Tiny Reflections: When Your Two-Year-Old Daughter Calls Herself "Fat"
On Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image
Nova is fat, my two-year-old daughter says as she examines her reflection in the mirror. Heart shattering. Breath paused. I become a prayer on fire.
I kneel down, hoping I heard wrong. Her eyes, the color of wild sage. What did you just say? I ask, begging the world: don’t let her learn shame before she can spell her name. Nova is fat, she repeats, smiling. Then touches my cheek with such tenderness it sears. Momma is fat, too.
When I was just a little older than she is now, my great grandmother used to pinch my cheeks, tell me that I was pretty, but fat. Then add just like your mother. My mother’s weight gain: the reason my dad left us. He was never to blame, of course, only her and her body. Generations of women passing down the word with gloved hands: fat meant unwanted, more importantly it meant unloved.
I’m grateful that Nova will grow up in a world with body positivity—models of various shapes, sizes, and genders. The mannequins look more and more like me everyday. Still, eating disorders have never been more rampant, or more severe. No amount of hashtags or ad campaigns can undo the damage caused. That is still being caused.
Where did you learn that word? I ask. But Nova has moved on. Wants me to be a froggie. A hungry bear. The color blue. I’m wildly grateful to pretend.
After we ribbit and growl, I point and celebrate each part of Nova’s magical body: tum tum, pinky toe, eyelashes. Remind her of her unquestionable beauty and natural strength. All the while, I scour my brain, trying to find the hole in the fence. How could a word like fat slip into our house undetected? Where did she pick it up? She only spent time with family, she wasn’t even in preschool.
And then the answer comes to me, like the cool rush of a wound greeting air: me. She learned the word fat from me.
While I never waste an opportunity to celebrate Nova and her body, how many times had she watched me do the opposite with mine—shudder at my reflection, pinch at my cellulite and rolls. How many times after my husband squeezes my waist, tells me I look sexy had she heard me respond, Thanks, I feel fat—some kind of twisted, honest reflex?
If momma was fat, she wanted to be fat too.
Most of my life, I have been haunted by my own reflection. Laughing over a dinner of my favorite foods: browned scallops, a wedge salad, and some French Rosé. At fancy restaurants, I throw my head back in joy and catch an image of a woman in some mirror I hadn’t noticed was there. She is large, double-chinned, dressed in exhaustion. Something inside me wilts when I realize: that woman is me.
It always happens in moments that feel happy-tears-beautiful—a wedding we have all waited for, a friend's fortieth birthday, playing the ukulele with my daughter—I catch my reflection and all the music stops.
The truth: I don’t love how I look, but I do love who I am. Years ago, I would have said it was impossible to hold both confessions in the same hand. In my teens, twenties, yes, even thirties, everything about my body, especially my weight, felt loud and terribly wrong. My childhood was spent dieting. Before and after school, from sixth grade to senior year, I counted calories, spent hours working out to barely hover around a “normal” BMI.
I was cruelly aware of my own body's tendency—guarantee—to end up overweight. There was a winter where I played Bon Iver’s Skinny Love over and over again, weeping for myself. Kept eating broccoli, chugging water, writing poetry, telling myself one magical day, I too would be worthy of love. My mother, sister, and I all struggled with body image. Raised by an eating disorder, I raised one inside me. The thinner I got, the emptier I felt. Loveless and so terribly hungry.
It wasn’t until I became and lost a mother that I stopped thinking about my body. I had just suffered three cruel years of infertility. On top of that, my mother, who had just moved cross-country to be near the future grandchildren I couldn’t have, was diagnosed with Stage Four ovarian cancer (the story of my second book, available for preorder).
My mother lived to eat. After she died, we stuffed ourselves full of every delicious bite—lobster mac and cheese, white wine, sour cream and onion dip—to remember her. Balancing the questions of new parenthood and sleepless nights, on top of a demanding job and knee-buckling grief—I ended up gaining almost twenty-five pounds. This was the weight of trying to survive. I had finally let my guard down, gave into my hunger, and look where it got me. Trying to carry both immense joy and impossible grief with my two clumsy hands, I graduated from chubby to overweight.
My mother raised me to believe motherhood was both magic and a calling. She would go on about how my sister and I were her world, then echo the warning: after two kids she had gained almost a hundred pounds. My mother had been programmed to apologize for her body, and didn’t want me to apologize for mine. Being thin, being beautiful, meant life would be easier for me. I don’t blame her for trying to protect me from the shame she carried.
After years of anger, I’ve finally forgiven my great grandmother for the seeds of self hate she planted inside us both. Still, terrified of a similar story, I decided maybe I would adopt, hoped for a boy. Didn’t want the ghosts and generations of body issues to haunt my daughter, too. Boys weren’t told to shrink for someone else’s pleasure. Instead, they are encouraged to be insatiable, to go loudly after what they want. But a girl? It would be like looking in the mirror. That would be too hard.
After I married and we decided to start trying, I found myself grateful for the thin of my husband's genes. While I gain weight every time I look at a cupcake, he can eat twenty and lose two pounds. Whoever our child is—I told myself—fifty percent of them will have a fighting chance.
When we decided to adopt for different reasons, there was a small corner of me that was relieved that the child wouldn’t inherit my weak chin or thicker midsection. My promise: commit my life to loving her, helping her love herself.
We all must find a way to survive our bodies—regardless of size, ability, the media. Now that I’m a mother, I realize I’ll never be able to save my daughter from the way this world fetishes the many versions of the “perfect body.” How can we, when marketing sells us our “flaws”? We empty our bank accounts to fix ourselves. Inherit shame. Mold ourselves into such pretty, pretty apologies. But as my sister likes to say, Beauty is an inside job. Now I heal forward. Break cycles and storylines.
People are always surprised to learn that Nova is adopted. We share the same sage eyes, and as the universe would have it, her body looks like a miniature replica of mine—a smaller version of myself to heal. Now every action, every word is an intentional—celebration of who we are and what we have. Working lungs. Strong, thick thighs. A mirror that catches our kisses and sends them right back. She is teaching me the heavy, important work of loving ourselves. To be a tiny reflection of the work I am doing.
Click here to read my poetry about motherhood and the body.
How does body image show up in your life? Leave a comment. Let’s chat about the sticky stuff <3
Kelly, always so searing and immaculate. The way you coil then spring with brevity is nonpareil. Thank you not only for the content of your writing, but for the writing itself.
Such honesty and vulnerability ♥️ I remember my mom always praising my body but criticizing her own — at 32 and childless (not by choice), I’m figuring out I learned her habits rather than her praise. It’s tough enough trying to heal yourself; I can only imagine how tough to be doing that work and raising someone else at the same time.