I said, and said, and said those words.

no one will ever know

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

Is

Real

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.” 

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

- Take no shit

- Wear glitter (or whatever makes you happy)

- Take your meds

- Eat that extra sweet

- Make time to do what makes you happy

- Stop apologizing for being you. You are so wonderful, beautiful, and valuable. Realize that.

Those last four gifs are like:

“It’s a wonderful workshop you’re building here, Stark. Much nicer than the caves.” 

“Yeah, it’s a little slice of heaven. It’s yours, by the way.”

*Yinsen’s silent SAY WHAT NOW face*

“You want to come change the world with me, Yinsen?”

– Yinsen actually telling Rhodey that Tony’s being an asshat because he’s dying in IM2

– Yinsen and Bruce Banner working together in Avengers; Yinsen meeting Steve Rogers 

– Yinsen’s very pointed thoughts challenging both sides, speaking as an actual adult refugee of a totalitarian regime in CACW. “You cannot be the law whenever it suits you, Captain Rogers – Tony, you keep quiet, you also cannot allow the government to be the ones to arm themselves with your power.” 

– Yinsen and Vision

– Yinsen and Wanda

– Yinsen and Peter

– YINSEN AND SHURI 

“Get out of here Miles. You’re perfect and no one invited you.”

I’ve seen a lot of posts saying what triggers do and do not do, and many times, I’ve seen it written that triggers do not make you angry, that they’re more likely to cause strong anxiety, panic, numbness, etc.

But coming from someone whose triggers invoke a gut-wrenching fury: Triggers CAN make you angry. They can remind you of the unfairness, trauma, and hurt of the past, and a normal human reaction to things like that is anger.

It’s not wrong for triggers to make you angry, and you’re not in the wrong for feeling it. Anger is an emotion that rarely gets addressed in relation to trauma, and I think that needs to change.

Your anger in response to triggers is valid.

—

Nizar Qabbani

one of the greatest lies of patriarchy is claiming framing the father as the lifegiver