"Get This Fat Girl Off Me"

“Get This Fat Girl Off Me”

            With three letters and a mere syllable, I watched the weight of the world’s judgment descend upon my daughter’s ten year-old shoulders. It was as if a giant fist had seized her and literally squeezed the crocodile tears from her eyes.

            There has been a collision under the basket of my daughter’s ten and -under summer coed basketball league and my daughter had landed on a blonde boy, who had deployed the word out of embarrassment and frustration at having been man-handled by girl all game long.

Having volunteered to coach the summer league team, I had watched her confidence grow with each game. She was asserting herself more and more on both ends of the court and, more importantly, her self-assurance off the court had skyrocketed.

            But with the deployment of one word, this all disappeared in an instant. As she ran off the court with a splotchy face and tears in her eyes, my sad rage was the only thing maintaining my own humanity. Had I been able to unloose the gates of hell at that moment, I would have gladly done so.

            When she said she was quitting, I was very nearly blinded by anger.  I was struck by the metallic sound of my own voice.

            “No, you’re not,” I said, “go wash your face,” was all I could think to say.

            Her teammates- tough, inner-city kids quite fond of their designated rebounder, pick- setter and defensive stopper- were prepared to make the offender disappear on the spot.

            As a father, I was at a loss as to what to do. A post-game dissertation on institutional prejudice and the objectification of women seemed altogether inappropriate. Punching the coach was another option considered and ruled out as too indirect. A scathing op/ed piece in The Times was too remote.

            Thank God I was standing on a basketball court because, as a basketball guy, I knew exactly what to do.

            So when she returned, I said this to her, “We may both get kicked out of this sumbitch, but the next time he comes down the lane, drop him like a sack of ashes.”

            I know. Father of the Year.

            Her teammates were admonished to open the lane to make an inviting target and the blonde boy dribbled directly into the kill zone, whereupon my daughter drilled her shoulder into his sternum and sent him crashing ignominiously to the floor, his perception of fat girls forever and inalterably changed. 

            My sense of satisfaction almost made me sick.

            All of a sudden, eighteen kinds of hell broke loose. The blonde kid crying. His parents screaming. The opposing coach calling for my ouster and banishment from the league. The referee actually making the foul call.

            And in the midst of the chaos, I glimpsed my daughter observing the scene with the wizened countenance of a major league pitcher who has deliberately hit an opposing batter- all business. I was almost as proud of her teammates for masking their glee. I do remember them surrounding her like a pride of lions, their wary looks telling the ten year –old hoops world a new enforcer had been born.

            I distinctly remember the opposing coach insisting she be ejected immediately and perhaps burned at the stake. The referee’s reply was the one I had hoped for:

“I heard what he said.”

While I am not proud of my behavior that day, I am less ashamed because the incident seemed to propel my daughter’s self –assurance into another dimension. She had taken their best and cheapest shot and emerged a larger, more complete young woman.

In that moment, I believe she ceased being a fat girl. In fact, her already bigger-than-life personality has become even more robust and expansive in the twenty years since the incident. It is as if her shape and size had been sculpted from the inside out to accommodate her grand spirit. In that moment, she began to grow into herself.

The fat girl has done okay: she played in a Dallas Parochial League basketball championship, swam in two state high school swim meets, joined a college sorority and was invited to join the Dallas Junior League- all supposed bastions of mean girls with reputations for intolerance. 

More importantly, she has earned her college degree, is wildly successful in a job which perfectly suits her talents and personality, works tirelessly for charity, is a true and loyal friend, and is fiercely protective of family and friends.

She has taken on the role of enforcer in all aspects of her life as a natural extension of her own empowerment.

And she has found love.

And it could have been so different.

 

It has been my experience that one does deploy the word fat by accident. It is a tactical nuclear strike designed to cripple one’s enemy.

The word carries with it a payload of institutional negativity so profound that no one dares even challenge the underlying (and fraudulent) notion that bigger women are not as beautiful as smaller women.

As shown above, there is no room for a proportional response. The only proper counterstrike is carpet bombing the enemy.

My yoga practice has allowed me to see true beauty- the beauty others see in themselves. The internal focus of a yoga practice radiates beauty both inwardly and outwardly. There is no greater interpersonal gravitational pull than a confident woman- yet it is an attraction that only a strong and secure man (or woman) can truly appreciate.

In almost any yoga class, traditional definitions of beauty are thrown to the winds, giving way to the tightly controlled dance of concentration, balance, focus, and power that is in all of us. Beauty is not always found in the yogis who achieve the fullest depth of a pose but rather in those yogis who stay within themselves, accepting where they are along the path.

True beauty resides in the peace of that moment of acceptance. For in that moment of acceptance is the ever-hopeful notion that there will be another moment, that their journey will continue, and that they will continue to evolve in their wisdom and in their beauty.

That beauty exists in the eyes and in the countenance. It exudes from the spirit within. It is a beauty borne of hard work, discipline and self-sacrifice. It is beauty that not all can accept. It should not be easily squandered.

There can be no lying or falsity in that beauty. There can be no objectified physical ideal of a woman. There can no airbrushing, photo-shopping or touchups.

And there are no fat girls.