When adults call children fat

“Okay, you gotta lose fifteen pounds,” Jessica Simpson’s new agent told her the minute she signed her first contract.

“What?” She responded, not really understanding. She was, by all accounts, tiny: five-foot-three and weighing 118 pounds.

She was also just 17.

“I think you’re going to have to lose fifteen pounds,” the agent said. “Maybe ten. Because that’s the image you want to have. That’s what it will take to be Jessica Simpson.”

That’s when Jessica looked at her parents. There, there in that Sony board room on the 32 floor of a big music office, a young and slightly delicate and wanting-only-to-sing Jessica turned to her mom and dad.

And her parents, the people that were meant to guide her?

They said nothing.

It changed everything, Jessica would later write in her candid memoir, Open Book.

“It was as if he tied my value as an artist to my weight right there, like a rock,” she explains.

“I immediately went on an extremely strict diet, and started taking diet pills, which I would do for the next 20 years.”

At the time, it’s what “we thought we had to do,” Jessica continues.

“I say ‘we’, because I was about to become the family business, and there was a lot of pressure on being what the label needed me to be…”

“My dad,” Jessica writes with forgiveness, with softness, “didn’t know when to say no.”

I finished reading Jessica Simpson’s Open Book last week.

One thing stayed with me:

Not the fame.
Not the mess with John Mayer.
Not even the alcohol addiction sipped from glitter cups.

It was how often Jessica’s parents appeared in the story when her body did.

They were there when a furious man pulled Jessica aside at a church convention, hissing that her body with her bre*sts was ‘too sinful’ for her to sing.

They were there when she began taking diet pills and eating only slices of microwaved turkey with cheese.

They were there when she stripped off her clothes to show the soft sag of her postpartum stomach, right before she headed into a mini tummy tuck.

And while Jessica doesn’t say this — she is so gentle in her writing, so forgiving — I can’t help but to think that maybe,

Just maybe,
They weren’t there in the ways that a young girl
Desperately needed them to be.

They weren’t really there at all.

My mom never commented on my weight.

Except, for once, when she did.

She was sat on her bed. In those days, she was always sitting or laying, her oxygen machine nearby. Her face was swollen from pills. But her eyes, they were as sharp and mischievous as ever, bright and blue and following me as I walked around the room.

“Danae,” She said in one of my pauses. “I gotta say somethin’. You’re gettin’ heavier. You know?” Her eyebrow arched and mouth twitched into a half-smile.

I froze. I’d noticed it too, of course I’d noticed, but it wasn’t all that important. I was finding my way and my feet at school. And somewhere among the late-night pizzas and Tuesday Taco runs, I’d carved a bit of freedom between myself and my mom’s illness.

“All that dorm food probably,” she continued with a shrug.

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Probably.”

In my memory of this moment, time stutters and skips, like a film reel gone wrong.

The next scene has me in a bathroom, staring down at a toilet. Oil floated on top. Good, I thought. Disgusting, but good. I’d started taking new diet pills that flushed fat from my system, sliding it out in big slippery bursts.

I bought them after my mom’s casual, unthinking comment.

Just a few months later, my little diet would become a full-blown eating disorder.

We learn how to feel about our bodies not from influencers, magazines, or strangers online — at least not at first.

We learn from the people we love the most.

We learn from our parents.

And maybe, maybe that awareness
Can become our key to changing
What comes next.

Maybe children don’t remember these little conversations.
Or maybe they remember them forever.

Rory is still little.

She’s started putting on frilly dresses and layering jewelry and spinning in front of me.

“Mama,” she asks. “Mama am I so fancy? Mama am I pretty?”

I feel the weight of the world in those moments.

I think about the offhanded comments made by different adults towards my body throughout my life (like that teacher when I was only seven, painting costume makeup on my face. “My, you really do have little lips, don’t you?”). I think about my mom, that one time in the bedroom, and how it led to a spiral. I think about Jessica, writing years later about an industry desperate to eat her alive and parents who didn’t know what to do.

I think about all the little girls
Wanting only to be loved,
And somehow already believing it’s tied
To being pretty.

“You are so sparkly,” I answer.

“You’re also smart and silly and strong. Can we imagine some other words —” but by then my daughter’s spinning away, off to change outfits and shove stickers on her nails.

And I worry I’m overthinking it all.

I’m still new to parenthood.

I know I’ll get things wrong — my gosh, I already have.

But if there’s one thing Jessica’s story taught me this week,
It’s that our children are listening long before we realize they’re learning.

They hear all the things we say.

They hear all the things we don’t.

Once, Jessica notes, her daughter worried that bread would make her six-year-old self fat.

“It was a wake up call,” Jessica continues.

“I want her to feel safe enough to love herself and the body God gave her. Not waste the time I did being cruel to myself.”

So she wrote Open Book.

As for me, I’m still working on the book,
And the healing,
But for now, I know this:

I want my daughter to remember something that took me decades to learn — that no matter how she shows up today, or tomorrow or the day after that, she is worthy. Simply by existing, by being here, she is enough.

If anyone ever makes her question it, I want her to know that mama will be there to scoop her up and hold her close and whisper into her ears over and over that she is a force to behold.

She is magnificent, in exactly the body and shape she has right now.

She is deserving of love.

And my god, my god,
She will always have it,
Unconditionally, endlessly,
Right here,
Right here with me.

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