I was staring back at my mother-in-law as a I realized I had just finished telling the same story about my daughter for at least the third time. The difference this time was that she had responded to my story with a question that caught me off guard. Let me back up and share the story first.
The Story
As you probably already know, my daughter started kindergarten this year virtually. This meant there was a lot of “asynchronous” time aka parental homework help. As time passed, Emma gained independence in her work however there were times when she just got stuck. One day, I could hear her frustrations from the office and I finally went in and asked how I could help. She was doing a reading exercise where she had to fill in the blank to finish the sentence with the word that made sense. I read the first part of the sentence given to her “THE CAT IS _____”. There was a picture of a cat sitting there smiling. The word bank included DUG, BLUE, FAT.
I was little surprised since this seemed like a very simple one to figure out but I went through the process with her. We read through the sentence filing in the blank with each word. She was quick to point out that the first 2 words didn’t make sense. I started to wonder if this had just been another ploy to get me to hang out in the office with her when I realized she was genuinely confused. As she filled in the sentence with the last word she looked at me with that face you get when you’re pretty sure the teacher has gotten it wrong. “See, mom. THE CAT IS FAT. That doesn’t make sense!” She looked at me expecting confirmation but found a blank stare from me. I wasn’t sure what was wrong.
Then, a moment of doubt crept into her face and she acknowledged, “I don’t know what FAT means, mom.” I’m pretty sure my face at that point read “You’re so cute”. On the inside, I was beaming with pride. Yay! We had done something right. She didn’t even know what the word FAT meant. Clearly, this wasn’t a word we use to describe people or animals or anything. The first time I relayed the story to my husband, I continued to feel very proud of us. It wasn’t until I shared the story with my mother-in-law that someone finally shot back, “Well, what word is she supposed to use?”
Ummm. I began to spout off a number of synonyms to her- big, large, etc. If it’s possible to detect that “inner eye roll” that I described in a previous post, I’m pretty sure I saw my MIL do one that day. For my mother-in-law and my husband, Spanish is their first language. My husband and I occasionally pause conversations to comment on why a certain word might be used versus another or why a different word might be used in a Spanish translation to make the story better. Either way, I realized, it wasn’t the word FAT itself that bothered me, but the negative connotation that seems to surround it in our diet culture. We know that people are born into larger bodies just like people are born into smaller bodies. But a lot of what we hear growing up is that one is better than the other.
There’s no reason that my daughter should make it almost to the age of 6 before learning what the word FAT means. I realize that it is likely the line of work that I am in that makes me hypersensitive to hearing this word (and others). Someone called our guinea pig fat the other day and I cringed… Why? Would I have felt better if they said he was getting big or large? Or maybe it’s that someone felt a need to comment on his body size in the first place? As though we should be striving for a “skinny” guinea pig? But that’s a conversation for another day.
Going forward, I have to remind myself, it isn’t the word itself that bothers me- it’s that layer of judgment that can be tied up with it. You know what I’m talking about.