The Heavy by Dara-Lynn Weiss Page A

complaining of being hungry. I was trying to be a good mother, an advocate for my child’s health. But I also wanted to be a polite dinner guest. Bea happily devoured the salad as I sat silently.
    Long afterward, my friend who’d hosted us that night and I discussed this incident. I described it as one of the many ways our food issues turned social situations stressful as I tried to navigate the triangle between what other people thought I should feed Bea, what I thought was best for her, and what Bea wanted to eat.
    “I can’t believe how pushy I was!” my friend marveled in retrospect.
    “You only did what any normal person would do in that situation,” I assured her.
    Overseeing the diet of an overweight child is an uneasy position to be in. It is going to cause social strain. I readily admit that I am not the most socially adept person, and I don’t handle tension well. While I felt I had failed Bea that night by eventually capitulating to the Niçoise salad, there was certainly no blame to be placed on anyone else.
    But I was mad at myself for not being more protective. I felt bad that I’d let her eat food we hadn’t planned on, just to avoid some social discomfort. It wasn’t the one bowl of salad that worried me. It was the very real fear that not sticking to our strategy 100 percent, all the time, left the door open for more such moments to creep in. I’d been on enough diets myself and had tried enough halfhearted measures with Bea to realize what was required. The salad incident served as a reminder that if we took our commitment to the rules of our program too lightly, the entire endeavor would collapse. I had to think like an alcoholic trying to stay on the wagon. One drink is too many, and a thousand is not enough.
    So the next time, I spoke up. We were at Bea’s cousin’s birthday party. I saw her heading for the M&M bowl on the buffet table, even before lunch was served.
    “Hey!” I shouted. And, though grinning, I widened my eyes and opened up my hands as if to say,
What the hell?
Bea caught my gaze, coyly slipped a few of the M&Ms into her mouth, and ran off.
    When the kids sat down to lunch, each place setting featured a juice box. I replaced Bea’s with a water bottle.
    “Aww, I want the juice!” she whined.
    “I know, but it’s just
juice
,” I said with an exaggerated sneer, sending up its inconsequence, trying to forge an intimate camaraderie over the idea of wasting calories on a drink—like all the other kids were ignorant for mindlessly drinking what they were given, whereas she was the clever strategist. “We’re going to have cake soon! So let’s just drink water.” She didn’t argue. I knew she wasn’t really into juice anyway, so that was an easy savings.
    When the cake was served, Bea literally licked her plate clean. David turned his piece over to me after a few bites.
    “I don’t like it,” he said, as if it had been a dose of cough medicine.
    “No?” I asked innocently, taking a bite as though doing so for verification purposes. I ate the entire rest of the piece just to be sure it wasn’t bad.
    Amid the frantic goodbyes, goody-bag distribution, jacket-locating, happy birthday wishes, and general post-sugar-consumption mayhem, I saw Bea approach the buffet table again. She was staring at the cookie plate. I pushed my way through the crowd, calling out to her.
    “Bea! What are you doing?” I said, raising my voice above the din.
    “I want a cookie,” she said simply.
    “You can’t have a cookie,” I said.
    “Why not?” she asked. She knew why not.
    “You just had cake! We had a whole discussion about what you were going to eat here. You could have had the cookies, the cake, or the M&Ms, but you cannot have all of them. You picked the cake. You’re done.”
    I’m not sure anyone actually paid attention to us. But I understood that if they had, they might have found the exchange embarrassing. The high-strung mom nagging her overweight daughter about