Loco Parentis: Living Large

“Doesn’t Coach ever worry that you guys are eating too much?” I asked.

Jake gave me a withering look. “When you work as hard as we do, you have to stoke the engine.” Food as fuel: It was the connection I’d always wanted my kids to make. But sometimes I suspected Jake took up football just for the excuse it gave him to cram in calories.

It could be I was jealous, though.  


WHEN I LOOK at my son, at his huge head and enormous arms, I can’t help wondering: If he quits football, what will happen to all that him? To his neck, which has acquired those signature lineman ripples? To his broad barrel chest? I ask my husband Doug, who’s built like a whippet and works out like a madman.

“It will turn to fat,” he tells me.

“But it’s muscle now?”

“It’s muscle now.”

“Do you think he’s … on steroids?”

He shoots me an amused glance. “No. Do you?”

“It’s just that he got so big,” I try to explain.

“That’s what teenage boys do.”

Well, yeah. But teenage girls do, too, some of them, and get slapped down for it in a million different ways. I can still feel the mortification that consumed me when I was in eighth grade and wildly in love with Danny Taylor, and Danny Taylor told me to come around when I lost 20 pounds. Even at 13, he knew what would hurt the most.

Jake doesn’t walk the way a big girl does, with shoulders hunched and neck bent, trying to be invisible. He walks like a jock, with the side-to-side swagger that big athletes share. He doesn’t perch gingerly in unfamiliar chairs, worried they might not hold him, like I do. He doesn’t squash himself in at a table in a restaurant, terrified lest he be perceived as taking up too much room. He slams himself into seats, sprawls across sofas, drapes himself over diner booths, uses his avoirdupois to assert himself: Jake is here. I envy his ease with his size, so unlike my constant shamed self-consciousness. I wonder what it would be like to stride in his size 15 Nikes for a day.


LAST SUMMER, a few months before my dad died, Marcy and I went to visit him. As she settled in beside him on his sofa, he observed, with cruel accuracy, “You look like you’re putting on some weight.” Marcy burst into tears and ran out of the room. I wanted to run as well, from a rush of old memories: Dad tucking a slim sister on either side of me before snapping the picture for our Christmas card. Dad frowning at me at Thanksgiving dinner, scolding “Not so much pie!” in front of everyone. Dad offering to pay me a hundred bucks if I’d just lose 25 pounds … He was a kind man, a good man, but he didn’t understand about girls and size and shame. Though he did realize something was amiss, at least: On our next visit, he confided to me that he’d told a number of female friends about his remark to Marcy, and that every last one of them upbraided him for being a heartless pig. Jake happened to be along on this visit, and Dad took the opportunity to ask him: “So, what do you weigh these days?”

“Three hundred 20,” Jake said.