 | | | | FAMILY PHOTOS | | When Your Kid Asks, ‘Mama, Did You Get Fat?’ | | | I’m very pleased today to have an excerpt on Scary Mommy from Angela Garbes’ powerful new book Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change. And I’m particularly happy to have this lovely section, about one of those moments where you have to balance your own complicated feelings with what you want to teach your kids. In this case, she pulled out a honeymoon photo of herself and her husband, and her daughter asked, frank and curious: “Mama, did you get fat?”
She only had a split second to think about her answer: “I look down at my stomach. It is fat. I’ve done a good job, though, I think. To my girls, fat is just fat, an adjective. It’s only me who brings judgment to it. Suddenly, before I can ruin the moment by speaking, they are on me, kissing my stomach, resting their faces on it, petting it, squealing.” Give it a read – I’ll be thinking about her daughter singing “My only Mama, my squishy Mama” for a long time.
— Kelly Faircloth, Executive Editor | |
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