As I was driving home after picking Princess up from school a few days ago, she said, “I kind of had an outburst on the playground today.”  I steeled myself for what came next, since, in our household, “outburst” can mean a myriad of things.

“We were playing tag and it got out of hand, and two of the boys said some things that made me really mad, and I started yelling a lot,” she said.  “They called me some other stuff I won’t go into, but they called me fat!”  Sigh.  And so it begins.

“You’re not fat,” I reassured her. 

“I’m not just a little pudgy?” she asked.

“You’re just fine.”  And she is.  She’s not the stick she used to be, but she’s not overweight at all.  Her growth spurts mean that her pants get too short before they get tight in the waist.  Although we’ve already purchased the first bra, there really aren’t any developing curves to speak of yet.

I was a bit younger than Princess (fourth or fifth grade, I think) when I had my first experience with weight concerns.  Those were the days of my hard core dancing, 5 classes a week during the summer and 3 a week during the school year.   There was a cereal commerical asking “Can you pinch an inch?” to encourage the world at large to pay attention to their body masses, but I doubt I could have pinched a millimeter.  One of my dancer friends left class mid-semester, and the teacher sat us all down for a heart to heart about the fact that she would not be returning.  She was being hospitalized for anorexia nervosa, a condition that very few people in my neighborhood had even heard of.  I knew she was very skinny, as almost all of us were, but didn’t realize how it had taken over her mind.  It was also aroudn that time when I first had someone called me fat in an effort to insult me. In retrospect, I should have laughed, since it was a ridiculous thing to say.  Instead, I bit my lip to keep from crying.  Thus started my continuing concern about my size and shape.

Puberty was not kind to me, giving me curves below the belt with nothing to balance me out on top.  And I quit dancing when I started junior high, taking away my main source of calorie burning.  Gone were the days when I could eat what I wanted, knowing it would not cause any significant expansion.   But everyone kept telling me I was fine, even that I was slim, even when I knew that I was getting bigger.  And somewhere along the way, I lost the sense of what size I really was, and I’ve never really gotten it back.  I look at pictures of myself, I look at myself in the mirror, and I perceive myself as larger than I really am.  I laugh at my concerns about size in high school, since being that tiny now would be like a dream come true. 

I wanted so desperately not to pass on my body image issues to my daughter.  I’ve worked so hard for the past eleven years to avoid calling myself fat in her presence, even when I felt like I was.  I joined Weight Watchers last summer because my weight had inched out of the healthy range for my height, and because I saw how tight my clothes had gotten.  I worked hard to focus on having energy and feeling strong, not on being slim.

I brace myself for the onslaught of images that Princess will try to live up to, and all I can do is try to keep her on a more even keel than I was on at her age (and beyond).  I can try to have her body image heroes be more Mia Hamm than Kate Moss.  And I hope she has better luck in that arena than I’ve had.