My daughter
loves school. She wakes up in the morning and takes a shower before going to
school because she believes in cleanliness. She read somewhere (or maybe I told
her) that a wet head from showering gives her brain 40% more capacity than a
dry head. Right at 8:15 a.m., she leaves for school with her sister and comes
back at 3:05 p.m. She does homework every night and, if she is asked to write
sentence, she will write a paragraph.
However, she recently
came home disappointed. She became easily angry and frustrated, resisted doing
homework, and said she would be very happy if she could take a day off from
school. As the semester went last spring, everyone was too busy to ask what
changed her.
When the summer
break began, I had a chance to take a walk with her alone during a beautiful,
warm evening. While we were enjoying the misty air from watered grass and
sprinklers around the neighborhood, Brenna said, “Some people are so lucky to
have a skinny body, blonde hair, and easily make friends. Life is easy for
them.” I asked her why she thought that way. Then she said, “People just don’t
like me. I never get invited to a birthday party while everyone in my class is
invited. If I asked the about that, they would say…’Oh Brenna, my home is small
so we cannot invite other people’. Or, ‘Oh Brenna, I am out of invitation cards.
I know they lied’.”
I stopped
walking, bent down on my knees so I could be the same height as her to look
into her eyes. I could see accumulated disappointment but no emotions, as if
she tried her best to appear tough and strong. I felt bad because I may have contributed
to that horror too.
After a while,
we sat down at the front steps to our house and continued the conversation. I
never had given myself time to visit her feelings and emotions. I took everyday life for
granted, while now I was shocked to find out how my little girl had been struggling
with her being for so long, and she had been so strong.
Brenna is tall
for her age. She is 4’7” and weighs 140 lbs., while what is considered “normal”
height and weight for an 8-year old girl, according to standard health charts,
is 3’8” and 55 lbs. Yes, she is tall and heavy compared to her classmates, so
she appears to be “not normal”. Some of her classmates deliberately said that
she does not belong there, while their fingers sometimes touch and try to
flatten Brenna’s tummy. Paradoxically, being big does not make her more visible
but it causes her to feel more invisible and disrespected, as if such an invisible
big body is available to be abused, mocked or bullied.
Brenna, my
8-year old dear daughter, is living in what Puwar (2004) calls an “out-of-place
body”, a body that does not belong to an 8-year old girl, a body that does not
belong to a classroom filled with “normal” bodies.
The body and the
classroom, both have never been neutral spaces, but constructed. The body has
always been constructed through social and political
practices as gendered (being male/female), racialized (white/black/Asian/Hispanic,
etc.), able/disabled, normal/abnormal, and so on; while space itself (like the
classroom) is imbued with history and meaning, where certain bodies are
naturally entitled to certain spaces and others are not. The clear example is
community segregation in city of Buffalo where East Side seems "naturally" to be inhabited by Black and/or
lower class communities, while West Side seems belong to the White or
middle-upper class. The white middle class will be perceived as out-of-place if living in East side of the city. So does a classroom under the school health
regime, a second grade classroom is entitled to students with “normal size” bodies for 8-year olds but not for the
tall and overweight student.
Of
course, we understand that the discourse of the body cannot be separated from
the discourse of power. Power here does not necessarily refer to a ruler but
also to the dominant regime and social/peer control (biopower) in the
classroom. In the Victorian era rules about the distribution of fat were
strictly defined for aesthetic reasons; while in the present time fat has
become an enemy that does not belong to the body (in other words, fat is an
out-of-place entity in the body) and is defined under the health regime through
the standard of the body mass index. The latter is still a little bit arbitrary
because weight which falls below the BMI standard is more acceptable than for those
whose weight falls above the BMI standard. In other words, being skinny or
underweight is acceptable, or even celebrated, in juxtaposition to the
overweight.
Don’t
get me wrong, I agree that we have to maintain a proper distribution and
quantity of fat in the body (our body needs fat at some level) but it is not
necessary to define health solely based on weight. What I don’t understand
is—why is it difficult to understand that some people may have different body
functions and genetic makeup that makes them bigger than others? In Brenna’s
case, she is a healthy child with no history of allergies or serious medical
problems. Her body may be “abnormal” according to the BMI but she is among the
few American kids who are free from medications.
Unfortunately,
her body has become the center of attention not only among her peers but also
for the school nurse who called me asking questions about the food I provided
at home and the fact that Brenna has become the object of NIH-funded medical
behavioral research. Of course, I felt offended when considering that I am one
of few mothers in the United States who still cooks from scratch and uses
natural herbs and ingredients for food which fulfills the need for protein,
carbs, and vitamins. Easy-to-fix food or canned vegetables, or ready to use
ginger or garlic in a jar is a big NO and microwaveable food is only for
emergency consumption. Because of that, the weight of my other two daughters is
normal.
If I
feel annoyed by the accusation that I am “ignorant” of the children’s diet, how
does Brenna feel when people think that her body is a result of her ignorance and
that she deserves to be mocked and bullied? I am glad that she expressed her
curiosity about being excluded from birthday parties. I am glad that she
addressed her concerns with me. I am also glad that she is not just being quiet
and accepting the bullying. I write this because adults, especially educators
in the school system, have a lot to learn from her experiences too.
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P.S: I posted the link to this article, and here are the responses I received:
