Loco Parentis: Living Large

JAKE GOT BIG like a beanstalk, like a fairy-tale mushroom, big like Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Jake got big overnight, went from boy to man in a twinkling, so quickly that I really thought if I sat by his bed, I could see him grow. His feet and hands turned massive. His forearms became immense. He hit his head on the ceiling pipes every time he went down to the basement.

And he didn’t show any signs of stopping. One year, he hit the 200-pound hash mark on the doctor’s scale; was it the very next visit he was 250? He loomed larger than life, took up entire rooms, was Brobdingnagian. I took care to make our already-pretty-healthy fridge and cabinets even more spartan. But Jake found sustenance somewhere, and continued to grow. And it’s not like he was sedentary. He was playing soccer, was in the high-school marching band, threw shot put and javelin for the track team.

His school’s new football coach spotted him lifting in the gym and seduced him away from soccer. “I’m going to be a lineman,” Jake told me.

“What does a lineman do?”

“Pushes people out of the way.”

At his first game, I opened the program I’d bought and almost fainted. It listed every player’s height and weight. If Marcy’s hockey or lacrosse teams had listed players’ weights, they’d never have fielded a full contingent. Jake, I was horrified to see, was bigger than any other kid on his team. But then …

“See his calves?” a mom sitting near me said happily to another mom, pointing to her son on the sideline. “He’s got those good, thick calves.” I looked. Her son’s calves were nothing compared to Jake’s.

I felt a frisson of … could it be pride? Pride in bigness, in size? The concept was as unnatural as showing off one’s serial-killer son. Fat is bad. Poundage is poison. Girth is a source of shame. My thick calves had meant buying jeans in the Chubby Girls section at Sears when I was growing up, and never once being able to fit into a cute pair of boots.

But things were different for Jake, now that his massiveness had been deemed acceptable — nay, advantageous. To his football buddies, size still meant strength. The team booster club even fed them, stoked them with pizza and hoagies before away games, served breakfast — at seven a.m.! — to prep them for the big Thanksgiving Day rivalry. These boys were like foie gras geese. They celebrated wins with half-price appetizer nights at Applebee’s. They mourned losses the same way.