Chubbo is a trigger word for me. That's a word that only my mother says (please tell me it's not in your vernacular), and before now I've only heard her apply it to me. She called me chubbo since I was 13 years old. Before I explore my chubbo-ness at 13 years old, I must say that Julia is not a chubbo. She's in the 5th percentile for weight, which means that of the girls her exact age, 95% of them weigh more than her. If she doesn't have a shirt on, she looks like a skeleton with a thin layer of skin. You can count the poor girl's ribs. I've had to use a binder clip to hold up her pants in a pinch (go multi-use office supplies!). I was at Target yesterday, and I was scoring $2 adjustable waist jeans. I met another mother who has a 35 pound son that is a year younger than Julia. Julia weighs 24 pounds, for the record. I don't know much, but what I do know is that my daughter is not overweight.
Of course I didn't correct my mother because I choose to not confront most people and instead healthily or unhealthily keep my rage inside and/or blog about it.
When my mother said the trigger word, I instantly felt 13 years old and as shameful as I did back then when she called me that trigger word.
For the most part, I don't try to be an oversensitive person. I try to be rational. I don't always achieve it, but I do try. However, I do seek out the approval of the people I love. If my husband called me fat or stupid, I'd be crushed. Same for if my good friends said it. And same for my mom. Yep, she's called me fat ("chubbo") and stupid many, many times in my life. The stupid thing I never fell for. It helped that every teacher I ever had (except for Mr. Wood in 9th grade PE) said I was smart. Deep down, I know I'm smart enough to get by. So I never really internalized my mother's judgment of me as "stupid." It also turned out that she called me stupid when I didn't do what she wanted. If I did what she wanted, I was smart. She may or may not resemble George Bush in that way. If you think and act the way she wants you to, you're "good." If you digress from what she wants, you're bad or "stupid."
The fat thing was always what I was more insecure about. Society says you have to be thin. I actually was thin until 8th grade. Then I gained 30 pounds in 6 months. It was an insane amount of weight gain in a short amount of time. It was all chest, boobs & hips. But those numbers don't lie. I literally gained 30 pounds in less than a school year. Flat chest to DD in a few months. And of course my mother noticed, and she labeled me a chubbo. I quickly labeled myself a chubbo too. Did anyone else? No. No one has ever called me fat/chubby except my mother and myself. I merely think other people are too polite to say something like that to your face.
My salvation became flannel. It was the early 1990s. I lived in Seattle, the grunge mecca of the early 1990s. Seattle loved flannel.
Personally I'm not a huge grunge fan. There's a few songs I like, but they are relatively few and far between. What I did and still like? That would be rap and hip hop.
You could say I was just riding the style wave at the time. I really wasn't. I was just lucky that the fad at the time was so darn good at hiding body parts. And I embraced it. Extra large men's flannel shirts combined with baggy jeans...I hid my chubbo body for a good 4 years under huge clothes. I was actually good at hiding my body. I was so good at it that other girls would look at me pitifully and say it had to suck to be completely flat-chested, which of course I wasn't, but I disguised it very well.
Despite wearing the teenage equivalent of a nun's habit, I did have boyfriends and guy friends. They never said much about my fashion choices, except that if I did choose to wear a skirt (let's say for a school dance or my job), they would say I looked nice. But never anything more than that. Just "nice."
What eventually got me out of my flannel rut was a college ex-boyfriend. He may or may not have been an ass, but he wasn't all bad -- he got me out of my flannel rut. He too was really into flannel and baggy jeans. So it's not like he objected to the style. He objected to the amount of baggy clothing I wore. He said I had a great body and needed to show it off more. Of course I responded that I'm fat. He insisted that I wasn't fat, and he said I should actually put on weight. That would inevitably start an argument; however, his stance wouldn't waver. And slowly with his encouragement I started ditching the flannel. It's not like I went wild and crazy and started wearing tight dresses. I just merely started substituting loose t-shirts instead of long-sleeved flannel shirts and slowly worked my way to a more normal-looking wardrobe. I can proudly say that I no longer own any flannel anymore.
Nowadays flannel is back "in." Unlike the early 1990s, baggy flannel isn't in. It's all about tight flannel and skinny jeans.
I'm so, so glad I grew up in the baggy flannel/baggy jeans era. It gave me an awesome disguise for many years that also disguised my self-esteem and body image issues.
I must work on ensuring that my mother and I do not give Julia any of these issues. That means I need to start heading off the Chubbo remarks from my mother pronto. Can I just say how I hate confrontation?
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