Authors: Dara-Lynn Weiss
She called me that day to tell me I had to be more like her.
“Don’t listen to anyone,” she said. “You did the right thing. You have to be like me—just be confident no matter what. Because you know that your kids are the best and they’re happy. No one can tell you otherwise.”
I don’t share my aunt’s natural assurance or moxie, but in that moment (and in many more since) I wished that I did. Because while it was easy for others to look at what I wrote and paint me as an abrasive, cold, superficial person, I felt my actions were being misunderstood. Still, being a public villain is not an enviable ride. And I wanted the controversy to just go away.
I realized, too late, that by appearing in
Vogue
, I had unwittingly presented myself as some kind of fancy Manhattan mom. That erroneous supposition was picked up and promulgated on the Internet until even legitimate media outlets described me as “socialite Dara-Lynn Weiss,” as though it were just a plain fact.
It shouldn’t have mattered, but I think it affected how people responded to my article. They viewed me as an unrelatable society woman whose life and decisions were nothing like their own. It made my story easier to process. By avoiding the mundane reality of the situation, they didn’t have to confront the question of what they would do in my position.
On the other hand, maybe I’m not giving my critics enough credit. Perhaps they didn’t care who I was or what my motivations were. I knew from personal experience that to many people, the idea of putting a child on a strict diet and unyieldingly keeping her on it was abhorrent. It didn’t matter what kind of person I was; doing what I did made me a bad mother.
I also woke up to the fact that
Vogue
is not
Parade
magazine.
Vogue
is a periodical that is—as
The New York Times
described it in an article about my essay—“possibly the spiritual home of the eating disorder.” I’d underestimated how powerful and, to some women, dangerous that particular venue was for my particular story.
The support of my friends, family, and especially Jeff helped give me clarity amid the craziness. They gave me the courage to act around Bea and David as though everything were normal. While I was deeply shaken, I didn’t want the kids to know about it. When they overheard conversations I was having about the backlash and asked what was going on, I blandly explained that some woman wrote an article about my article and said that she thought I was too tough on Bea. We hoped we could leave it at that.
I was terrified, though, that the controversy had already grown too big and that Bea was going to be the target of comments at school. We’d have to wait until she went back the following Monday to find out. I berated myself for failing to heed the advice to leave Bea out of the photo. I felt stupid for not thinking of using
a fake name for myself. If only I hadn’t been so naive about the potential reaction!
In the meantime, I couldn’t entirely avoid the headlines. I received an email inviting me to my friend’s new baby’s bris, and at the bottom, fed in through some Yahoo! News technology, was a link to an article: “A woman uses dramatic methods to get her seven-year-old to lose weight before a magazine photo shoot.” Ugh.
A later Google search revealed a smattering of articles in my defense, including ones on sites as prominent as
Time
magazine’s
Ideas
blog and Fox News. But of course, these supporters were drowned out by my critics. More than 100 articles had been written about my essay, hundreds more blogs had posted about those articles, and those presumably generated thousands of reader comments.
I don’t say proudly that the online controversy was of international proportions. Articles were written about me in Poland, India, Italy, France, England, Canada, Germany, Lithuania, Brazil, Ireland, Australia, and Hong Kong, and they all agreed I was pretty disgusting.
I don’t know German, but I can take a guess as to what the headline “Monster-Mutter No. 1” means.
But people who were actually touched by this problem personally went out of their way to contact me to express their support. Women and men who have struggled with their weight all their lives commended me for getting involved with Bea’s problem early. People with siblings who battled eating disorders shared their suspicion that the situation might have been avoided if their parents had been willing to talk about weight. Several mothers of overweight adults told me their grown-up children blame them for letting them grow up fat and not doing anything about it. A woman with a young overweight child confided that she identified
with my feelings of awkwardness and being judged in dealing with the issue.
Those conversations were the most reassuring to me, because these were the people who had lived this problem, not just judged it from afar.
My journey had been beset by doubts, and the backlash to my article had reinforced those fears. But I slowly began to think that, just maybe, I had done the right thing after all. The more closely I considered the criticisms against me, the less validity I felt they had.
The harshest allegations were that I “fat-shamed” and “publicly humiliated” Bea. I recoiled from the accusation but struggled to understand what people were referring to. When exactly did I fat-shame and publicly humiliate her? By getting testy about the hot chocolate at Starbucks? Was it the enforcement of her dietary restrictions in public? What about all the parents of healthy-weight kids who do that? Are they exempt from censure because their kids aren’t fat? Did any policing of Bea’s food intake become “public humiliation” just because the result I was seeking was not just instilling generally good eating habits but managing her weight?
Maybe if Bea hadn’t been lying on her stomach in one
Vogue
shot and obscured by a table in the other, people would have realized that the goal I achieved was not to make her “skinny” or “slender” or “thin,” which is how various journalists described her, although those words do not appear once in my article. In fact, at both the time of the article’s writing and its publication, she was still technically in the “overweight” category. Does that make people feel better?
Some friends ventured that perhaps my own weight affected how readers viewed my plight. That maybe some readers inferred I was disappointed that my daughter didn’t look like me. Perhaps
if I’d been visibly overweight or discussed my husband’s family history with obesity in greater detail, I would have appeared more sympathetic. Or in that case would my insistence on seeing to it that Bea didn’t end up like us seem hypocritical? I could easily imagine being excoriated for forcing my daughter to lose weight while allowing myself or my husband to be heavy. But the converse didn’t seem to satisfy people, either.
Another major source of rancor was that I went public with our story at all. People felt that my writing about Bea’s weight was embarrassing to her. This is a private issue, they railed, and should have remained so. To me, such concerns reveal a misunderstanding of how inherently public it is to deal with being overweight. Obesity is an excruciatingly obvious disease. Having fought her way to a healthy weight, I’m not sure what these critics believed Bea should feel embarrassed about.
My favorite criticism was that I vocally disapproved of her food choices and refused her food even when she complained of being hungry. Are you kidding me? Of course I did that! When more exercise and a healthy diet fail to make a difference, how else can one address obesity other than by reducing an overeater’s food intake?
Finally, just about every critic used one or more of the following adjectives to describe me: “tone-deaf,” “obsessive,” “strict,” “abrasive.” And to those critics, I say: guilty as charged.
But that doesn’t mean what I put Bea through was cruel or wrong. What if the difference between me and the millions of mothers who haven’t yet curbed their children’s obesity is the very actions that people were so shocked by: the inflexibility, the harshness? Well, you could argue that in that case, I should have let her be. Fighting a child’s obesity is not worth making her miserable. Health is not just about the body, it’s also about the mind.
But the fact remains that I really do not believe that aborting Bea’s consumption of hot chocolate at Starbucks, having an annoying conversation about dessert at every party, making her enumerate her snacks at French Heritage Day, and refusing her a fifth piece of fruit before bed have made her life unbearable. I bet she would agree.
I was on edge as I drove the kids to school on their first day back after everything blew up. What if I had a car accident? I imagined the blog headline: “God Delivers Justice for Bea:
Vogue
’s Diet Mom Dead in Car Wreck.”
I was preoccupied all day, wondering what she was going through at school. I waited nervously at her bus stop for her in the afternoon. When she arrived and climbed off the bus, I scanned her face for any sign of what her day had been like. Had any kids made comments? Mentioned the article? Tipped her off to the backlash against her mom?
She reached the street, dragging her wheeled backpack behind her. She opened her mouth and uttered the two familiar words she always said when she got off the bus: “I’m hungry!”
I had never been so happy to hear it.
If Scarlett Johansson’s beautiful face looked especially lovely smiling out at me from the May issue of
Vogue
, it was likely because the image confirmed that the issue containing my article was no longer on the newsstands.
It had been a difficult month being the hated
Vogue
diet mom. I was glad that the controversy had finally died down and that my kids had emerged as buoyant as ever, reasonably unaware of the controversy their mommy had unwittingly sparked.
But the outcry had affected me. The disapproval, scorn, and fury unleashed in response to my article reminded me of the real proportion of supportive voices versus critical ones and revealed the true tenor of society’s response to what I did. The world had more clearly exposed its inability to deal unemotionally with the intersection of weight, food, children, obesity, and parenting than I ever could have. My complex and multidimensional story had been reduced to the tale of a cruel, narcissistic mother who shamed
and tortured her daughter into socially acceptable thinness, handing her an eating disorder along the way.
So many outside observers had refused to accept any nuance, elided my humble admissions of ill-preparedness and uncertainty, and jumped to flawed conclusions to fill in any blanks left by my article. In doing so, they demonstrated how their own narrow notions affected their interpretation of my words and actions. To them, a candid acknowledgment of obesity equates with shame. Public discussion about how to feed an overweight child is public humiliation. Denying food to an overweight child is deprivation, even “starvation.” Many of the reproaches revealed an ignorance about obesity. Still more demonstrated an inability to accept that a person can make difficult decisions, be strict, and even make mistakes, yet still be a good, loving mom with a child who ends up physically and emotionally healthy.
I appreciate that the public rushes to judgment to protect a young child, but why did everyone assume that my interactions with her were abusive? If I get testy with a food server, refuse Bea a second dessert, even hold back most of her dinner because she ate too much for snack, those things do not necessarily entail cruelty. They can be, and were, actions taken with love and respect.
Helping an overweight child is hard. Doing so as a woman in today’s weight- and food-obsessed culture, as someone who has grappled with her own issues of body image, is even harder. People don’t need more excuses to avoid dealing with childhood obesity. I wish the media hadn’t provided so many in their response to my story.
Coincidentally, while my
Vogue
article was on newsstands, a relevant controversy erupted in nearby Park Slope, Brooklyn. Apparently some neighborhood parents were in an uproar about the presence of an ice-cream truck at a popular playground. This
dust-up beg
an with irate moms posting online, and it eventually received television and print coverage as far away as Seattle and San Francisco. The problem at hand was that there was an ice-cream truck in full view of the kids, and children were freaking out and having “meltdowns” if they were denied ice cream by their caregivers. So some moms wanted the truck banned from the vicinity.
Relieved to see that the media heat had moved on to another target, I observed with interest how blogs and newspapers presented the drama. The gist of the coverage was generally mocking the parents for being unable to countenance conflict with their children.
A
New York Observer
reporter wrote, “Rather than teaching kids to deal with temptations and master their impulses, parents would like those temptations removed. Now! Please.” And while this story was never overtly connected to the outcry my article ignited, there were some fascinating parallels.
One Park Slope mother complained that she had to fight with her kids every day at the playground over the ice-cream issue. This mom was subjected to media ridicule for her perceived unwillingness to discipline her child. Huh? So now it’s a good thing to discipline a child around food? In any event, no one accused her of “publicly shaming” her kid.
Another Park Slope mom opined that parents need to learn how to say no and that kids need to learn how to hear it. She was presented as a reasonable voice, not as someone “depriving” her child.
While I felt like an outcast for monitoring my child’s food intake and admitting that publicly, a woman who spoke to the
New York Post
requested anonymity “for fear of being ostracized by other parents” because she disagreed with the bloc of parents who wanted the ice-cream trucks banned. Imagine fearing social reprisal for disagreeing with food-policing parents! Where were all the anti-ice-cream moms when my article came out?
I was vaguely amused by the local controversy—which, predictably, petered out after a few days. But on another level, it made me sad that this situation, which, like mine, involved food, kids, and overbearing moms, was received so differently in the realm of public opinion.