My 11-Year-Old Cousin Asked If I Think She’s Fat Last Weekend
We had the annual end-of-summer barbecue at my aunt and uncle’s house this past Saturday. The potato salad had way too much mustard, my uncle burned three out of the eight hamburgers so we ended up ordering extra hot dogs, and I left with three mosquito bites on my left ankle that still itch when I sit at my desk. Lila, my cousin, is 11, and she spent the first hour hiding out with me on the back porch, avoiding my great-aunt who kept asking her if she had a boyfriend yet. She finally dragged me up to her room to get away, said the air conditioning worked better up there anyway, which it does.
Her walls have that half-done thing 11-year-old girls’ rooms do, right? One full Olivia Rodrigo poster, two that are half peeled off because she decided she didn’t like them anymore but never got around to taking them all the way down. Her American Girl doll sits on the top shelf, half hidden behind a stack of graphic novels, like she’s not sure if she’s too old for it yet but doesn’t want to put her in storage. I sat down on her bean bag chair that’s all lumpy on one side, and she pulled up TikTok on her phone and leaned in close like we were sharing a state secret.
She pulled up this video of a 19-year-old influencer, all tan and tiny, doing a what I eat in a day. Half the stuff she ate was like, cucumber slices and a tablespoon of hummus. Lila flipped her phone around to me and goes, “Do you think I’m fatter than her?” I froze. I fumbled, said the first dumb thing that popped into my head: “Of course not, you’re totally healthy, you’re perfect.” She just rolled her eyes and flopped back onto her bed, hard enough that the lamp on her nightstand shook. “All the girls in my class say my hips stick out too much when I wear high waisted jeans. They said I need to stop eating so many cookies.”
I thought back to when I was 11. I was exactly her size, same hips, same soft belly from eating too many of my grandma’s cookies. I remember a girl in my gym class pointed out that my arms jiggled when I did jumping jacks, and I didn’t wear a sleeveless shirt for three years after that. Back then, you had to go looking for the bad stuff, right? I had to sneak onto a weird forum on MySpace after my mom went to bed to see all the stupid tips for cutting calories. Now? When I accidentally swiped past that video on Lila’s FYP, the next one was a 12-year-old girl doing a “waist check” in a crop top, talking about how she cut out soda to shrink her waist. It just… shows up. You don’t even have to look for it.
My aunt and uncle are good parents. They never diet in front of Lila, they never comment on anyone’s body, they take her hiking every other weekend and let her bake chocolate chip cookies whenever she wants. I can’t even get mad at them. Later that day, at the barbecue, Lila pushed her half-eaten hot dog around her plate and said she wasn’t hungry. My uncle laughed and joked, “What, you’re watching your figure now?” It was just a dumb dad joke, he didn’t mean anything by it. But Lila’s face just closed up, she pushed her plate away and said she was going back up to her room. I wanted to kick him under the table, but what do you do? It’s my uncle, he’s a good guy, he just doesn’t get it.
I was at Target on Monday, picking up laundry detergent, and I wandered through the tween section because I needed new socks. All the jeans are low-rise now, same as when I was in high school, but these are for 11-year-olds. I saw a whole display of “slimming shaping tank tops” that went down to the hips, sized 8-16, for kids. Who the hell needs a shaping tank top when they’re 11? What is even happening here.
I texted my aunt after the barbecue, said I wanted to talk to her about something, told her Lila’s been worrying a lot about how she looks. My aunt wrote back, “Oh it’s just a phase, all girls go through this, she’ll grow out of it.” And maybe she will. But my phase when I was 11 turned into 15 years of counting calories, of skipping meals before beach trips, of crying in fitting rooms because nothing fits right. I’m 26 now, I go to therapy for it, and I still catch myself sucking in my stomach before anyone takes my photo. Phases don’t just go away if you ignore them, they stick to your bones.
Lila texted me last night, actually. Sent me a photo of a pair of baggy jeans she saw on Instagram, and asked if I could take her to the mall next weekend. She said she doesn’t want to go with her mom because “mom always says I’m a smaller size than I think I am, but I know I’m not.” She said if I go with her, I’ll tell her the truth. Of course I said yes. What else am I supposed to say?
I don’t know what to do, honestly. I’m going to take her, I’ll tell her whatever she needs to hear, I’ll buy us matching churros from the food court after, I won’t say anything dumb like “you’re perfect the way you are” because I know that doesn’t help when you’re 11 and all you hear is the mean kids in your class repeating the garbage they’ve seen online. But I also know I can’t fix this. I can’t block all the bad videos on TikTok, I can’t tell every 11-year-old mean girl to shut up, I can’t take all that insecurity away before it sticks.
I just keep thinking about that drawing she gave me Saturday, of the two of us at the zoo last spring. She colored my hair pink because that’s my favorite color, even though my hair is actually dark brown. She added little rainbows around our ice cream cones. She’s still just a kid. She likes drawing and baking cookies and riding her bike to the park with her friends. She shouldn’t be worrying if her hips are too big yet. I just hope I’m enough, I guess. That’s all.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » My 11-Year-Old Cousin Asked If I Think She’s Fat Last Weekend