Baby Fat

            A nineteen-pound baby was born recently in Atlanta. I saw his picture, and he was both longer and plumper than most infants, and as sweet as any of them, from the tiniest spidery preemie to, well, this one, asleep in a nurse’s arms, sucking a binkie.

            A friend saw the picture and erupted in tsks and frowns. “Look at that,” she said. “Already obese.”

            Not all that long ago, I was pregnant. I was older than most moms, and I was larger, too, but healthy and strong.

            When either an older or a larger woman gets the pregnancy diagnosis, silent alarms go off, and everyone in the doctor’s office is thrown into emergency mode. As a mom who was both old and fat, I guess I’m just lucky the place didn’t implode. While the baby hummed along inside me, evolving from shrimphood, the doctor fretted, called for blood sugar tests, found me a specialist—all on the premise that I was in a high-risk category, and mine was a dangerous pregnancy.

            I started checking my blood sugar and trying to keep it within the desirable range. My blood sugar has always been on the high end of normal, but the high end was considered the deep end of the pool, and my doctor wanted me in the shallows. We monitored; we dieted; we regulated. Being in the shallows made me feel weak and faint, but she liked the math.

            The details are as boring as they were worrisome. At the end, I was brought in for induction, then sent home for a week because the bun needed more oven time. In another week—still two weeks before my due date—I went in for induction and was wheeled off to the preparation area, where I waited and worried. I was sure I’d have a twenty-pound baby—that no one in the hospital had ever seen anything like the manatee residing in my salt bed.

            I really wanted a natural birth. I see a natural birth as my link to history—a way, in this entirely modern world, to be like my grandmother, and her grandmother, and all the mothers throughout time. It’s painful, and it doesn’t have to be, but that pain feels essential, elemental, traditional. We go through it, we get past it, and, generation after generation, we prevail. Obviously, if there were real danger, I’m no fool—I have a doctor, and I’d be willing to do what it takes to have a healthy baby at minimal risk to self. But the truth is that there is nothing more natural than having a baby, and this is true for all women, all along the size spectrum.

            What I ended up with was an operating room full of people, the anesthetist over my shoulder, a vat of my own ruby blood right in my eyeline. It was terrifying; it was quick. Suddenly, there was a baby in the room.

            My son was fat—beautifully so. He was not, however, the record-breaker who was feared. They weighed him once: ten pounds, two ounces. They weighed him again: nine pounds, fifteen ounces. I tell everyone the first weight; the second is the weight indicated on his birth certificate. All that worry—my little booklet full of blood sugar numbers, an unwanted early surgery—and there he was, in the normal range, just sort of large for a baby. Ten pounds, two ounces. My baby, birth certificate be damned, was ten-two.

            Look at that. Already obese.

            In summers during college, I earned money as a medical records clerk, full time, usually on the night shift. Some weekends I worked day shift, and my job then was to fill out birth certificates. I am an excellent speller, and it’s a skill that came in handy when I approached parents who were almost always younger than I was and asked them for the baby’s name.

            “Stephanie Michelle,” a mom might say, maybe with her partner or her own mother beside her, maybe, tragically, alone.

            “How do you intend to spell that?” I’d ask.

            I grew accustomed to the pause. “How do you think it should be spelled?”

            I am responsible for numerous Michaels who were born in the late 1980s in the Appalachian part of Ohio and who do not spell their name M-I-C-H-E-A-L. I was also the final judge on some name options. “What do you like better—Kyle or Cody?” a mom would ask.

            Of course, I was all in for Cody.

            I enjoyed going to the new moms’ rooms as they got used to holding a newborn. I liked seeing the special outfit picked out for the baby’s first picture or for the trip home. Some abandoned moms were just happy to have someone who would let them show off the baby.

            On summer day, I was filing lab reports when a transcriptionist came in with the news. There was a baby upstairs weighing fifteen pounds, and he looked like a little toddler.

            Without another word, we hit the elevators and made our way down the hallway to the labor and delivery area, where there was an observation window for viewing the babies. It was pretty easy to find the fifteen-pounder, and my friend and I weren’t the only ones looking. There were unit secretaries and phlebotomists and gift shop clerks and candystripers, all gawking at the sleeping baby. The nursery was full, and the big guy was boxed in by babies a third its weight.

            I have to confess that I like chubby babies best of all. The skinny, spindly ones puzzle me, like when the woman at the zoo once handed me the blue-tongued skink. How does one hold such a thing? Where do I put my hands? Fat babies seemed sturdy and obvious, and I always knew just what to do with them, how to hold them close.

            My mother says that when my older sister was born premature, she looked exactly like a spider—spindly and covered in dark hair. She has never mentioned my dimensions, but I am a middle child.

            By now, that big baby from the hospital would be around twenty-six. He might have a giant baby of his own, or a passel of them, like a patch full of the ripest pumpkins.

            There are two ways you can have baby fat. One: you can be a child who still retains some soft features from babyhood. The other: you can give birth and have a noticeable tummy for a few weeks—but no more. Then your fat is something else—something shameful.

            It is no longer OK to be a fat baby, with big pinchable cheeks and a dimpled butt. Once the sign of health and vitality, fat is now an unacceptable variant. And giant babies, like that little boy in Atlanta, are objects of pity and disgust. Let’s hope the mom registered for a baby-sized elliptical machine.

            But welcome to the world, big fat baby. Have some milk. Let me hold you while you sleep. I am more than happy to make room for you.

World's Fattest Animals

            My son has a library class three days a week. This is so different from my third-grade experience, which involved merely visiting the library once a week to check out books, or to forget to check in the books I had checked out the previous week. But this is the information age, and my son’s class teaches information literacy and all the ways to find out what we need to know. It’s really pretty great—a way to create lifelong learners, instead of mere memorizers of facts. And he gets to check out books, too, when he’s resisting the influence of the overdue-book gene he got from me.

            The other day, I asked him what exactly he does in library class, since I had no equivalent grade-school experience to draw upon. He told me that they learn about the different parts of the library, listen to a story read aloud, practice finding and checking out books, and search for information on the computers.

            After this detailed explanation, however, he switched from a matter-of-fact tone to a stage whisper to give me the straight scoop.

            “Mostly I just look up the world’s fattest animals,” he said.

            There must be a name for that tendency we have, when given the opportunity to learn anything, to default to the ridiculous.

            I brought home my first personal computer in the early 1990s. It was one of those all-in-one Apple McIntosh systems with the tiny screen. I admit I feel a little nostalgic for the simplicity of that machine—how I’d just carry it up the stairs to my apartment by a back handle and plug it in to the wall, with no separate hard drive, speakers, or other accessories.

            After I had found a spot on a table and plugged the computer in, there was the simple matter of removing the cord from the phone and sticking it in to the computer’s data port. Everyone who computed in the 1990s remembers the bleeping wind-tunnel sounds of the connection being forged (and having to go through several phone numbers to find one that was not too busy to accept the log-in). It’s very strange to have to explain something so recent in such detail, but the fact is that a reader under the age of thirty would have almost no recollection of these sounds, or the excited-for-me tones of a disembodied male voice saying, “Welcome! You’ve got mail!” We over-forty types may as well have driven a covered oxcart to hop on to the Internet—it’s exactly that strange.

            What’s less strange is what we did the first time we were alone with that new home computer. Like everyone else then, and now, and in all the days to come, we plunked as many filthy words as we knew into the search engine and pressed “Go.” It’s really no wonder Jeeves turned in his letter of resignation, considering the nature of the things we had been asking him to tell us about.

            A young child’s version of forbidden fruit is manifested in the sneaky Internet search. It’s looking for the “world’s fattest animals” while the rest of the class is looking for “Abraham Lincoln.” Out of curiosity, I replicated my son’s search.

            Most of what came up were huge housecats, held awkwardly under their arms, their great girth suspended like bulbous pears. I saw an obese giraffe, but I’m pretty sure its ground-touching gut had been photographically manipulated into place. There were some sad-looking dogs with back problems—pity the corpulent dachshund, overindulged and bucking at his center of gravity. There were representatives of the naturally fat animal set, elephants and hippos and pigs and whales. There were also some dolphins and manatees that looked quite satisfied with their fat lot in life, and some huge baboons, stuffing their faces and staring into the camera with fuck-off eyes.

            It was an interesting search, with widely varied results. My unfiltered computer brought back some pictures of naked fat people—the rescued-from-their-own-bathroom level of fat—because searches of any topic will yield something for voyeurs like us to sink our teeth into. I doubt my son saw these in the school library, where he contented himself with puffed-up winter birds and squirrels whose cheeks were packed to capacity with nuts.

            I do wonder what led him to that particular search, within the entire universe of odd and worthwhile things to see. He gets picked on at school sometimes, and it’s possible he was looking for something kind of jolly, like he might find at home, or something fierce and defensive—like he also might find at home.

            It’s hard to let them go into this sharp-edged world, and when he ambles back to me, I can’t help it—I become the mother hen, fluffing myself around my skinny chick’s defenseless down. I think of home as a round nest, as a soft place to lay one’s head.

The View From the Car Line

            Something needs to be said about the car line. With as much time as it occupies in elementary parents’ lives on any given day, it’s strange to me that hardly anyone talks or writes about this model of democracy and cooperation. There is no other part of my life that illustrates quite as fully the principle that we’re all in this together.

            I am a regular in the car line at my son’s school, Rountree Elementary. I know its rhythms—how it is longer and slower on very cold days, how my son’s teacher will generously bend my ear with a progress report if he is that week’s traffic monitor, how some people lose track of where they are and let two, three, five car lengths open up before they jerk to attention and move forward.

            I am typically the mom with the book. Sometimes I’m the mom listening to NPR and staring into some middle distance. Lately I’ve been the mom playing Trivia Crack, which has also made me the mom of the five-car-lengths jerk.

            Our school is a lovely public school in a quiet neighborhood, and many of the people in front of and behind me are friends who didn’t have time to walk or who are taking cover in a 250 horsepower umbrella. We feel guilty, but there we are, united by our environmental guilt and our love of wearing pajamas all day. And there we are, too, all of us dreading the teacher who approaches the car and says, “Would you mind coming in for a moment?”

            My friends know two things about me for certain: my own “two things” are not stuffed into a bra unless I have a formal appointment, and I find pants cumbersome and optional. I know I’m an outlier in the car line, but I don’t think I’m alone—still in my pajamas at 3:45, or in a nightgown halfway tucked into some hastily donned sweat pants.

            I have a good but energetic son about whom there is much to be said. Last year’s teacher, Mrs. S, had a habit of running out of the building to wave me over and tell me what wild shenanigans he had gotten into that day. I got into the bra-and-pants habit then, I assure you; there are only so many conversations one can have with one’s arms crossed the entire time. This year’s teacher, Mr. W, is more merciful. Maybe one encounter with me in my invisible straitjacket got the message across. Or maybe he’s just as eager to get home as my son and I are. We stick to through-the-window conferences in a catch-as-catch-can sort of way.

Three years ago my son went to a private school that is nearly as close to home as our public school is. It was snooty as could be, or what passes for snooty here in the Ozarks, and while we were all in it together there, too, it didn’t feel that way. Most people were all in it several feet above our Honda Civic in their luxury SUVs. And there was the strange one-upmanship of parents who dressed to the nines to pick up their spawn—heels, jewelry, Estee Lauder, the whole shebang. One felt … well, sort of eyeballed in that private school car line. The fact that everyone was quite literally looking down at us (from a Cadillac Escalade) may have been a factor.

While I tried to be friendly and helpful at that school—and while I always wore a bra—my overtures were never successful. At the public school, on the other hand, if you volunteer once, you’re roped in for the duration, and you are expected and even needed at every event that follows. At the snooty school, I don’t know how many times I offered to do this or that, only to learn that it was covered, thankyouverymuch. And as hard as it was to be a parent there, the classroom experience was worse—bullying, bragging, with a first-grade caste system that assigned a permanent spot in the pecking order to every young scholar.

Needless to say, we got the heck out of there and into the public school system. Our beloved neighborhood school has provided a better environment for my son, a better education, and even a better place for my, er, girls, who can stay warm and dry in their nightgown, in their car, where all of the people around us are too busy and too pajama-clad themselves to notice.

It really is true: We are all in this together.