I GUESS I WAS AROUND six years old when I started to notice that I was a fat kid. Maybe notice is a strong word. I was in my body, so I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at it yet. I just took in that people said things about me that they didn’t say about other kids. I didn’t really get why other kids called me fatso or elephant, or why they felt they could talk about my body at all. My mom was fat. Most of her family was as well. My dad was thin but had a pretty big stomach that he blamed on American food. I thought I looked like my family, and that seemed right and fine with me. Also, it was hard to imagine that there was something wrong with my body when I knew that it was temporary. That’s what little kids do. They grow. Their bodies change.
Eventually, I noticed my own family starting to talk about my weight. I used to do this thing when I was in kindergarten. At the end of school, I would see my mom and run as fast as I could and plow into her for a hug. She would hug me back, and say, “Ugh! Gabu! You’re like a football player. You’re gonna knock me over.” I took this as a challenge, and every day I would try to plow into her harder because I thought it was a fun ritual we had. One day she told me that I was hurting her because I was too big. I remember that I didn’t get it at first and continued to do this to her for who knows how much longer. But then my brother started calling me fatso, hippo, and the names of many other large animals, like the kids at school did, and I started calling him an idiot and stupid on a daily basis as well. Siblings, right? I still didn’t really notice there was a problem until my father started suggesting that I lose weight so that he could show everyone what a pretty princess he had for a daughter. That’s when I realized that I was different from other kids, and that this affected the people around me. It had never occurred to me that I looked bad in a way that would make my father not want his friends to know he had a daughter. It took so long to realize that my body was different, but it took about two seconds to jump to that conclusion.
My mom said that when I was a baby I wouldn’t eat anything and stayed underweight. My doctor told her to put a few iron drops in my food. She says she put in the recommended amount and that it worked—too well—I haven’t stopped eating yet. Every time she tells me this story now, I’m like, “TRUE!” because this is, after all, a story of triumph. My mother also told me that her family blamed her for my weight. I thought it was completely unfair of her family—I knew that I was the one who ate too much. I was the one who really liked cookies and cakes and ice cream. It was one thing to bring shame to my dad, but my mom was wonderful and she could do no wrong. I was so mad at her family for making her feel bad about something she wasn’t in control of, and I felt terrible for being something wrong in her life.
When my parents separated, my mom started giving me diet pills. The purpose of diet pills is to suppress your appetite. But I’d learned that you can actually eat when you’re not hungry. Eating had nothing to do with appetite anymore. If I had a bad day at school, munching Chips Ahoy! cookies while watching cartoons was a great way to elevate my mood! If someone hurt my feelings by calling me fat, an excellent way to stop feeling hurt was to eat a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream! If I had a good day and everything was fine, that called for a celebration of both ice cream and cookies! I was now self-soothing and also rewarding myself with food. If I ever had a free moment with nothing fun to do, like do you even know how fun BBQ Pringles can be? Fun enough to stomp out the boredom! Eating had nothing to do with appetite, so those pills didn’t work.
The first year my parents separated, Ahmed and I went to live with my dad in Brooklyn for the summer. Ahmed wasn’t thin, but he was thinner than I was and often went outside to play football with his friends in the heat. He lost weight all summer long while I sat friendless in the house all day. Right before summer started, I’d accidentally shot myself in the foot while playing with a Roman candle on the stoop in front of my aunt Dorothy’s house and suffered a third-degree burn. I had to have my bandage changed every other day all summer. I watched TV all day long and ate all day long, too. Dad bought me SlimFast shakes to help me lose weight. I drank the shakes along with some chips while watching TV and feeling sorry for myself. That same summer, Dad took Ahmed to Senegal and France to visit family. He left me in Brooklyn with Tola and the new baby, Abdul. I don’t remember ever voicing this, but I thought he’d taken Ahmed and not me because he was ashamed of me. In all likelihood, he had enough money to take only one kid, and Ahmed was easier than I was. I asked too many questions and by then I’d already declared that I hated Senegal and never wanted to go back. Also, I had a steak-size hole in my foot. I’m sure Ibnou’s reasons had nothing to do with my weight, but I still thought I was too big for him to want to admit that he was my father.
That was the summer my panic attacks started. I remember crying and complaining that I couldn’t breathe. It’s easy to see now that with my parents’ separation, my new stepmom and brother, moving into my aunt Dorothy’s house, my fireworks accident, the antibiotics I had to take for my foot—along with the diet pills—life was out of control for me. At the same time, I had two parents whose lives had also changed dramatically. I don’t think they noticed what was happening to me. I was nine years old and my family was split in two and I was too fat for either family. Everything hurt and it hurt too deeply. I was all of a sudden really sensitive; if someone called me a name, I’d cry for hours. That fall, Ahmed and I went back to living with Mom and never tried that “summers with Dad” experiment again. Thank God. If I was going to be too fat for my family, I preferred to be with the parent who was also fat. Mom. Before their split, Dad was diagnosed with diabetes, and he immediately changed his eating habits and lost his big stomach. All of a sudden, he became rail thin with very little effort. I was so jealous. Mom had been a fat little girl like me, and I figured she understood me. Problem is, she was also a fat grown-up, and she didn’t want me eventually to be the same. Some days she called me names just as hurtful as the ones the kids in school used. She thought she was helping me. I’m sure she knew that she was making me hate her, too, but I think she probably thought it would be worth it if I lost weight. But I didn’t. I just hated her.