Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Meet the Screamers
My kids are so loud they go to group speech therapy.
By Jennifer Moses
[11/02/99]

My grandparents were pioneers in the battle for visitation rights
To me, they were dependable, a security blanket I would never lose.
By Damien Cave
[11/01/99]

Eager saints and sweet-toothed sinners
The blessed Halloween of my youth
By Kate Convissor
[10/29/99]

Halloween hand-wringing
Are the stories about trick-or-treat mayhem for real?
By Jill Wolfson
[10/29/99]

Please, God, don't let him be a penis grabber
Then again, if he is a penis grabber, keep him away from mine.
By Jonathan Kronstadt
[10/28/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

She was, as she tells it, "born fat." In photos she is round-faced, miserable in taffeta, bulging in swimsuits next to her slim sister. When she thinks of childhood, which is seldom, catcalls leap into her head as if it was still 1938. Fatso. Tub. What her classmates called her she still calls herself.

That her mother -- a thin woman who shunned food -- brought home piles of dresses from the store to spare this child the shame of a communal fitting room strikes my mother as merciful.

"I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!" An invitation to enter the Mothers Who Think "Is This Marriage Doomed?" competition!

At 30, illness nearly killed her but it left her slim. She marveled at her arms. And taught herself how not to eat. Today one of the worst things you could say to her is, "You look healthy."

She says being fat ruined her life. Today when she sees fat women, she shudders. "Tragic," she will murmur, or "I'll never eat again."

These days, fat children are everywhere I look. At schools, in restaurants, at the pool. Last week as I guided a friend around Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, it appeared that every third child had that shape, increasingly familiar: thick necks, big thighs, bellies bulging out over the waistbands of their jeans. Soft terraces.

For me it is a bizarre acid test. I was raised by a woman terrified I would be fat, though I was not. She scrutinized my meals, watching across her empty plate, and rushed out to buy products made with cyclamates when she heard they were being outlawed. I cannot see fat kids and not panic. The more I see, the more I fret. You could say that is my problem.

But it's not.

Last week, studies in an edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted to obesity indicated that 22 percent of Americans are obese. More than 50 percent of Americans are overweight, according to the studies, and obesity, defined as being more than 30 percent over ideal body weight, is the major cause of mortality in the United States. About one in eight Americans was considered obese in 1991; today it is one in five.

In 1997, 40 percent of American 5- to 8-year-olds were obese. Ten percent were obese in 1990, up from 5 percent in the late '60s, according to a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. More TV, less P.E. and myriad ways to have sedentary fun have caused the young to expand at breakneck speed.

And I am wondering: Are these lives being ruined in unison, just as my mother's was decades ago? She was always the only fat child in her class. In my day, in the '70s, two or three made their hunched and solitary way along the crowded hall. Now hefty kids have lots of company. But does that help?

Next page | "You are nice, for an elephant"