Monday, August 4, 2014

He Just Doesn't Get It

Tom likes to tease Alyssa about being, in his words, a moose. He has also put limits on her snacking in the evening.

I’ve bitten my tongue and tried not to interfere as long as he makes his limits about health and not about weight.

Alyssa is not fat. She doesn’t think she’s fat and I don’t want her to start thinking about her weight at all. She’s healthy, she’s tall, she’s strong.

I tried to explain to Tom on Sunday morning that he needs to be really careful about his teasing and his food issues. He got annoyed, telling me that he never mentions weight or tells her she’s fat. He just wants to limit the amount of junk food she eats in the evenings after dinner.

I agreed with him that she loves her junk in the evenings and that we need to help her eat better for nutritional reasons but I also tried to explain to him that girls are sensitive. We take things differently than they’re meant.

I told him that I didn’t want either of our daughters to ever hate their bodies as much as I hate mine.

I think I must have gotten teary as I said this because he replied, “Well, you don’t have to cry about it.”

Ugh! Ass.

Seriously, why are guys such jerks sometimes? I wanted him to realize that the tears were a sign of how important this subject is and how hard it is to overcome body image issues once they’ve taken root in a girl’s head.

A little later, he said off-handedly, “You know you shouldn’t hate yourself, right?”

Duh.

I replied, “Yes, I know that. But knowing it doesn’t actually take away the hate.”

He said, “Well, most people I know have things about their bodies that they’d like to change.” He then poked his stomach out and patted it. The man has to exert serious energy to have enough of a stomach to pat. Jerk.

“Not the same thing,” I told him. “Wanting to change things and feeling a seething hatred of yourself are very different things. And when you have to force your stupid stomach out to make a point, you have no room to talk.”

He laughed because he knows I’m right.

But he doesn’t really get it. This is a man who can lose fifteen pounds in two weeks by giving up ice cream and bread. Then he can add bread back in and be just fine. He will never get it.

But I won’t stop trying to explain it to him because we have daughters and I don’t want what he considers teasing to give them issues they’ll be dealing with for the rest of their lives.

I owe that to my beautiful, healthy, smart, kind, loving girls. And he owes it to them to try to understand and even empathize even if he never really gets it.

1 comment:

Julie said...

Oh man! Riley is so tiny but we limit her junk food as well. I am totally picking up what you are dropping off. How do we encourage them to be healthy without doing any mental damage?