(Write it quickly was the only parameter given me.)
The day after my 9th birthday, my father sat me down in the living room, heaved a leaden sigh, and began enumerating several points from a piece of paper:
1) that, unfortunately, it was now his job to tell me that over the last few months I had become “too chubby,”
2) that he and mom had agreed this was no longer simply baby fat, since I was, after all, nine,
3) that mother was deeply disappointed I no longer fit into “the proper size for my age,”
4) that, additionally, he’d seen how much chocolate mint monkey cake I’d eaten just the day before — my piece and my brother’s, with ice cream, and,
5) that, “therefore and in summary,” he was putting me on a supervised liquid diet and he was to be the supervisor and it was all because my parents loved me.
Were you eavesdropping on MY LIFE?!? I’ve always wondered if anyone else had something like that happen to them (although it wasn’t my dad, it was my mom, and she made me go to Weight Watchers meetings with her every week when I was nine).
Girl, if this is for real, we could prolly compare notes sometime. Sheesh.
I would like a piece of chocolate mint monkey cake. Thank you.
Yeah…I’m 27 and my mom still tries to do this to me. For real.
Horrifying.
I don’t even remember the day after my 9th birthday…probably spent part of it playing with the toy that I got the day before, and eating some of the leftover cake my mom baked for me.
Your dad would have gotten along with my folks just fine. I remember coming in from school to have an after school snack and my step mom walking into the kitchen, seeing me eating (nothing large or unusual, a normal after school snack) and saying, “I’m just going to go get the duct tape for you and we can just tape the food to your thighs. It’ll be faster.” I was like 12. She had always naturally been a size 0 and did not understand that my (perfectly average) size was not the product of massive overeating. It was a product of BEING HUMAN AND NOT HAVING A FREAKISH METABOLISM.
These days when some of those moments come up in conversation they just look at me in horror and say, “We did that? We SAID that? Oh my gosh. No wonder you had problems with food.”
So.. um. Yeah. I’m baking a chocolate mint monkey cake and we’re all gonna sit down and eat three slices each with big glasses of whole milk and discuss our parents’ misguided efforts to protect us from the potential sizes of own own asses.
Um. and if this is fictional… well written. Um. Hit a nerve. 😉 sorry!