Through My Daughter's Eyes

I was a fat kid. In the beginning, it was cute. That baby fat turned into pinchable cheeks and an adorable potbelly. Somewhere between the third and fourth grades, the cute aspect of my weight problem disappeared and gave way to the stigmas associated with weight gain. Instead of a cute little potbelly, I had a stomach that was three times the normal size and an extra chin or two. I was the fat girl in class, and this continued to be my label throughout elementary school. I hated shopping for clothes, because I knew that the cute little outfits that the mannequins wore would never fit on me. Even if I could find the right size, the cuteness of the outfits would lose their appeal at twice their normal size.
I wasn’t thrilled about being fat, but I was happy in general. I didn’t have a ton of friends, but I was ignorant to the hardships of social stigma. I ate what I wanted without the guilt associated with counting calories, and I was happy. You also tend not to fret about the things most girls fret over – my hair was insanely frizzy and I had no clue how to style it, I had the beginning stages of acne, I had large breasts (as many overweight girls do), and I didn’t particularly concern myself with boys.
During the summer between elementary school and high school, my sister signed me up to play field hockey. It wasn’t my first venture into athletics. Although my favorite hobbies were eating and sitting on the couch, I had dabbled in a few extracurricular activities here and there. I had played volleyball since fourth grade, and I was surprisingly good at it (must have been the thick wrists). And somewhere around seventh grade, my mom signed me up for tennis lessons. She had this vision of getting me in shape by forcing me to get involved in sports year-round. I quit after four lessons…
So when my beautiful size 6 sister signed me up for field hockey without my knowledge, I was a little perturbed, but I knew I would probably just quit after a week and everything would go back to normal. I could take my place back on the couch and spend the remainder of my summer relaxing and sampling different flavors of Homemade ice cream. I might even get a little exercise when I biked to the store to buy a pint.
When summer conditioning began, there was a lot of running involved. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a runner. I don’t enjoy it. It doesn’t relax me or send endorphins shooting through my brain. It basically makes me feel like I want to vomit. And what my sister neglected to mention is that field hockey is basically running up and down the field, so conditioning for field hockey was basically running a few miles every day, then doing sprints, then sitting against walls to strengthen the leg muscles. I had never experienced such excruciating pain from exercise in my life.
But for some reason, I didn’t quit after that first week. Maybe I felt some sort of competition toward my sister – if she could do it, so could I! Or maybe I was tired of quitting. The second week brought more running and more pain. Just as I got close to my breaking point, the coaches approached me and did something that would change my life. They asked me to be the goalie. It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Choose the biggest girl on the team to be the goalie – it solves the problem of having a girl on the team who can’t run, and it gives you a person to fill the position no one else wants. I said yes, primarily because the goalie didn’t run as much in practice as the other girls – we spent our time doing different exercises and training.
I began that summer at the heaviest I had ever weighed: 186 pounds. At the end of the summer, I weighed 163 pounds. I didn’t even notice I was losing weight until I got on the scale and my weight was in the 160s. I hadn’t seen the 160s since the fifth grade. But there were two benefits to the constant exercise: (a) the running was more exercise than I had ever experienced and (b) I was so exhausted by the time I got home that I didn’t have the energy to have my normal second helping of food. Thus, I was taking in half the calories and burning off twice as many as before. Over the course of the season, my weight plummeted to 155. My clothes became baggy and my face thinned considerably. For the first time in a long time, I began making a conscious effort toward my appearance. I cared what I looked like.
After two seasons of field hockey, I weighed in at a pretty consistent 145. My weight wavered between 140 and 150 for the remainder of my high school career. I had gone from a size 16 to a comfortable size 10, and when I graduated, I had a boyfriend and a much more vast wardrobe. But in college, I gained the freshman 10, and I found myself once again in the 150s at the end of freshman year. I panicked.
I spent my sophomore year in the gym, struggling each day to burn the 1,000 calories I allowed myself to take in. My diet consisted of crackers, salads, and lite frozen burritos. Occasionally I allowed myself to have Chinese food on the weekend, but I ate only one meal those days, and I made sure to visit the gym to make up for the extra calories. I had gone from a girl who cared nothing about appearance to a girl who was obsessed with her appearance.
My ignorance had been bliss, and my knowledge had become hell. That was when my view of myself became irreversibly warped. I would never again see myself how others saw me. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see the thinning frame, bony shoulders, or tiny waist others saw. What I saw became similar to one of the reflector cards you have as a child – the kind you turn at a certain angle to see one picture, and when you turn it at a different angle you see an entirely different picture. I was caught between the 130-pound anorexic girl and the 186-pound fat girl with frizzy hair. I saw fat where there was none, and it became my obsession.
Gradually, with help from professionals and friends, I overcame my eating disorder. I found a healthier way of exercising and eating right, and my habits took a better turn. My weight lingered between 135 and 145 for the remainder of college, and when I got married 4 years later, I weighed a healthy 130, although my view of myself was still terribly warped. I wore baggy clothes to hide my stomach and legs, and I never showed off any unnecessary skin.
When my husband and I decided to start trying to get pregnant, I wasn’t sure how I would handle it. I had started to gain weight already, following a vacation to the Caribbean, so I noticed myself falling into bad dietary habits again. When I say “bad” dietary habits, I am not referring to what the average American would consider bad – I didn’t eat pints of ice cream or gigantic plates of pasta. I just started eating normal helpings of meals – instead of just soup for lunch, I had soup and a salad. I ate milk on my cereal, rather than eating it dry to save on calories. I gained 8 pounds just trying to get pregnant, and when we conceived after 4 months, I weighed in at my first doctor appointment at 143.
Over the next 8 months, I gained 43 pounds, ironically weighing in at my last doctors appointment at the 186-pound mark that had been my highest weight in elementary school. I constantly fretted over my weight gain, though I never considered denying myself food. I knew I needed to provide nutrition for my baby, but I feared for the aftermath that would inevitably follow her birth. I would once again be struggling with my weight as an overweight person. For even though I never felt thin before, I knew I was in decent shape at 135 pounds.
Six weeks after giving birth to my beautiful baby girl, I weighed in at 163 pounds. I allowed myself 10 pounds for breastfeeding (my breasts were massive, after all), but that meant I needed to lose about 20 pounds to be back at my ideal weight.
Looking at myself in the mirror, my self-image was once again distorted. What did I look like to other people? I saw this stomach that, admittedly, was a bit bigger than my stomach had been at 135 pounds, but surely there weren’t 20 pounds of fat there. My face was a bit thicker, but only slightly, and I felt the extra weight in my thighs, but how much weight can thighs honestly hold? I didn’t think I looked much heavier than I had been.
Then I made a crucial mistake. I tried on my pre-pregnancy clothes.
I had been wearing a size 8 pre-pregnancy. I was lucky to fit into a size 12. My heart shattered. I broke into tears, and my husband rushed to my side, telling me how silly I was because, after all, I had given birth just 6 weeks earlier. He might as well have said, “It’s okay that you’re fat now. You just had a baby,” because that is what I heard. I was fat again.
As I begin putting on my make-up today, I look at my daughter. Her big gray eyes look up at me and she smiles her toothless grin, kicking her legs in excitement. I stroke her head, which is just barely covered in dark brown hair. I touch her cheeks, which are plump, and sure to resemble my apple cheeks – pinchable and full when she smiles. I take her hand, which is attached to a roly-poly arm. She grasps my finger tightly, still grinning at me. I see myself in her – the shape of her eyes, lips, ears. The color of her hair is similar to mine, and I wonder if it will lighten as she grows or stay the rich brown that is dominant in my family. Will she struggle with her wavy/curly hair the way I have my entire life? Will her potbelly go away with her growth spurts or will it transition into the fat girl belly I lived with for so many years? I look down at my own stomach, disgusted by the extra flab hanging there.
I continue with my make-up, and I catch the shape of my hairline in the mirror. Her hairline is exactly like mine. But for the first time in a long time, I don’t see the frizziness I usually see – I see what she must see when she looks at me. Beautiful shiny dark brown strands of hair, falling into loose curls around my apple-shaped face. I wonder if her hair will look like mine. I look at my eyes, and I see a rich amber brown in them, not just the blah brown I usually notice. I wonder if her eyes will be that color, or will they be hazel like her daddy’s eyes? I look at my button nose, which I have always felt was too slanted and stuck out in my profile. Her nose is still growing, but it resembles mine already. I love to touch her nose with my finger, because it makes her giggle. I see all the beautiful things about me in her – my hair on her isn’t frizzy, it’s soft and shiny. The shape of my eyes – her eyes – is beautiful, and her lips are full and perfect for kisses. For the first time in a long time, I am seeing myself through someone else’s eyes: my daughter’s. I see her look of pure joy when she stares into my eyes and recognizes her mommy – she loves me unconditionally because I love her. She doesn’t care if my hair is frizzy or if every strand is in place, so long as it is my hair and she can stare at it for hours. She loves to look into my plain brown eyes, because she recognizes the love I have for her in them. Then I look at my stomach again – how could she possibly love the blob of a stomach I have now? What is there to love about it? But I think, I grew that stomach for her. I patted it lovingly as she came to life inside me. I talked to her as I stroked my stomach, taking on every pound so I could support her life inside me. And now, as I type this, she is nursing at my oversized breast, laying on my oversized stomach, and I can imagine what she will see when she looks up at me. The most beautiful woman in the world, through my daughter’s eyes.