Why Do You Look That Way, Mommy?

 

I said something really bad to my daughter the last time she called me fat.

Mind you, she’s eight years old and often reminds me that I’m fat. And mind you, I’ve raised her without Barbie dolls or television thinking that somehow that was going to keep cultural expectations at bay.

For the record, I haven’t been thin since that spring I had mononucleosis in 7^th grade and could balance a ruler from stuck out bone to stuck out bone with the ruler measuring smooth across from those two points.

All the rest of my life I’ve been this hour glass thing with a tiny waist and big thighs and hips and I’m totally okay with it. I no longer want to wear straight up and down flapper clothes and Banana Republic outfits. I’m not 16. I’m 43. I’m quite happy to be in my vintage cut dresses and have resolved that even if contemporary designers have forgotten that my body type exists, I can figure it out on my own and not give them my money in the process.

Twenty years of my adulthood I‘ve been happy to be me. But now I have a daughter. And my daughter? Called me fat.

And that hurts.

“You’re going to look just like me when you grow up. If I’m fat to you, well you’ll be fat too,” I warned her, “don’t be so smug.”

Obviously looking like me wasn’t what she wanted to hear and she burst into tears. Now I feel terrible.

“What’s wrong with the way I look?” I asked when she calmed down a bit.

“You don’t look like other moms.”

“What do other moms look like?”

I didn’t know if I wanted this answer or not. But I had to ask. What was I being compared to? What standard was she setting in her mind that I couldn’t possibly reach?

“You aren’t straight up and down. You go in and then you go out. “

“Yes, I do.”

“But then you can’t wear jeans and tee shirts like the other moms. You stick out. I don’t want to stick out.”

Ah. Social conformity. Perhaps we were too insular in our little world of rural, TV free bliss. I did the only thing I could think of that would show my daughter that it wasn’t about size. I took her to the nearest Wal-Mart nearly an hour away.

There she saw many women shoppers much bigger than mommy, much smaller than mommy and all wearing jeans and tee shirts in various states of grooming.  The message hit home for my daughter. Sometimes you need to leave town for comparisons. My body is vintage. It can’t pull off the jeans and tee shirt.

“Mommy?” she asked in the car on the way back while trying on her new Hello Kitty socks in various shades of pink and purple (her pick).

“Yes?”

“Maybe it’s what you do that makes you different. You work online. You make art. You wear dresses.  We don’t go to daycare. You and Papa aren’t getting the divorced.“ Yay! Score one for me. She gets it. You don’t have to conform. I thought I’d push it just a little.

“So am I still fat?”

“Well, yeah, mom.” But then she smiled and added, “not that it matters.”

 

 

Margaret Elysia Garcia writes essays, fiction, memoir, and poetry. Her recent work can be seen in Brain, Child magazine, The People’s Apocalypse Anthology, Huizache Journal, Catamaran Review, and other literary places. She lives in the remote northeastern corner of the Sierra Nevadas, where she teaches unsuspecting college students and hosts an alternative women’s radio show and a book club show on Plumas Community Radio atwww.kqny919.org. She’ll be making her directorial debut  for Listen to Your Mother this May. You can follow her adventures and links to publications on her blog, Tales of a Sierra Madre.