What you first notice about my daughter Frances is her size. She's big.
Some might call her fat. She's definitely heavy.
At four years old, her stomach still sticks out, her cheeks are full,
her butt is soft and round, and, since it looks exactly like mine,
promises to more than fill out every pair of jeans she'll ever wear.
She's on the taller side; her head is enormous. Next to other kids her
age, you'd swear that either they are malnourished or you're looking at
Frances through a magnifying glass.
My daughter's size — even before gender — was the first thing I knew
about her.
"You're almost done," my husband said, right after a series of
contractions and hard pushes squeezed out the head of what appeared to
be a three month old.
"Actually, this could take awhile," I heard my midwife say. "That's a
really big baby."
And she was. Ten pounds fourteen ounces her first time on the scale. She has
gained steadily ever since — twenty-four pounds at six months, thirty-three pounds at one
year. She registers big, big numbers for a girl only in preschool.
Since birth, Frances's size was a conversation opener everywhere we
went. At the post office, a clerk asked me how many bottles she consumed
in a day.
"Zero?" I answered.
He paused, thinking, and then yelled at my chest, "That's some damn rich
milk you got!" Heads in the lobby nodded in agreement.
"Can I hold her?" strangers asked. "Oh my God, she's bigger than my
toddler!" they screamed. My baby girl's body was alternately a
celebration and a circus act.
Had I heard correctly: my baby needed a diet?
Women presumed a concern that, at the time, wasn't there. "I looked just
like her," a skinny mom at Whole Foods stopped to tell me. She held her
arms out like wings and turned a full circle. "Now look at me."
My older daughter's elderly dance teacher stuck out her leg, still toned
from years as a Vegas showgirl. "I was a fatter baby than that," she
said, fondling one of Frances's three chins. "You'd never know now,
would you."
Everyone loved my fat baby — everyone but the pediatrician.
"Have you considered cutting back on nursing?" Frances was six months
old. It was our first appointment with this doctor, who came highly
recommended by a friend of a friend. When the doctor plotted her weight
and height on a pink-checkered chart, two identical lines shot from the
corner of the page, rode above the mess of numbered percentiles, and
came to rest in a blank space known as "off the charts."
Had I heard correctly: my baby needed a diet?
"It's just we want to catch diabetes when they're young, stop any
problems before they start," the doctor said.
"Diabetes! Are there signs?" I asked. "She's just a baby!"
"We can take another look when she's a year old."
At Frances's nine-month check up, her height and weight lines followed
the shape of the proscribed curve, but still hovered way above the 99th
percentile. Same thing at a year old. And at two.
"We'd really like to see her down in this range," the doctor reminded
me. She moved her finger around the deep innards of what I had begun to
think of as an angry pink chart. "Let's work on that." I agreed, but had
no plan. The only thing that changed after our doctor appointments was
how much I quietly obsessed about my daughter's size.
