Authors: Dara-Lynn Weiss
Good advice. Got it. Done.
“You’re not going to be in the
Vogue
photo, Bea,” I told her later. “I’m sorry I offered it as a possibility.”
She was crestfallen. “But I want to!”
I was adamant. “Sorry, no.”
Days went by, and Bea reminded me repeatedly that she really, really wanted to be in the photo. She said this was something we’d accomplished together and she wanted to be a part of it. Eventually my husband and I relented.
We should have stood firm. I should have listened to the therapist’s
advice. But I imagined the article coming out, next to a big picture of … just me? The story wasn’t mine alone. Bea and I were a team. My article was not about the efforts of a mother, but the journey of a mother and a daughter. Leaving Bea out of the image felt wrong.
I also wanted to give Bea an opportunity to celebrate her accomplishment—something I felt she had not sufficiently done yet. I knew she would relish having her hair and makeup done, trying on dresses, and being photographed by a professional photographer. In the shallowest way, I wanted her to have a once-in-a-lifetime day where she could feel like a star.
I also wanted to send her a clear message:
You have accomplished something so unusual that a world-renowned magazine wants to spotlight you. You played the most important, active role in getting where you are today. Even though you’re just a kid, you took responsibility for your health and made really difficult changes. You deserve recognition
.
I probably protest too much. Whatever excuses I might make in defense of my decision to let Bea pose for
Vogue
are irrelevant. In retrospect, it was not the right choice.
On the Sunday night before the Friday photo shoot, Bea and I lay in bed together, each of us with a laptop. She logged into the Twitter account she had set up months before and rarely used (in the same time frame, David had racked up seventy followers and had written more than 300 tweets). She decided to compose a message.
“Going to sleep. Stoked for Friday,” she began. I glanced at her screen surreptitiously as she typed, curious to see how she was going to describe the photo shoot to her handful of followers. “On Friday I have something at school called a teach-and-tell which is like a show-and-tell but you teach the class about something.”
The
Vogue
shoot didn’t even register. Good for her for having solid priorities.
That Friday after school, a photographer and his assistant arrived and rearranged our furniture while a fashion assistant wheeled racks of clothes into Bea’s tiny room. A makeup artist and a hairstylist laid out their tools on our dining table. Plastic black trunks filled with shoes took up the better part of our living room floor.
Bea looked insanely cute in everything they tried on her. I wasn’t such an easy fit. Even the collective powers of
Vogue
were hard pressed to find attire that flattered my idiosyncratic build. But the editor managed to pull out a multicolored sheath that looked good, so we went with that. As someone whose wardrobe consists entirely of black and gray clothing, I felt like a rainbow had thrown up on me, but how can you argue with
Vogue
’s taste? I was just excited to be there.
Since everyone asks, I’ll tell you: no, we didn’t get to keep the clothes.
All hell broke loose when the
Vogue
article came out. From the reaction in the blogosphere, you would have thought that I had maimed my daughter.
I’d assumed the piece would generate a little buzz on the mommy blogs and parent-oriented message boards online. I knew some aspects of what I’d written would be controversial, such as the very idea of putting a young child on a diet, or my occasional choice of lower-calorie processed foods over higher-calorie organic fare. I was truly interested to see what people had to say about it.
So the day the issue hit the newsstands, I logged into UrbanBaby, a popular parenting website with an extremely busy (and often venomous) message board. If anyone had an opinion about what I’d written—particularly a negative one—chances were good it would end up on UrbanBaby. The site’s boards were the ones I had frequented in my earlier years of motherhood, when I’d post or search to allay anxiety about my children’s mild ailments or
school enrollments. The site could be immensely and immediately helpful.
It could also be petty and spiteful, its anonymity releasing moms from the social pressure and moral filter that usually curbed the frank expression of judgments about other people’s parenting.
I steeled myself and poked around a bit but found nothing about my article. Hm. Maybe no one really cared.
But within a day or so, it became clear that people did care. A friend said her buddy at the
Today
show wanted to book me for an appearance. My mother called to let me know that someone from
Good Morning America
had phoned her at home, hoping to get in touch with me. An email from a staffer at
20/20
found its way to my husband’s in-box at work. ABC News hand-delivered a letter to my apartment building.
It was somewhat exciting, very disconcerting, and utterly bizarre. While I thought that what I’d written was worth talking about, this response was unexpected. I look back on the flurry of activity with a bit of disbelief now. I hadn’t imagined that anyone would ask me to speak publicly about this issue. Other than what I’d written in my article, I didn’t know what to say. I was totally unprepared for the attention. As someone who watches a lot of TV, I knew that responding to media requests when not fully prepared to speak was a recipe for disaster. I did not return any of the calls.
The interest from these TV shows was but a mild harbinger of the brewing firestorm. And if the entirely polite and respectful overtures from this handful of producers freaked me out, you can imagine how thrown I was by the nature of the onslaught I was about to experience.
Mentions of my article started popping up online. The message-board debates, as many online do, were levelheaded at first, then
devolved into the ridiculous and vitriolic. While the first bunch of comments I read contained sensible criticisms about my methods (feeding Bea meager packs of processed snack foods, snatching a hot chocolate out of her hands at Starbucks), the discussion soon turned into allegations of insanity and abuse, complete with a recommendation that Child Protective Services be called on Bea’s behalf.
While I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the maliciousness of the discourse my article generated—this was the Internet age, after all—it felt surprisingly painful to read anonymous attacks on me and my parenting. I snapped my laptop shut. I was not going to read any more. I could be satisfied that my article was being talked about. There was no need to read the venom.
But calls, emails, and texts from my friends made ducking the maelstrom impossible. They were worried about me, checking in to see if I was okay. I learned that bloggers were devoting entire articles to me, and the comments on those articles numbered in the hundreds, most negative.
Just to get a tiny sense of what was going on, I read one such article, on a prominent blog. It was wrenching. I was called, among other things, “abrasive,” “irrational,” and “truly disgusting.” Those are the printable epithets. The moments that had caused me self-doubt—now immortalized in
Vogue
’s pages—were excerpted as clear evidence of my unambiguously awful parenting. My admissions about my teenage food and weight struggles were invoked as proof that I was projecting my own neurotic issues onto Bea. I was accused of having superficial motivations for forcing Bea to be “skinny,” and that getting myself a byline and photo in
Vogue
was one of them.
I felt physically sick. I had written an unsparingly honest article that I’d thought people could relate to. But apparently I had
inadvertently outed myself as a selfish, cruel mother. It wasn’t as if I had been misrepresented or misquoted.
I had written the article myself
. Those were my own words. And virtually everyone who read them seemed convinced I was despicable.
According to friends monitoring the situation, our nutrition doctor was being widely quoted in response to my article.
She’d told the blog
Jezebel
that she “wasn’t thrilled” with the way my piece in
Vogue
depicted her program. She criticized me for ignoring the “emotional issues” involved, and disclosed that I had given up on our appointments after a few months. She conjectured that, had we stayed under her care, “the end result would have been more than just weight loss: [we]’d have weight loss and a happy child.”
I understood that she kind of had to throw me under the bus, lest the tsunami of anger cast her as an accessory to the crime. Still, I wasn’t sure why she needed to conjecture about the emotional well-being of a child she had personally treated only a handful of times and hadn’t seen in over a year. But most of her remarks seemed to just be setting the record straight about the tenets of her program.
When Jeff read some of the coverage, he shrugged it off. “It’s just some stupid bloggers,” he said. “Who cares?”
I knew he was being intentionally flippant. When you’re married to someone as prone to stress and self-flagellation as I am, it helps to act as though things are no big deal, to try to ratchet down the emotional response level a few notches. It meant an enormous amount that Jeff was on my side when external voices were so resoundingly against me. He remained so even when we had to scramble to remove all online traces of our kids after a British tabloid published a photo of our family that they’d pulled off his Facebook page.
“You know why you’re doing this, and we’ve talked about it,” he reminded me in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep from all the stress. “This is for Bea. You know what you’ve achieved together, who she is, and who you are. That’s what you have to hold on to.”
But these bloggers, and the chorus of commentators who had not necessarily read the full text of my article, were confirming my worst fears throughout this process: I was crazy, and now I had made my daughter crazy. Food, dieting, and weight were eternal struggles for me, and now they would be for her. While I had naively hoped I could get beyond my own baggage and help Bea get healthy, doing so had backfired, and now I had screwed her up for life. She would have been better off if I had left her alone—or if she had had a better, issue-free mother to shepherd her through the process.
Jeff, reassured me that we’d done the right thing, and that while people could say what they wanted, they were not fit to judge unless they knew us, knew Bea, or had successfully ushered their own obese children into health while preserving their self-esteem and happiness.
He’d have to have similar conversations with me many times over the next few days as I processed what was going on. He’d remind me that Bea was a very happy child. He pointed out that one of the major reasons I’d written my article was to address the very kinds of reactions that the article was getting: attacks on a regular person trying her best to deal with the colossal challenge of helping an obese child lose weight.
Most of all, he felt that what people were responding to was not even a weight issue but a parenting issue. People did not want to accept the possibility that a good mother could publicly admit to the bad parenting moments I’d laid bare without being crucified.
Everyone had acted the way I did at one time or another, he said. Few are willing to confess to it. And my doing so had struck a nerve at least as great as one about food and weight and little girls.
We all want to do what’s best for our offspring, but that means different things for different children, and to different parents. Do we want to maximize our kids’ joy? Keep them as safe as possible? Push them as hard as we can to help them reach their fullest potential? No matter how far you’re willing to go for your child, you can’t give them everything. As the response to my article had clearly illustrated, one’s definition of what’s “best” is inevitably going to run counter to someone else’s.
Over the next few days, the response to my article intensified as media outlets picked up on the online backlash. My home answering machine filled up with messages from CNN,
People
, the
Toronto Star
, Headline News, Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew,
Showbiz Tonight
, even the
Times
of London.
One of the few calls I took was from one of my aunts. She is a brilliant woman, a successful doctor, a devoted wife, and mother to three grown children. She is fun and interesting and funny. She is also brutally honest with everyone, sometimes to the point of insult. She cannot go shopping or even attend one of her grandchildren’s birthday parties without getting into an argument with somebody.
She harangued her children throughout their childhoods in the interest of pushing them to be the best they could be. In one infamous incident, she so badgered her middle child in the waiting room of a doctor’s office that a stranger passed the child a note with a phone number, offering help if she wanted to escape (I’m not telling tales out of school; my aunt will recount this story with a laugh).
But anyone who would, based on casual observation, consider
my aunt to be a bad mother would be utterly wrong. She gave her kids such vast stores of unconditional love, respect, and support that none of them ever doubted her absolute—and often embarrassing—adoration, coupled though it sometimes was with yelling. All three of her children grew to be happy, healthy, and successful. They are sensitive, kind adults with great families of their own, and, for the record, they could not love their mother more.
I love her, too. Because even though she would vocally critique my appearance, disapprove of my boyfriends, or belittle my professional endeavors if that was how she saw things, she was doing it only because she thought I’d benefit from hearing her opinions. She’d also be the loudest in her praise when she felt I looked great, had met the right guy, or was doing well at work. And I never doubted that she loved me or wanted the best for me.