My mother spent many moments imparting her life wisdom, which fell on deaf ears, but as with most things mom tried to share as I matured, I disregarded it. I'm the type of person who has to experience everything before I truly hear what someone tried to tell me. She used to say, "Trust me...One day you will WISH you were THIS fat." As I spent my teen years, which I now affectionately refer to as the banging-body years, living on a lake only revealing my bathing-suit-clad body from under a super-sized T-shirt or towel long enough to either jump into the water or to jump out of the water, she would tell me I should feel more secure and flaunt what she referred to as my hourglass figure.
One advantage to being almost 5'8" tall is that I rarely looked my actual weight. While I felt fat, people guessed me under where I actually hit the scale. For example, when I weighed 150 pounds, my husband guessed me at about 115 pounds, and his brother called me a liar when for the SINGLE time in my life I tried to just say the number I feared to hear out loud. No, my husband isn't lying to me. We can speak openly about everything. He's my best friend. Even today, he guesses me at about 20 pounds less than I am. I've always kept my actual weight a secret, until now, but you all don't know me. I'm just typing in a blog that nobody is reading yet.
Well, it was after I started my family that I received my first pot-shot from my child's pediatrician. My first child weighed 22 pounds at the age of 1 and was so thin you could actually see his skeletal system and the ligaments moving under his skin as he moved various limbs here and there. I was a skinny kid myself (see below), and my husband used to look like he was starving as a teen he was so thin, so I tried to not worry about my youngster. He ate nutritionally, so I figured he had two parents who were skinny kids affecting his weight.
When he turned 2 and had only gained 1 pound that whole next year, comparing with other kids who had at least gained a few, I wondered. It wasn't until he turned 3 years old and had again only gained 1 more pound, now putting him at a gain of 2 pounds in 2 years from the age of 1 to the age of 3, that I sat with my husband in the exam room for his well child exam while holding my 10-month-old daughter in my arms that I asked, "You sure that's okay that he's only gained 2 pounds in 2 years?"
The doctor slowly looked up at us, looked at my beanpole child, carefully looked both my husband and I over slowly, and said, "Sure he's fine. Just look at his Dad. He just takes after his Dad is all."
I don't think my husband heard it. Can you hear it? I walked out of that visit in what I consider semi-fit shape with a postpregnancy pooch of a belly exaggerated with the I'm-holding-a-20-pound-child lean back pushing the pooch forward thinking "What the hell?"
My husband looked perplexed when I said, "Why the hell would he say THAT?" and he asked me for clarification. This set me off with statements such as, "Does he think I've just ALWAYS been fat?" and "I was a skinny kid too that SOB."
How dare he assume I've just always looked the way I did at that very moment? I weighed about 180 pounds at the time, having only gained about 10 pounds since my wedding day.
There you have it, pot shot #1, but I still didn't panic then. I tried to think I just needed to not be holding a baby with that pooch-inducing baby lean the next time I asked that question. I had 2 young children I'd do anything for, that I enjoyed every minute with....I'd lose that slight and hardly noticeable gain later, right?
Have you ever had someone make a comment that is way off base and insulting when you didn't feel you fit the bill at that time?
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