like. I found myself highlighting and dog-earing just about every page. Simmons knows her stuff. But rather than simply painting a fearful portrait, the book also offers many helpful, actionable solutions for steering girls away from body shaming and toward a positive, holistic view of themselves at this moment in time.

In many ways, though, this chapter seems as though its audience could be any female readership. Fat Talk is a problem that begins in girlhood that we cannot seem to outgrow as women. Simmons writes that Fat Talk may feel like Friend Talk but it builds a bridge at the expense of putting down an individual. As women, too often we bond over one-upping (or one-downing?) each other on our body shaming. How many times have you been privy to two women gushing about how much they ate over the holidays or how lazy they were on a vacation? Maybe you were even participating in the conversation. It may have seemed innocuous, but is this the message we want to send girls? That the currency of true friendship is exchanged by putting one's physical self down?

***

Simmons visited my children's public school system earlier this year and her talk was very resonant, covering the same topics addressed in her book (bullying, social media, the pressure to be perfect).  She invited girls grades 2 and above to attend the talk. She was able to address the girls as well as their parents, speaking to both audiences in a way that was relevant but not preachy, funny but still heavy with the gravity of an important message. Many of the topics in Enough As She Is are geared toward parents guiding girls through the latter years of high school, but there is plenty relevant to parents of younger daughters. Moreover, so much of the message of modeling positivity and listening to our bodies and their unique needs is ageless, timeless.

Simmons' book is certainly a drink from the fire hydrant and I'm finding it may be a perennial go-to resource than a quickfire read. The complexity of issues and the depth of the research and guidance speak well to the complexity and depth of being female, though, and I would recommend it to anyone who is one or who cares about one.

Chronicle of Valentine's Past

1987 - I remember room 1B, the desks aligned in rows with each student’s handmade mailbox scribbled in crayon. Danny B. includes candy in his valentine envelopes, something more exotic than the chalky conversation hearts, and he is the coolest kid in Mrs. Ferry's room. 1990 - My parents leave us little valentines at our breakfast plate, including sponge toffee from Sell’s and a kite for each of us. Hockey Boy gives me a cardboard valentine with a devil and a pitchfork that says, “You’re Hot.” I don't know how to describe the tingling feeling up and down my spine.

1992 - My bestie and I go ice skating and we see Hockey Boy who asks us to couple skate but we turn him down. I am wearing overalls with one of the straps unhinged. I am obviously too cool for Hockey Boy.

1994 - I slow dance with Morgan S. at the Student Council Valentine’s Dance. I totally drag him onto the floor, the lights are totally on, I am totally wearing a red flannel shirt with my uniform skirt.

1995 - The boys’ high school send over carnations to be distributed in homeroom. I receive one from my friend’s boyfriend, J.R. Yeah, it's not like that. It's more like a self-esteem valentine for him plopped on a thorny pity stem for me. Like, Please worship at the altar of my chivalry, as there is plenty to spread around, since I, the magnanimous boyfriend of your friend am happy to have so very many young ladies to enchant with my oft-desired carnation in the homeroom mail.

1998 - I am in Indianapolis with Big Pops and TP, on a college tour. I am finding this is so not the school for me, even though they have offered me a very handsome scholarship, and I am freaking out about it.

1999 - Freshman year of college, in love with Goldenboy. I make a comic book by hand and send it to him as a valentine. I receive a letter from him the next week indicating that he already has a girlfriend. I am numb for at least a year and a half. Whenever I find the Xeroxed copies of that comic book, I am amazed at how much free time I had in college.

2000 - After stalking a particular member of the football team for all of first semester, he shows up at my RA room while I am on duty.  I am wearing pajama pants with stars and a ’70s cardigan and Doc Martens, an ensemble that should have told him this wasn't really going to work out. Alas, he corners me in a stairwell that smells like dirty snow and Bath & Body Pear Glace body spray, and he says, Let’s give this a go. This sort of thing does not happen to me, so I am unable to absorb what is happening.  He is mashing my face and I am paranoid the entire time that, since I am on RA duty, there is a 99% chance that freshmen on a bender are rolling multiple kegs down the hall upstairs and I am totally going to lose my job, lose my scholarship, lose out on college because I am missing this round to smooch a boy. By the next week, it's clear he's not that into me and I feel a mix of relief and dread because we are supposed to go on a spring break trip together and ugh, why didn't he just turn back when he saw the pajama pants?

2001 - I am interning in DC and have dinner in Dupont Circle with my roommates. We go back to the apartment and my future husband is waiting inside, having driven from Meadville, PA to DC that afternoon. Best Valentine's Day ever.

2002 - My future husband surprises me at the Safari Bar where Lori S. and Celia N. are stalling me until he shows up, Megan W. having picked him up at the Pittsburgh airport just hours before. Ben in a Box gives me a rose, which is the icing on the cake.

2003 - I am clinically depressed and think my future husband is going to break up with me any day now. My future husband and I have a subpar dinner at Harvard Square and are given a bootleg CD of Jason Mraz by some guy at a shoe store. We go back to my future husband’s apartment and dance to bootleg Jason Mraz. I can barely get out of bed the next day, I am so depressed.

2005 - I am engaged to my future husband. I have no memory of this year’s V Day.

2008 - I give my husband a valentine “from the two girls who love you the most.” We bring our 2 week-old daughter out for sushi. She does not partake.

2009 - Baby Girl and I attend the funeral mass for Uncle Kevin. Uncle Joe gives one of the most eloquent and moving eulogies ever. I am happy to be with my family, but sad to leave my valentine behind in Boston.

2010 - I receive my first handmade valentine from Baby Girl with her handprints shaped like a heart and the feeling is not unlike the tingles of Hockey Boy in the fourth grade, except these ones radiate all around my heart.

2017 - My husband sends me a box of cupcakes to my work at the all-girls school which send a very strong message that I am loved and also that I married well.

2018 - I am helping son prepare his valentines for class when we receive the memo that his school disallows food and candy being brought to school for Valentine's Day. Son walks around in a huff, referring to Friendship Day in air quotes, and proceeds to write his name backwards on all his packs of Fun Dip in the hope that they won't possibly know the source of the offending candy, stealth candy dealer that he is.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of a Ten Year-old

My firstborn turns ten today. Pardon the theatrics, but I thought there would be more time.

On the aging spectrum, our girl is now closer to adulthood than she is to infanthood. By all legal measures, we are past the midway mark of having raised a child in our home. This feels equal parts accurate and completely impossible.

For example, our girl is far more likely to pick out her own clothes, friends, and activities than she is reliant on her parents to deign to have an opinion about these and other matters. But she also cannot imagine a world where we are not on the other end of a school day, and girlfriend would have 2.5 pairs of socks in her possession if not for her parents. Half the time I am so proud that girlfriend has such a vast vocabulary, and the other half I am willing all the dictionaries to disappear because really, she doesn't need to know any more words and their manifold meanings. There are also roughly 4.7 million topics we have yet to broach with her, a bajillion stories left to tell. We just brought her home as a newborn from the hospital last week, yet the seeming half-century's worth of tween sediment in her bedroom belies her recent arrival. We have pocketed the well-hewn paradox of parenting, and found that this pebble is still ours to carry for some time.

I am in awe of the unique, resilient person our girl is becoming. And I am utterly bewildered by this human who looks and sounds like her parents do, but whose DNA seems to be drawn from another source entirely, one far more exuberant and observant, like maybe a creature, part Manga princess and part wildebeest? I do not know this person and yet I should not be the least bit surprised by her. I was able to spend every waking and sleeping moment of her first few years with her, but it's still breaking news to me that she is going to reflect all the virtue and vice within me and that there is nothing I can do about it.

Our daughter is ten. Time is spiriting us away on this journey and it is stealing moments and months from us when we are otherwise checking our e-mail. Simply spread both hands wide and you can count the full set of digits. The spaces between the fingers and thumbs, though, they tell a story, too. There are the notes that repeat, the repetition that forms the chords that we remember. But between the fingers and thumbs are the rests, the moments of silence, the seasons of growth when the chords are imperceptible. The notes and the rests, the milestones and the blank pages in the baby book. We failed to document it all because we thought this hard, beautiful season might last forever, or we foolishly thought we would remember all of it.  Instead we wear more lines around our eyes, hear the faint echoes of laughter from moments we wanted to bottle whole--and these tell a story, too.

The past decade has taught me that it is all little bit of both. Raising a human is heaven and hell at the same time, the agony and the ecstasy in equal measure, running concurrently, in two parallel streams.

We are closer to the end of parenting a child. We are nearer to an understanding of her as a child trying to become an adult. There is no mic drop here, though, no busting through the ribbon at a finish line. We are miles from watching her take her first steps, but we as her parents are still profoundly wobbly. We carry the paradox of parenthood in our pocket and hope we are swift enough when it causes us to tilt too far in any direction. Falling is guaranteed--particularly falling more in love with this beauty love force girl person whom we adore, ten times ten times ten.