Getting explicit about size
Jun 30, 2009 Parenting
Madison and I just got back from the grocery where we ran to get a cake for my boss’s birthday celebration (we need to leave for it in about 45 minutes) and cherries to take to the Clippers game tonight. She buckled herself in while I put the cart away and when I came back and got in the car she said, “It’s ok to be a little bit fat, right Mama?”
And I said, “Yes. What’s important is eating right and getting exercise. If someone is doing those things then their body is going to be exactly what it’s supposed to be, which might be fat and might be skinny.”
She said, “Ok.”
I said, “Were you thinking about me being a little bit fat? Were you watching my body when I was putting away the cart?”
(The line after this paranthetical paragraph is where you see how Dawn will climb up on the cross for the public good of her blog reading public to combat size prejudice. Much of the following info is similar to what I’ve written before but further down you can see what Madison says about herself and see why being explicit — i.e., getting up on the cross and daring to say, “You mean my fat ass?” is important.)
She said, “Yes, I was looking at your tush.”
I said, “My fat tush, huh?”
She laughed.
“Well,” I said. “You know how I eat a variety of food and you know I’m running and exercising so you know that my body is just supposed to be a little bit fat.”
“Not straight like Lis [babysitter].”
“No, not straight like Lis. But that’s how my body is and that’s how Lis’s body is. You know, people might look at me and Lis and say, ‘Wow, Lis is so straight! I bet she really exercises!’ but actually I exercise more than Lis and this is just how my body is. That’s why you can’t ever look at someone and know if they eat too much or too little or exercise at all. People will tell you that you can look at someone and tell but they’re wrong. And they will try to tell you that how people look is ok or not ok but they’re wrong about that, too.”
(Lis will not mind my telling you that I exercise more because she is one of the people I talk to about this stuff anyway.)
Madison then said, “It is just racist to say that people who are fat don’t exercise!”
I said, “It’s not nice to say things about people’s body shapes and sizes but it’s not racist. Racist is when people make assumptions about people based on race — on being black or white or Asian. Some people call it size-ist when people make assumptions about people’s size.”
“I exercise and I eat a variety of foods.”
“Yes you do. You are really healthy.”
[beat]
Then I said, casually, “What do you think about your body?”
“A little bit little and a little bit fat.”
“And since you exercise and eat right, your body must be exactly right.”
[Note: Here I wanted to say all kinds of "beautiful" and "strong" and "pretty" but I felt like this was coming from my reaction to her saying "fat" and wasn't necessary and in fact would be "she doth protest too much." Because if she had said, "A little bit little" I would have just said that bit about being exactly right so I stuck with it. I sat on my proverbial hands. The ones that would otherwise be wringing.]
“Yes,” continued my dearest darling Madison. ” Can you be straight and fat at the same time?”
“Yes, you can have a fat tushie or a fat tummy and straight arms and legs. Bodies come in all shapes.”
“Like a fat belly? Like Pennie has a fat belly because Roscoe is in there!”
And then we segued right from size and body acceptance into how babies are born, what they do before they get born and adoption.
It was the longest ride home from the grocery EVER; I am exhausted and recuperating with coffee (to make up for that lame-ass diet coke I had this morning).
I have been wondering when Madison would bring up the fact that she is bigger than her friends because obviously she knows this. For one thing, they play dress-up together and clothes that fit her friends don’t always fit her. That she used “fat” matter-of-factly gives me hope because this is a label that will be put on her (she is female after all and I think you could be 5′4″ and 105 pounds and still could get that lobbed at you) and I’d like her to own it and not the prejudice that comes with it. And note: The first step to this is asking her explicitly, “Are you talking about my fat body?” And then saying explicitly, “Because my fat body is ok.”
The very first time I heard a 4-year old girl call herself fat was when I was babysitting and this adorable, beautiful and yes, round little girl said, “I am too fat to be the princess; I have to be the prince.” See, the problem is not that she (lovely as she was) called herself “fat”, it’s that she thought beautiful princesses could not be fat. Fat is not the problem; some of us are fat. That word isn’t the enemy. It’s the prejudice behind it and the only we can dismantle it in our own families is by disempowering it as an insult. First step to doing that? Not flinching when your kids say it and even inviting them to share their thoughts even when you know it’s your fat ass they’re eyeing.
There’s a lot I do wrong as a parent. Like yell at the kids when the root of the problem is that I’m drinking diet coke at breakfast instead of coffee. Or get so tense about money that I have a heart-attack when someone innocently asks why we are so mean as to deny them a trip to the (expensive) movies. I mean, these kids have worlds of lame parenting to explore in therapy someday. But this stuff — this explicit talking about fat and about sex and about race and about adoption and all the hard stuff — this I can do. And I have a strong belief, surely born of my fear that I am screwing up in many ways, that if we see our kids as the full-fledged people they are with ideas and concerns and experiences that matter as much as our own and treat them with the serious attention they deserve then they can deal with our neurotic breakdowns. Knock wood.
From Madison telling me that she wishes we were all black (you should’ve seen her, elbows on the table, waving her hands and rolling her eyes as she said it) to saying that she is “a little bit little and a little bit fat” with the same casual certainty that she says she likes pink, I figure this girl is gonna be ok.
Madison wondering
Jun 25, 2009 Parenting
The impending arrival of Madison’s new baby brother has her doing a lot of thinking about babies including how they get in there and how they get out. She forgets things she’s heard before or maybe she finds them so unbelievable that she has to ask again and again to make sure the answer stays the same.
Madison was a cesarean section baby and she was worried about that, worried that the cut hurts the mama. I told her they give the mommy medicine so that it’s ok and everyone is just so happy about the baby that the hurting doesn’t matter so much. She asked if there was blood and I said that when babies get born, there is blood but this is because bodies make blood and isn’t bad for the mommy or the baby. She asked if Noah was a c-section and I said that he was a v*ginal birth. Now THAT surprised her. She has her “how babies get made” books and so she’s seen the (cartoon) pictures and all but this was hitting close to home. She could not stop thinking about it. She asked me if that hurt and I said yes but again, it’s such a happy time with a baby that the hurting is all right.
Still, she was just amazed that such a thing could HAPPEN. Then after a little bit of reading her book (we were sitting in bed reading together) she said, “Does it go to your SOUL?” I said, “Does what go to your soul?” Then I realized she meant women’s v*ginas because after all, if a baby comes out of it, it’s something pretty special right?
I asked her what she thought and she said she didn’t know but probably. I said some people thought that. (I didn’t tell her that zillions of years of patriarchy have been based on similar theories.) I said she was right about v*ginas being special.
She’s a budding feminist, that one!
Tags: ctts, facts of life, Madison
Madison baby book entry
Jun 9, 2009 Parenting
Right at this minute Madison is swinging while wearing her velvet Thanksgiving dress (long sleeves, long skirt — it is hot out there) and a blue Easter hat that she got from Pennie’s dad in the dress up box and which is getting a little bit too small for her. It’s light blue and made of plastic straw. It makes an interesting contrast to the black velvet top and red satin skirt on her dress. Oh and she’s carrying a baton.
It’s 1:30pm and today is a without Noah day because he’s at Gram and Gramps camp (it’s a real camp — the park & recs department puts it on) with Brett’s parents this week. This has made for a much quieter morning.
So far Madison has helped make coffee cake, eaten coffee cake, had a tea party, read her book, gone out on the porch to listen to the (very loud) music coming from the school across the way for their last day party, rediscovered the drink & wet doll that was mine when I was little and potty trained said doll, danced to Hairspray, dressed and undressed all of her dolls, eaten lunch and picked up her mess in the family room. She has not, however, picked up her tea party yet.
It’s hard to believe that she could be in kindergarten next year if we were gonna send her. On the one hand, she seems perfectly capable of anything academia could throw at her but on the other hand, I can’t imagine her sitting at a desk for any length of time. This child needs so much big muscle time, I’m telling you. She needs to run, dance, jump and spin spin spin. She is also a major grazer, rarely eating a full meal unless you let her spread it across an hour or two or three. She eats A LOT, mind you, but she doesn’t always have the attention span to eat it all at once.
Madison quotes:
“Ooh, that dress is tacky!” (As one would say, “Lovely!” proving that what I call “tacky” are things she most admires and that now she thinks it’s a synonym for beautiful.)
Madison: Do you know DW on Arthur?
Me: Yes, I think she’s kind of a brat.
Madison (thoughtfully): She’s not a brat, per se. It’s more that she gets very intense about people touching her stuff.
(Noah can’t stop quoting that — he thinks it’s hilarious.)
Upon looking out at a sudden and heavy rainstorm. “Wow, a cloud really broke out there!”
She’s become self-conscious lately and cannot STAND criticism from anyone besides her parents or Noah. Grandma, Pennie and her babysitter have all inadvertantly sent her into a sobbing crisis by suggesting she might perhaps not want to shove in line or could maybe clear her place at lunch.
“It’s embarrassing!” she says. “I feel like they’re yelling at me!”
Her recent art series was portraits of the family — Me, Noah, Peanut, Pennie and Tommy — as octopuses. (I looked that up; you can say octopuses or octopi, just so you know.) She’s also interested in writing letters and spent one happy afternoon playing school with her dolls and an easel. She is off and on about reading — picking out words and then losing interest. When she comes back to it after days away she’s always a little further along than the last time.
Her favorite toys are her dolls. Her baby dolls, her big girl dolls (Diosius and Kit) and her Barbies. She loves her Barbies to distraction, much to my dismay. She likes them best in the bathtub because she likes washing their “real” hair. She has only just begun disappearing into her room for long stretches of time to play house with all her babies and continues to enjoy making meals for all of us at her play kitchen, especially since we moved the wooden ‘fridge from the basement into her room.
Other favorite activities include: tap dancing on the basement’s cement floor, digging in the garden, standing on our front lawn to holler greetings to passer-bys, scootering on the driveway, playing with the trains on her map-like rubber mat, playing with the Fisher-Price little people and being at Noah’s beck and call. (In the evening he’ll get her to brush his hair with the good scratchy bristle brush while he reads out loud to her.)
She is really the brightest, shiniest thing around here and sometimes we three big people just sit on the front porch and admire her while she sings and dances in the frontyard.
Tags: baby book, baby book entry, baby dolls, Barbie, fisher-price, Hairspray, Madison
