by Kim Brittingham

We're crowded into a booth at the IHOP.  It is Mother's Day.

My partner Lori works to maintain a friendly tone as she probes her father.  She is tracing a backwards road, trying fruitlessly to understand, "now, what exactly do you think Sadam Hussein had to do with 9/11?"

Meanwhile, I smile patiently and nod at regular intervals as her 88-year-old mother plies me with small talk.

"You have such a lovely complexion," Lucy tells me.  Then she lowers her voice and gestures limply at everything below my neck.  "I won't mention anything else."

Later I will post this anecdote on my Facebook page, and friends will leave comments of shock and outrage.  As the author of a fat-positive, body image-related memoir, they might complete the scene in their minds with me setting my mother-in-law's ass straight.  Busting some preconceived notions, proclaiming my self-pride -- all punctuated by a clattering fork, and a dramatic Julia Sugarbaker-style exit.

But I won't be making any grand gestures today.  You see, my mother-in-law actually thinks she's being kind.  And in her advancing state of senility, she is incapable of understanding otherwise. 

Lucy accepts that fat is an undesirable thing, and assumes that every woman who isn't slender must desperately want to be.  Of course she must -- what woman in her right mind would willingly sign up to be ugly?  For Lucy, life is simple -- as simple as an easy Sunday under the blue sky of her native North Carolina, swaying in a hammock with one toe dragging in the piney dirt of the land she was raised on.  Living is easy when you realize there's a right and a wrong way to be, in every situation.  And thin is always right for a woman.

When she tells me she "won't mention anything else" on my body, Lucy is assuring me she understands how embarrassed I must be by my physicality, and that she isn't about to call any special attention to it -- ironically enough.  To her, what I am is "a shame".  And she feels for me in that hand-patting way.  As though I was born with a cleft palette or scorched my face scarlet in a kitchen accident. 

She is incapable of digesting the fact that I've come to accept my body just the way it is, even see the beauty in it, and that my constant efforts to live healthfully have nothing to do with waging battle on a bathroom scale.  If I lose weight as a natural result of my eating and exercise habits, so be it.  I know from experience that putting the focus on "weight loss" is a sure way to lose one's life to an empty obsession -- one that usually results in big rebound gains anyway. 

But Lucy, like millions of others, doesn't get that.

Sometimes in a clumsy but well-meaning effort at drawing us together and making conversation, my beloved Lori reports to her parents how hard I worked at the gym that week.  As though trying to convince them I'm not as apathetic and slovenly as my girth might suggest.  Her mother blinks -- unable to compute.  Fat woman?  Exercising?  As though we've told her that dogs worldwide suddenly started speaking today.  In Polish.  "Well," she drawls.  "That's nice." 

"I tell you, I don't have an appetite anymore," Lucy tells me, cutting into a link sausage. "When you get to be my age, you won't hardly want to eat at all!"

I suppose I could try to explain to Lucy that shame seldom leads to healthy change, whether it comes from within or without.  I could give a sermon on how I'm more deeply fulfilled, more excited about life and happy since I claimed my place as a first-class citizen of the universe, rather than some poor lost soul who fell from grace into a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough.  But I believe it is all beyond her comprehension.

Lucy comes from a world where a girl grew up to get a permanent wave in order to snag a husband, so she could take her place behind a Kenmore range, perfect the art of the casserole without complaint, and pop out babies without ever uttering the word "pregnant".  A world where middle class women watched their waists and sucked down Alba shakes, or else got sent to analysts to be "fixed" for not caring anymore.  Of her own mother, Lori recalls, "She stopped getting dressed up and doing her hair after I was born.  She became so frumpy and matronly at such a young age.  You wouldn't believe it -- she used to be so tall and stylish and blond." 

I feel myself withdrawing from our scene at the IHOP.  I nod less.  I focus on my omelet.  I pretend I don't notice Lori's father watching me eat, as he often does.  As though observing an animal in the zoo.  The curious gorging habits of the American Fat Woman.  He doesn't think I know.

Despite understanding the source, it still saddens me a little to be treated like some circus freak.  Maybe even less for myself than for others who don't have as much courage as I do, to strut around in whatever clothes I damn well please and actually get a swagger going in a swimsuit. 

"You know, when you get to be my age," Lucy repeats, "You won't hardly want to eat at all!"

She retains hope for my future. 

What good would it do to try and enlighten an old lady?  Twenty years earlier, Lori took her mother angrily to task for prejudices and intolerances that even maternal instinct couldn't overcome.  I think she was right to make her mother take responsibility then.  But today she's a poor soul who devolves into infantile whimpering if she has to pee and the bathroom is occupied.  One's impulse is to give her an extra pillow -- not give her something to think about.

Despite her questionable remarks about my body, Lucy is outwardly warm and kind, treating me to sincere embraces and kisses upon my cheek, accepting me as her daughter's partner.  During our civil union, she even sang at me, "Here comes the bride," then giggled.  It's the best she will ever do, and it's enough. 

"Listen," Lucy says over her pancakes, "When you get to be my age, you won't have hardly any appetite left.  You won't want to eat at all!"  Then she turns and inserts herself into Lori's conversation with her dad.  She announces she doesn't like Obama.  Of this woman who refers to Bill O'Reilly as her "boyfriend", we already knew this.  "And it's not because of the color of his skin," she offers.  Lori looks at her blankly.  "It's not!" Lucy insists.  "I can tell by the look on your face you don't believe me, but it's true!"

We pay the check and I walk ahead of the others.  I watch from across the restaurant as Lori and her parents work their way haltingly through the crowded dining room.  Lucy stops at the table of an African-American family and coos at a beaming newborn peeking over her mother's shoulder.  She pauses to place a gentle, arthritic alabaster hand on the head of a little Latina girl waiting in line with her parents.  "What's your name?" Lucy asks sweetly.  The girl stares at her with big eyes.  "I see, you're not gonna tell me," Lucy laughs.  We leave.

After the good-byes, Lori and I slide into our car in silence.  It's like a pre-heated oven in there, hungrily awaiting a sheet of raw Carolina biscuits.  Lori opens the sun roof with the push of a button.  We start to drive.

"Don't worry now," I say in my best Paula Deen, "When you get to be my age, you won't want to eat at ALL!"

Lori snickers. 

"And I am NAWT a racist!" I continue.  "And just to prove you wrong, I'm gonna touch every brown baby in this place on my way out the door!"

Lori laughs so hard, no sound escapes her gaping mouth.  She pounds the steering wheel and tears start to roll down her cheeks.  She catches her breath and her laughter grinds out of her throat. 

We're motoring back home again, to our own tiny world, where things make sense to us.