Category Archives: weight

On Raising Bodies

When my first daughter was brought to me, pink and hot and smelling like something elemental and metallic, I could hardly believe how thrilled I was to see that she was a girl. It turned out that I’d wanted a girl more than I’d been willing to say. I loved everything about it: choosing her name, buying her cute clothes, and saying the word “daughter.” I assume I would have felt the same way about a boy, once I saw him, but I never got that chance. I have two daughters, defying my pregnant instincts and imagination both times.

The truth was that I was afraid of one monumental thing when it came to parenting daughters: screwing up their relationship with food. Continue Reading…

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2017: Counting and Not Counting

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In December of 2014, I had my first meeting with Deborah Siegel of Girl Meets Voice, a consulting firm helping women get their thoughts and world-changing ideas out into the world. Deborah looked with bright, interested eyes over the table at me and asked, “what’s your idea? what do you need to say?”

I had walked into that meeting thinking that I knew exactly what I wanted to say, but when she asked me so directly, I wasn’t sure. I stammered out that I wanted parents to feel empowered to push against doctors who weren’t listening. I added that I wanted those parents to feel less alone, that their worries were shared and that they had more in common with each other than their distracted glances in crowded hospital waiting rooms.

“I want to write a book,” I said. Continue Reading…

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Layover in Holland

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Within the community of families with special-needs children, there is a well-known poem/essay called “Welcome to Holland.” It became famous in this community because some loved it and felt it really spoke to them, and some found it galling and infuriating. In “Welcome to Holland,” the writer, Emily Perl Kingsley, compares life with children who have special needs to a flight she expected to arrive in Italy, only to touch ground permanently in Holland. The rest of her life is filled with experiencing all the real, tangible beauty of Holland, even as she has to hear all the stories of Italy she will never experience firsthand.

It’s an obvious metaphor, and certainly simplistic, but it’s easy to see the comfort it might provide. Few pregnant mothers dreamily stroke their stomachs and imagine the beauty of the metaphor in which Holland stands for a life of health struggles and emotionally draining paths to seeing one’s child’s basic needs met. However, once they stand in on the tarmac in the strange land they’d never considered, it’s only human to peer into the distance and seek out the tulips. Those tulips are real, at least some of the time. Continue Reading…

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Padding

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She’s ok, I thought, looking at her on the couch with her water bottle and her picked-at bowl of green jello. She’s ok and she will be ok. She’s ok and she will be ok. She’s-ok-and-she-will-be-ok, she-will-be-ok, she-will-be-ok, she-will-be-ok…

Parents like me, whose children have been through medical scares or ongoing health-related issues, often talk about the long-term anxiety that follows. Certainly in the immediate aftermath — even once the drama is months behind us — the expectation that we’ll worry more about our children is palpable. After my daughter Sammi’s last major surgery, the teachers and administrators in her school were incredibly kind and as careful as they could be to accommodate her healing, even in ways that might have been fussier than necessary for her but were utterly crucial for me and my comfort level. On major milestones — when she was allowed to return to recess, when she ate her first sandwich after years of a damaged esophagus, and on the anniversaries of the surgery that healed her, friends have cheered and celebrated with me, remembered and sighed in relief at my side.

But now it has been three-and-a-half years since the biggest legitimate worries subsided. There can be no mistaking her vitality. While there were years when even strangers could look at my daughter and suspect something was not quite right, now the most they might notice is that she’s slightly shorter than her classmates. I have little on which to base my worry these days, except for history and, I must admit, mild post-traumatic stress. Continue Reading…

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At Twelve

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It’s August, and I can’t believe she’s twelve.

I remember the August twelve years ago, after I finished a July of laying on the floor of my office, the door closed, my feet on the back of a chair, trying to turn my stubborn breech baby. I placed earbuds at my pelvic bones and played fiddle music in the direction I wished her head would face. When she turned finally, one night in late July, I felt every organ in my torso shift, roll and right itself again in one nauseatingly relieving motion.

In retrospect, it was a sign: with enough work, everything would eventually be repaired, over and over again. My girl, who always kept me on my back with legs in the air, directing my world from the floor, has now turned twelve, reaching down to offer a hand and pull me up. When I rise, she stands next to me and steps to one side to rest her cheek in the hollow between my shoulder and neck.

She’s grown. Improbably, in defiance, literally right under my nose now. Continue Reading…

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