I’ve yo-yo-ed in my weight class since kid-hood, a challenge for someone like my mom who is emaciated for all the years I’ve known her and who channels all of her anxiety into controlling weight, including mine. When I’ve reviewed journals, almost half, maybe more of the content was about losing weight. We have long since come to peace with our differences on this topic regarding my own weight, but I’m thinking about it lately because she is slowly making First Son self-conscious about his weight. I thought she was keeping her relentless commentary to me. I get an ream of emails on texts asking me to cut back on his carb in-take and how once you gain weight, you can’t lose it. It’s tricky, since she’s so emotionally fragile and this is definitely one of my hotspot issues, I have to proceed with caution and yet also protect my guy.
I let her deliver her lecture and try to counter calmly. Let’s deal with reality. As long as his pediatrician says his weight is normal, his weight is normal. Does he look normal? Yes. If First Son ever got into a position of being overweight, then we would just make sure he gets more exercise. The way to maintain a healthy weight is to not become neurotic about it. She seemed okay with this for a while.
But then, perhaps due to recent events like poor thing broke her wrist, mom has escalated the weight talk. Now she says she has looked up the weight range for the kid’s age group and he is absolutely overweight, this is an emergency, etc. (Um, yeah, did you look for weight and height combo? Yeah.) Slowly, I’m hearing things like First Son weighs himself at her home, he is looking at grams of sugar on packaging, but some of this may be due to his intense enjoyment of counting stuff.
Once my guy asked about when he could start counting calories and whispered a request for a snack, I had to make a more serious effort to get mom to back off.
“He is afraid to eat in front of you. Your help doesn’t actually change the behavior. Every time you put me on a die when I was a kid, I would just cram food into my mouth after you went to bed. What do you want your legacy to be? How do you want First Son to remember you?”
It seems like she got my message and agrees, and I think, when she sees her behavior, she’s seems to experience chagrin. Hope it stops, but you never know.
When First Son was five months old and in full-on Michelin Man baby status, Mom told me he needed to go on a diet. It was an incredibly liberating moment. It made me see, god, all those years you were on my case about my weight really were all about you.
Anyway, after all this gabbing about the topic, I had the realization that losing weight is actually not that important. It’s just not. After years of obsessing over it, I suddenly just got an upgrade in mental real estate.