Loco Parentis: Living Large

My dad smiled indulgently. Then he turned and asked me, “How can two kids be so different?” But it wasn’t the kids who were different: It was the way he — and everyone else — made them feel.

There are moms and dads who actually envy me because of my big son. Ask any red-blooded American boy if he’d rather be built like Jake or like Beck, and guess which he’ll say? I see those boys now and then — at the Y, at the grocery store — standing beside Jake, staring up at him in awestruck admiration, basking in his bigness, clearly hoping that they, too, will be huge someday. And it still seems strange and unnatural to me — as if Michelle Phillips longed to be Mama Cass.

It makes Marcy furious. She watches her brother go for thirds on spaghetti with her mouth set tight: “Aren’t you going to say something to him?” I understand her rage. Where’s the celebration of size and strength in women? Marcy’s powerful, too; she goes to the gym every single day. She works like a dog to keep her weight in check, while Jake gets a free pass to chow down. I’m sorry for her. I’ve stood in her sneakers all my life. But I’m also weirdly fascinated by Jake’s size, and by the world’s reaction to it. Marcy gave him a DICKLENBURG COLLEGE hoodie for Christmas, and he loves to wear it, because strangers ask him: “Do you play football for Dicklenburg?” They assume the best of him — Hardworking athlete! — and not the worst: Out-of-control pig! And a little of that fairy dust sprinkles down in a wider circle. He didn’t get those calves from Doug, dammit. He got them from me.


WHEN I WAS a kid and my family spent two weeks of every summer in Wildwood, there was a guy on the Boardwalk who would guess your weight for a quarter. He had a scale, and after he guessed, you stepped onto it. If he was within 10 pounds, you lost. But if he was more than 10 pounds off, you won a stuffed-animal prize. Not long ago, I reminisced to Marcy about the guess-your-weight man, and she recoiled in horror: “You got weighed in public? In front of everyone?”