Yesterday, after work, I went round to visit a lady who because of her mobility can't get to church on her own. A gent at church had told me about her and 'suggested' (hehe) that she might like some company every now and then, so we fixed a convenient time for me to drop by (if this sounds excessively fussy, well, I live in a country where you don't just pop in unannounced).
Lovely lady. Very hospitable. Gave me lunch (simple soup and a sandwich). Lives a full life and is a captivating storyteller. Aaaaaand she shoots from the hip, let me tell you, including this gem:
Don't you ever have problems because of your...corpulence?
If it sounds hilarious in English, you should try it in the original language. Goodness me.
I know it sounds varying degrees of rude, and the salsa of two years ago would be pretty hurt by it. But my skin's a bit thicker now (actually, all of me's thicker! *badoomching*), and people here are pretty direct.
But still. It was a bit of a -moment on my part :P
guess that person forgot the rule: NEVER assume a woman is pregnant unless you can actually see the baby arriving, eh?
there was a doctor from roumania at emerg when i had to run nik, my oldest (severely underweight) daughter (i mean *severely*: four diagnoses of failure to thrive and when she was 14yrs old, her favourite pair of capris was the track pants she wore when she was 4!).
my second daughter, cait, 11yr old, because of the high-fat, high-calorie, high-protein diet we needed to follow to keep my oldest one at least not losing weight was "pleasingly plump" and i mean that in the truest sense. she was softly rounded and adorable, not so overweight that she had double chins or whatever.
there was a bowl of candy on the nurse's station and my second daughter's eyes lit right up - "oooo! can i have one?" i told her to ask the nurse but there wasn't one and the next one to come along was the aforementioned doctor.
cait asked the doctor very politely if she may have a candy, please. the doctor took a step back, looked her up, looked her down, and said "you? no." then she looked at nik and said "you? take two."
i felt like i'd been slapped in the face. cait didn't react so i thought maybe it had gone over her head but as we came out into the parking lot, she asked me, so sadly, "was that doctor saying i'm fat?"
it's not often Mama Bear comes out but she came out of hibernation with a vengeance that day! i phoned and wrote to the hospital and the doctor was put on probation (turns out mine wasn't the only complaint about her conduct) and she was required to attend sensitivity training, particularly as it applied to preteen girls.
side note: that doctor was the LAST - i mean the LAST - person to judge another by their size!
Last edited by threenorns; 03-15-2012 at 05:13 PM.
A professional colleague of my husband asked me when I was due and that was a slap in the face.
I stopped going to the gym here because of comments that people would make. I don't know about anyone else but when I went to the gym it was to workout and not really to make friends, and it seemed like there were lots of chatty people at this gym. The last straw was a woman who got on a machine beside me and started chatting with me and then out of no where told me "You are an inspiration to me, because if you can be in here at your weight working out like you do then Lord knows I can be". I now have gym equipment in my home that I use.
salsa chip, where I live we have direct people as well and funnily enough they are mostly all older people who do this. When I was younger (in high school) I dropped off a friend and ended up staying for a bit. Her step-grandma was very very very direct she just came right to the point when talking to me and said "You sure are fat aren't ya?" My face got red from what my friend said and I was embarrassed. I know she didn't mean anything by it but geez. My mom outlawed the word fat in our house so I grew up thinking that fat was a bad word could you imagine when I found out it really wasn't? Another time was when I was first married to my husband and like SmallSteps my grandma's "date" asked me to turn around and he promptly told me that I was going to have a boy because of the way my backside looked . Ummmm....my grandma told him I wasn't pregnant and I blushed and went to help my mom.
Don't you ever have problems because of your...corpulence?
If it sounds hilarious in English, you should try it in the original language. Goodness me.
I know it sounds varying degrees of rude, and the salsa of two years ago would be pretty hurt by it. But my skin's a bit thicker now (actually, all of me's thicker! *badoomching*), and people here are pretty direct.
But still. It was a bit of a -moment on my part :P
Anyone got any others to share?
Awesome! Good for you for not taking her comment too seriously.
At the moment, I can't think of any weight-related comments people have made to me. People say bizarre things in many areas of life, though. Your story reminded me of an encounter I had with a guy at my university. A Ph.D. candidate I had just met asked me what graduate program I was in, and when I told him what it was he replied, "oh, I'm sooo sorry." I had a moment, too. Yeah, it's absolutely horrible that I'm at a fully accredited and reasonably well-respected university (where I qualify for the in-state fee schedule), working toward a degree that should enable me to get a job doing exactly what I want to do, in a program that's accredited or endorsed by my future profession's major professional organizations. I'd much rather be paying out the nose for the same degree from a more prestigious university that will give me the same or less practical and theoretical experience, or enrolled in a "more traditional, less applied" Ph.D. program like his in which 90% of the students seem to be massively insecure and still talk about how many Advanced Placement courses they took in high school or how they'll "pull rank" on people in their program who weren't big enough fish in their undergraduate ponds (or just didn't care enough) to get into Phi Beta Kappa.
I, weirdly, usually react better to cracks or comments about my weight than I imagine I will.
My dad, when I was little, told me I'd grow up to be fat. Point blank. I was was 10, I think. I've worried about weight ever since then. He was right, though.
I was getting in a car in HS with friends and others to go to some hangout thing. I sat in the middle of the van. My friend's brother eyed me and said, "The heaviest objects in the car are supposed to go in the back." I came back with something witty, but it kinda hurt (he was right, but I wasn't THAT heavy - I was like 170-180).
Once on vacation, two friends and I got in a 2-3 person canoe. I was heavier then (190, I think). I sat in the middle to try and not tip us. On our way away from shore, a woman we know (who's known for not being nice anyway) saw us and laughed really hard. She then said, "You girls are riding really low. You're going to capsize. You might want to try without Lianna." And laughed again. Ouch. My friends didn't comment and we went anyway. But she was right - the others were 110 and 120 respectively. I had 80 lbs on them. Ugh.
When I was at uni, somewhere near my highest weight, I was hanging around in the student social area in between lectures with a couple of friends.
Out of nowhere, a girl sitting across the room (it was kind of empty), started having a go at us. Apparently she was trying to work, though why someone would go to the designated *social* area rather than the library to work, and then complain about people having a conversation, is beyond me.
It turned into a kind of argument, with this girl and my friends insulting each other. I stayed a bit quiet, since I was doing some reading and figured that the 2 guys I was with were well-equipped when it came to verbal relays. At one point, one of the guys, who is quite tall and incredibly skinny, joked, "Are you saying I'm fat?"
"Is your friend fat?" the girl replied. Oh, wow... like I'd never heard that before. Yeah, I'm fat, so what. She then started having a go at me, asking why I was dressed "like a lesbian" and that I should "take some pride in yourself, you let other girls down."
LOL! For one thing, I'm bisexual, so being thought of as a lesbian isn't an insult to me (not that it should be anyway); and how exactly can you dress like a sexual preference?
So, as I was about to leave for my tutorial, this girl said, "You know, it's a sad day for the sisterhood when girls don't stick up for each other. As a girl, you could have defended me against those guys."
Ummm.... right. So, you start having a go at us for no reason, have a go at ME for my weight and apparently dressing like a lesbian, as if being a lesbian is such a terrible thing to be, and when my friends stick up for themselves and me, I'm supposed to take YOUR side? Right.
As I was getting ready to leave from Moms house on Sunday, we were having a conversation about donating a kidney to Mom. My oldest sister asked if I had finally found out the BMI limit for donating. I told her the living donor coordinator told me they had never operated on anyone with a BMI of 40 or above. My brother looked at me and said "That sure to goodness counts you out then." I just looked at him dumfounded. He was laughing. He probably didn't mean to hurt me, but it really did. I am super emotional. I told him what my BMI is and that I need to lose at the very least 30 more lbs. He laughs and says "If that's your BMI, mine is 15!" My chin hit the floor. Was he seriously being just a jerk? Yes! He is not thin by any stretch of the imagination. He is around 230-250 lbs! I just got my stuff together and came home. I ended up crying the whole way home. How can people be so hurtful?!
Several years back I was working at a little shop in the mall that was a family business. I was one of the few employees that wasn't actually a member of the family, but I was often confused as the owner's third daughter since I was so close to them in age and even resembled one of them slightly. And when one of them got pregnant, word spread fast. I can't tell you how many times I got congratulated by the other mall employees as I walked down the halls; since I was one of the heavy-set ones, they assumed I had to be the one pregnant. Um, no . . . it was the other heavy-set one.
The real kicker was the day I was ordering a drink from one of the spots in the food court:
Mall Lady: "Congratulations!"
Me, feeling slightly annoyed at hearing this yet again: "... On what?"
Mall Lady continuing to be excited: "On being pregnant!"
Me trying to explain the situation: "Oh, I'm not the one that's pregnant, that's X."
Mall Lady looking down to my stomach, dumbfounded: "You mean you're not pregnant? Are you sure?"
Yeah . . . I was pretty sure I wasn't the pregnant one.
today i went grocery shopping and there was a lady in the store who's known around town for flapping her yap. "hey, i just tell it like it is" (which, btw, is politespeak for "i love being a rude, miserable sob").
so i was taking out the food from my cart. this was the list:
orange peppers
reduced-fat cottage cheese
vine-grown tomatoes
eggs
bread (14-grain)
asparagus
a box of organic field greens
a box of president's choice chocolatey-mint flavoured tea
a bag of frozen mixed fruit (president's choice "power mix": black cherries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and i can't remember what-all else)
a can of italian seasoned diced tomatoes
when i started piling a WHOLE lot of meat (*totally* scored at the discount meat bin!) on the belt, the hag made that "hmph!" noise - like she's saying "figures" - and the cashier, without moving or changing expression commented "yes, she certainly feeds her dog well - check this out: strip loin steak!" and showed her the package.
when i brought the cake out from under the cart, however, she actually said it out loud: "i KNEW it!"
and the cashier, again without moving or changing expression, said "do say happy birthday to saari for me, will you?"
it was nice not to have to deal with her but quite frankly, i think i'd've enjoyed kicking her in the shins more.
next time i see her scooter in the parking lot (it's not actually hers: it belonged to her late husband, as did the handicapped parking sticker she uses), i'm going to wedge a squeaker up under the fender.
Years ago, my neighbour an old German guy, as I was getting out of my car with my millionth bag of McDonald's & a drink in hand, he says "Stop eating that, you're way too fat"
OMG i wanted to die, and laugh at the same time! My quick-wit and knee jerk response to RIP HIM A NEW ONE had me almost asking what he did during the war, but I just hustled inside LOL
These are some doozies, ladies! People just don't think. I've been asked numerous times if I was pregnant - actually, I've been told I was pregnant - "When are you due?" - and when I give them a confused look and tell them I am not pregnant they look at me like, "Are you sure?" Luckily, I haven't been asked that question since last summer.
Bizarre comments
-moment on my part :P
. Ummmm....my grandma told him I wasn't pregnant and I blushed and went to help my mom.
