My Daughter Thinks She's Fat and it's All My Fault

Swimsuit season is upon us.  And with it the onslaught of diet ads on tv, magazines with pics of celebs caught having actual cellulite, and me, bemoaning my post-partum, post-forty, past passing for anything but middle-aged body.

Though I am, if I am completely, intellectually honest, neither truly fat, or particularly unattractive, I have made a life (and something of a writing career) of comically dissecting my physical flaws.  I'm the self-appointed Queen of Bad Body Image, chronicling on line and in print my twenty year quest to lose the same ten pounds.  I've joked about the fact that my belly button seems to be frowning, that the only men who find me attractive are septuagenarians, that I've chosen to paint my daughter's room the same lavender color as my newly acquired varicose veins.

Ha Ha.  Nudge nudge.  Wink Wink. Very funny.  Until this morning, when my daughter refused to eat breakfast because, she told me through her tears, the boys in her class had told her she was fat.

My daughter just turned nine.

Not that it matters, but for the record, my daughter is not fat.  At exactly four feet tall and less than 60 pounds, she is completely normal. Petite, even. (that's her (though in real life she does have a face) with me in the picture.) But boys will be boys, these boys called her fat, and she believed them.  She was sobbing as she insisted she'd never eat anything again.

I told her that she was beautiful.  I told her she was perfect. She just cried more.  I'm not surprised; I remember my mother saying those things to me, and I never believed her either.  Instead, I spent my adolescence perfecting the art of strategic dressing, and humorous self-deprecation - the better to protect myself.

But in protecting myself, did I damage her?

I've always tried not to do the "does this body make me look fat?" routine in front of my daughter.  But I think that it's so ingrained in me I do it anyway.  And she's noticed.  And it's rubbed off.  And I've set her up to believe those rotten boys who no doubt had no idea how much damage they were inflicting.

I know it's cliche to point out the fact that men are allowed to get old and get fat.  Witness Jack Nicholson: at his somewhat advanced age, he's thoroughly wrinkled, significantly more puffy than his younger self, and still (still!) considered a seriously sexy man.  I don't dispute that opinion.  Jack Nicholson is still sexy. But why, then, is Kirstie Alley vilified by the media for gaining weight?  She's still beautiful.  She's still sexy.  But she's a woman.  She is supposed to be thin, wrinkle free, and perpetually thirty.  We all are.

My daughter is growing up in this world. This world where thin is a commodity, and self-worth is often inversely proportion to body weight.  It's my job as her mother to give her the confidence to navigate the quagmire of media messages of looks whatever her size.  This morning, I did that by reminding her that if everything that boys said was true, she'd have cooties.

That made her laugh, stopped the tears, and got her to eat some breakfast.

But it didn't close the hole in the pit of my copious stomach (see, I can't stop!).  The sick feeling that I've bequeathed my daughter a legacy of self-loathing handed down from my grandmother, to my mother, to my sister and me.  

I want to stop the cycle.  I want my daughter to know deep down inside that she is fabulous, and smart, and funny, and perceptive, and perfect whatever her size. Maybe if I believed that about myself, she'd have a better chance.

This is an original post to NYC Moms Blog.
Nancy Rabinowitz Friedman is a humor writer and blogger.  She is a contributor to C://Mommy Run, an anthology about the frazzled lives of blogging moms.