"Look, Mom! He's Fat!"

During the summer, the kids and I frequented a local water ice place for a treat.

On one particular occasion, while we were standing in line, my middle child, who was only 4 at the time, pointed to a little boy in the next line, and said, "Look, Mom!  He's fat!"  I heard her, but pretended not to, in the hopes that she would drop it, and we would never talk about it again.  Unfortunately, my plan backfired when she shouted the same thing again, this time, loud enough for -- not the boy to hear her -- his mother to hear her.

Embarrassed doesn't even convey the feelings of humiliation I felt.  I had no idea what to say... to my daughter; to that poor mother (I don't think her son heard, THANK GOODNESS).

I immediately apologized to the mother.  Profusely.  Fortunately she was very understanding, and just let it go with a nod and a slight grin.  I bent down and said to my daughter that she shouldn't say things like that, and she apologized.  I even brought it up again on the way home, where she started crying and apologizing again.  I later resolved that I should have told his mother that I would talk to my daughter about those kinds of comments later.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it.  For a lot of reasons.  My daughter had no idea how insulting it was for her to identify that child as fat.  She might as well have said he was tall, or had brown hair, or was wearing a blue shirt.  It was simply an observation.  There was no malice or hatred behind her remark.

I later became annoyed that I felt so defensive about my daughter's remark.  We live in a society where we try to teach our children, more specifically, our daughters, that fat and thin don't mean anything; that beauty is on the inside.  Children are so easily influenced and I don't want mine to think that just because someone doesn't like they way the look, or they don't "fit" into some degree of "normal," that they're weird or ugly or fat.  I want my kids to accept themselves, and others, the way they are.  It doesn't matter what they look like.

I'm glad I apologized to the mother of that little boy.  But I wish I hadn't made my daughter feel so bad for something she didn't realize she had done.  She truly didn't know that she said a hurtful thing.

I wish fat wasn't such an insult.