Chubby

I would like to excise the words "fat" and "thin" from the English language.

Flashback: As we drove home with my tiny newborn daughter pinkly in the back seat, I allowed myself a few moments of fear about raising a girl: body image and self esteem were right there at the top of the list. But then I got over it and enjoyed my beautiful tiny snuggly baby.

Last night, my daughter - my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter - pulled me close to her and asked me in the whisper she uses when she's being very serious, if she was a little bit too thin. She wanted to know if thin was good or fat was good.

My heart broke a tiny bit. Maybe more than a tiny bit.

"You are exactly perfect and beautiful," I told her, perhaps a bit too fiercely. "Remember that always. Exactly perfect."

And I told her that thin and fat are not bad and good things. Good is fresh air and exercise and being strong and healthy. Bad is, well, nothing, so long as you don't overdo it. At least, I tried to tell her, but she probably went off at a tangent about something else entirely before I'd said even a quarter of all the important things I have to say - that it's my duty as her mother and a woman who was a girl - to tell her.

I just have to keep telling her, don't I?

Legitimately a little chubby, perhaps.

*She learned the word "chubby" from the movie Tangled. I wish she hadn't.