So the day the issue hit the newsstands, I logged into UrbanBaby, a popular parenting website with an extremely busy (and often venomous) message board. If anyone had an opinion about what I’d written—particularly a negative one—chances were good it would end up on UrbanBaby. The site’s boards were the ones I had frequented in my earlier years of motherhood, when I’d post or search to allay anxiety about my children’s mild ailments or school enrollments. The site could be immensely and immediately helpful.
It could also be petty and spiteful, its anonymity releasing moms from the social pressure and moral filter that usually curbed the frank expression of judgments about other people’s parenting.
I steeled myself and poked around a bit but found nothing about my article. Hm. Maybe no one really cared.
But within a day or so, it became clear that people did care. A friend said her buddy at the Today show wanted to book me for an appearance. My mother called to let me know that someone from Good Morning America had phoned her at home, hoping to get in touch with me. An email from a staffer at 20/20 found its way to my husband’s in-box at work. ABC News hand-delivered a letter to my apartment building.
It was somewhat exciting, very disconcerting, and utterly bizarre. While I thought that what I’d written was worth talking about, this response was unexpected. I look back on the flurry of activity with a bit of disbelief now. I hadn’t imagined that anyone would ask me to speak publicly about this issue. Other than what I’d written in my article, I didn’t know what to say. I was totally unprepared for the attention. As someone who watches a lot of TV, I knew that responding to media requests when not fully prepared to speak was a recipe for disaster. I did not return any of the calls.
The interest from these TV shows was but a mild harbinger of the brewing firestorm. And if the entirely polite and respectful overtures from this handful of producers freaked me out, you can imagine how thrown I was by the nature of the onslaught I was about to experience.
Mentions of my article started popping up online. The message-board debates, as many online do, were levelheaded at first, then devolved into the ridiculous and vitriolic. While the first bunch of comments I read contained sensible criticisms about my methods (feeding Bea meager packs of processed snack foods, snatching a hot chocolate out of her hands at Starbucks), the discussion soon turned into allegations of insanity and abuse, complete with a recommendation that Child Protective Services be called on Bea’s behalf.
While I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the maliciousness of the discourse my article generated—this was the Internet age, after all—it felt surprisingly painful to read anonymous attacks on me and my parenting. I snapped my laptop shut. I was not going to read any more. I could be satisfied that my article was being talked about. There was no need to read the venom.
But calls, emails, and texts from my friends made ducking the maelstrom impossible. They were worried about me, checking in to see if I was okay. I learned that bloggers were devoting entire articles to me, and the comments on those articles numbered in the hundreds, most negative.
Just to get a tiny sense of what was going on, I read one such article, on a prominent blog. It was wrenching. I was called, among other things, “abrasive,” “irrational,” and “truly disgusting.” Those are the printable epithets. The moments that had caused me self-doubt—now immortalized in Vogue’s pages—were excerpted as clear evidence of my unambiguously awful parenting. My admissions about my teenage food and weight struggles were invoked as proof that I was projecting my own neurotic issues onto Bea. I was accused of having superficial motivations for forcing Bea to be “skinny,” and that getting myself a byline and photo in Vogue was one of them.
I felt physically sick. I had written an unsparingly honest article that I’d thought people could relate to. But apparently I had inadvertently outed myself as a selfish, cruel mother. It wasn’t as if I had been misrepresented or misquoted. I had written the article myself. Those were my own words. And virtually everyone who read them seemed convinced I was despicable.
According to friends monitoring the situation, our nutrition doctor was being widely quoted in response to my article. She’d told the blog Jezebel that she “wasn’t thrilled” with the way my piece in Vogue depicted her program. She criticized me for ignoring the “emotional issues” involved, and disclosed that I had given up on our appointments after a few months. She conjectured that, had we stayed under her care, “the end result would have been more than just weight loss: [we]’d have weight loss and a happy child.”
I understood that she kind of had to throw me under the bus, lest the tsunami of anger cast her as an accessory to the crime. Still, I wasn’t sure why she needed to conjecture about the emotional well-being of a child she had personally treated only a handful of times and hadn’t seen in over a year. But most of her remarks seemed to just be setting the record straight about the tenets of her program.
When Jeff read some of the coverage, he shrugged it off. “It’s just some stupid bloggers,” he said. “Who cares?”
I knew he was being intentionally flippant. When you’re married to someone as prone to stress and self-flagellation as I am, it helps to act as though things are no big deal, to try to ratchet down the emotional response level a few notches. It meant an enormous amount that Jeff was on my side when external voices were so resoundingly against me. He remained so even when we had to scramble to remove all online traces of our kids after a British tabloid published a photo of our family that they’d pulled off his Facebook page.
“You know why you’re doing this, and we’ve talked about it,” he reminded me in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep from all the stress. “This is for Bea. You know what you’ve achieved together, who she is, and who you are. That’s what you have to hold on to.”
But these bloggers, and the chorus of commentators who had not necessarily read the full text of my article, were confirming my worst fears throughout this process: I was crazy, and now I had made my daughter crazy. Food, dieting, and weight were eternal struggles for me, and now they would be for her. While I had naively hoped I could get beyond my own baggage and help Bea get healthy, doing so had backfired, and now I had screwed her up for life. She would have been better off if I had left her alone—or if she had had a better, issue-free mother to shepherd her through the process.
Jeff, reassured me that we’d done the right thing, and that while people could say what they wanted, they were not fit to judge unless they knew us, knew Bea, or had successfully ushered their own obese children into health while preserving their self-esteem and happiness.
He’d have to have similar conversations with me many times over the next few days as I processed what was going on. He’d remind me that Bea was a very happy child. He pointed out that one of the major reasons I’d written my article was to address the very kinds of reactions that the article was getting: attacks on a regular person trying her best to deal with the colossal challenge of helping an obese child lose weight.
Most of all, he felt that what people were responding to was not even a weight issue but a parenting issue. People did not want to accept the possibility that a good mother could publicly admit to the bad parenting moments I’d laid bare without being crucified. Everyone had acted the way I did at one time or another, he said. Few are willing to confess to it. And my doing so had struck a nerve at least as great as one about food and weight and little girls.
We all want to do what’s best for our offspring, but that means different things for different children, and to different parents. Do we want to maximize our kids’ joy? Keep them as safe as possible? Push them as hard as we can to help them reach their fullest potential? No matter how far you’re willing to go for your child, you can’t give them everything. As the response to my article had clearly illustrated, one’s definition of what’s “best” is inevitably going to run counter to someone else’s.
Over the next few days, the response to my
article intensified as media outlets picked up on the online backlash. My home answering machine filled up with messages from CNN, People, the Toronto Star, Headline News, Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, Showbiz Tonight, even the Times of London.
One of the few calls I took was from one of my aunts. She is a brilliant woman, a successful doctor, a devoted wife, and mother to three grown children. She is fun and interesting and funny. She is also brutally honest with everyone, sometimes to the point of insult. She cannot go shopping or even attend one of her grandchildren’s birthday parties without getting into an argument with somebody.
She harangued her children throughout their childhoods in the interest of pushing them to be the best they could be. In one infamous incident, she so badgered her middle child in the waiting room of a doctor’s office that a stranger passed the child a note with a phone number, offering help if she wanted to escape (I’m not telling tales out of school; my aunt will recount this story with a laugh).
But anyone who would, based on casual observation, consider my aunt to be a bad mother would be utterly wrong. She gave her kids such vast stores of unconditional love, respect, and support that none of them ever doubted her absolute—and often embarrassing—adoration, coupled though it sometimes was with yelling. All three of her children grew to be happy, healthy, and successful. They are sensitive, kind adults with great families of their own, and, for the record, they could not love their mother more.
I love her, too. Because even though she would vocally critique my appearance, disapprove of my boyfriends, or belittle my professional endeavors if that was how she saw things, she was doing it only because she thought I’d benefit from hearing her opinions. She’d also be the loudest in her praise when she felt I looked great, had met the right guy, or was doing well at work. And I never doubted that she loved me or wanted the best for me.
She called me that day to tell me I had to be more like her.
“Don’t listen to anyone,” she said. “You did the right thing. You have to be like me—just be confident no matter what. Because you know that your kids are the best and they’re happy. No one can tell you otherwise.”
I don’t share my aunt’s natural assurance or moxie, but in that moment (and in many more since) I wished that I did. Because while it was easy for others to look at what I wrote and paint me as an abrasive, cold, superficial person, I felt my actions were being misunderstood. Still, being a public villain is not an enviable ride. And I wanted the controversy to just go away.
I realized, too late, that by appearing in Vogue, I had unwittingly presented myself as some kind of fancy Manhattan mom. That erroneous supposition was picked up and promulgated on the Internet until even legitimate media outlets described me as “socialite Dara-Lynn Weiss,” as though it were just a plain fact. It shouldn’t have mattered, but I think it affected how people responded to my article. They viewed me as an unrelatable society woman whose life and decisions were nothing like their own. It made my story easier to process. By avoiding the mundane reality of the situation, they didn’t have to confront the question of what they would do in my position.
On the other hand, maybe I’m not giving my critics enough credit. Perhaps they didn’t care who I was or what my motivations were. I knew from personal experience that to many people, the idea of putting a child on a strict diet and unyieldingly keeping her on it was abhorrent. It didn’t matter what kind of person I was; doing what I did made me a bad mother.
I also woke up to the fact that Vogue is not Parade magazine. Vogue is a periodical that is—as The New York Times described it in an article about my essay—“possibly the spiritual home of the eating disorder.” I’d underestimated how powerful and, to some women, dangerous that particular venue was for my particular story.
The support of my friends, family, and especially Jeff helped give me clarity amid the craziness. They gave me the courage to act around Bea and David as though everything were normal. While I was deeply shaken, I didn’t want the kids to know about it. When they overheard conversations I was having about the backlash and asked what was going on, I blandly explained that some woman wrote an article about my article and said that she thought I was too tough on Bea. We hoped we could leave it at that.
I was terrified, though, that the controversy had already grown too big and that Bea was going to be the target of comments at school. We’d have to wait until she went back the following Monday to find out. I berated myself for failing to heed the advice to leave Bea out of the photo. I felt stupid for not thinking of using a fake name for myself. If only I hadn’t been so naive about the potential reaction!
In the meantime, I couldn’t entirely avoid the headlines. I received an email inviting me to my friend’s new baby’s bris, and at the bottom, fed in through some Yahoo! News technology, was a link to an article: “A woman uses dramatic methods to get her seven-year-old to lose weight before a magazine photo shoot.” Ugh.
A later Google search revealed a smattering of articles in my defense, including ones on sites as prominent as Time magazine’s Ideas blog and Fox News. But of course, these supporters were drowned out by my critics. More than 100 articles had been written about my essay, hundreds more blogs had posted about those articles, and those presumably generated thousands of reader comments.
I don’t say proudly that the online controversy was of international proportions. Articles were written about me in Poland, India, Italy, France, England, Canada, Germany, Lithuania, Brazil, Ireland, Australia, and Hong Kong, and they all agreed I was pretty disgusting. I don’t know German, but I can take a guess as to what the headline “Monster-Mutter No. 1” means.
But people who were actually touched by this problem personally went out of their way to contact me to express their support. Women and men who have struggled with their weight all their lives commended me for getting involved with Bea’s problem early. People with siblings who battled eating disorders shared their suspicion that the situation might have been avoided if their parents had been willing to talk about weight. Several mothers of overweight adults told me their grown-up children blame them for letting them grow up fat and not doing anything about it. A woman with a young overweight child confided that she identified with my feelings of awkwardness and being judged in dealing with the issue.
Those conversations were the most reassuring to me, because these were the people who had lived this problem, not just judged it from afar.
My journey had been beset by doubts, and the backlash to my article had reinforced those fears. But I slowly began to think that, just maybe, I had done the right thing after all. The more closely I considered the criticisms against me, the less validity I felt they had.
The harshest allegations were that I “fat-shamed” and “publicly humiliated” Bea. I recoiled from the accusation but struggled to understand what people were referring to. When exactly did I fat-shame and publicly humiliate her? By getting testy about the hot chocolate at Starbucks? Was it the enforcement of her dietary restrictions in public? What about all the parents of healthy-weight kids who do that? Are they exempt from censure because their kids aren’t fat? Did any policing of Bea’s food intake become “public humiliation” just because the result I was seeking was not just instilling generally good eating habits but managing her weight?
Maybe if Bea hadn’t been lying on her stomach in one Vogue shot and obscured by a table in the other, people would have realized that the goal I achieved was not to make her “skinny” or “slender” or “thin,” which is how various journalists described her, although those words do not appear once in my article. In fact, at both the time of the article’s writing and its publication, she was still technically in the “overweight” category. Does that make people feel better?
Some friends ventured that perhaps my own weight affected how readers viewed my plight. That maybe some readers inferred I was disappointed that my daughter didn’t look like me. Perhaps if I’d been visibly overweight or discussed my husband’s fam
ily history with obesity in greater detail, I would have appeared more sympathetic. Or in that case would my insistence on seeing to it that Bea didn’t end up like us seem hypocritical? I could easily imagine being excoriated for forcing my daughter to lose weight while allowing myself or my husband to be heavy. But the converse didn’t seem to satisfy people, either.
Another major source of rancor was that I went public with our story at all. People felt that my writing about Bea’s weight was embarrassing to her. This is a private issue, they railed, and should have remained so. To me, such concerns reveal a misunderstanding of how inherently public it is to deal with being overweight. Obesity is an excruciatingly obvious disease. Having fought her way to a healthy weight, I’m not sure what these critics believed Bea should feel embarrassed about.
My favorite criticism was that I vocally disapproved of her food choices and refused her food even when she complained of being hungry. Are you kidding me? Of course I did that! When more exercise and a healthy diet fail to make a difference, how else can one address obesity other than by reducing an overeater’s food intake?
Finally, just about every critic used one or more of the following adjectives to describe me: “tone-deaf,” “obsessive,” “strict,” “abrasive.” And to those critics, I say: guilty as charged.
But that doesn’t mean what I put Bea through was cruel or wrong. What if the difference between me and the millions of mothers who haven’t yet curbed their children’s obesity is the very actions that people were so shocked by: the inflexibility, the harshness? Well, you could argue that in that case, I should have let her be. Fighting a child’s obesity is not worth making her miserable. Health is not just about the body, it’s also about the mind.
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