Solo moms don't need to "get back out there"
And fat ones don't need to lose weight. But we all need to make some changes.
Aubrey Gordon’s book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, blew my mind. It’s permanently changed how I see fat people, and our culture, and even my own physical being, a human who has complained at length about how hard it is to find clothes that flatter her pillowy, pear-shaped size-12 body. All my friends and family have Aubrey Gordon to thank for never having to listen to this nonsense from me ever again. They, and all of you, should run out and read her books and listen to her podcast immediately.
But also. While Aubrey Gordon was busy rewiring my brain around anti-fat bias, and bringing me to tears with her personal story, she also got me thinking about other forms of bias in our society—ones that I, a white, cisgender, middleclass-ish person, have internalized and promoted, however unwittingly. The more I read, the more I began to see parallels between single parenthood and fatness. I know, I know. Not the same, at all. Definitely not suggesting that. But hear me out.
Single motherhood, like fatness, is widely portrayed as a choice, the consequence of a long string of poor decisions, both in fiction and the media. You married the “wrong” person. You couldn’t make your marriage “work.” You made a baby with someone who didn’t want one. Perhaps one “mistake”—the wrong dress, the one drink too many, the forgotten pill—led to another. Or maybe you became a parent on purpose, on your own, because you couldn’t manage to find a solid partner during your prime reproductive years. You got yourself into this mess, and now you can get yourself out, is generally the moral of these stories. Either you become that exceptional single mom who pulls herself up by the bra straps and raises kids who later credit you for their “success”, or you “get back out there” and find a mate.
Widows with kids, like fat people whose weight is a direct consequence of a congenital, medical condition, are the exception to this general rule; our situations are “not our fault”, and therefore, instead of being judged, we are pitied. People tell us that they are so sorry. They didn’t know. And of course they didn’t know. We don’t go around wearing long black dresses, the way we did in Victorian times. Widows with kids are indistinguishable from any other single mothers, the ones who “got that way” because of their failure to have a “healthy” partnership.
People who say “I just want you to be happy,” are genuinely interested in our well-being, just like those who tell fat people, “I just want you to be healthy.” And I appreciate your intentions. I do. But what I need you to know is, single parents are not necessarily unhappy because we’re single parents. We don’t need to date, just as fat people don’t need to diet. Dating, like dieting, is a generally miserable process and the results aren’t exactly guaranteed. Actually, a lot of the time, it can be physically and emotionally harmful.
A fad diet might result in dramatic weight loss in the short term, just as a whirlwind courtship might result in marriage, and everyone will be there to celebrate, to tell you how great you look, how happy you must be. But relatively few couples can maintain a genuinely happy, healthy marriage, or a radically thin body, just from pure force of will. There are, like, a dozen other factors playing into a harmonious partnership and the size of a body and there’s quite a bit of overlap between them. Think how much easier it is to be married, for example, with enough money to buy good food and a safe place to live.
And the length of a romantic partnership, by the way, is no indication of its health or happiness—we all know at least one miserable, long-married couple—and the same is true of the size of someone’s body. There are plenty of fat people who are happy and healthy in their bodies, just as there are plenty of people who are happy in single parenthood, despite all of the additional challenges we must face, in a society that privileges thin and married parents.1
Marriage is not the answer to single parenthood, just as weight loss is not the answer to fatness. Neither condition is, inherently, a problem to be solved. What needs to change, is basically everything about how our society is structured around the “ideal” nuclear family. That ideal only existed for a hot minute in the 1950s, and by the way, it actually wasn’t that great for anyone who wasn’t a dude. The ideal family life is as elusive as the ideal body weight is, for the vast majority of us, partnered or not. And billions of dollars are being wasted on convincing all of us that both of these things are within reach for everyone, and that when we get them, we’ll finally be happy. All we have to do is work hard at them and spend a lot of money in the process. Sigh.
Just to be clear: I’m not objecting to marriage or thinness. For part of my life, I was both (the marriage lasted quite a bit longer than the now-distant days in which I wore single-digit dress sizes). What’s getting me so riled up is this notion is that both coupledom and thin bodies are so widely perceived to be inherently better than singledom and fat bodies, when the truth is, they’re just not.
What if we all reinvested some of the energy spent on finding “the one” into building the kinds of extended family and kinship relationships that kept humanity going for the thousands of years that came before we put the nuclear family on a pedestal? What if we took some of the dollars flowing into the diet industry, and put them into making healthcare accessible to everyone, regardless of their size?
What I want to see, are the kinds of changes that would help all people. I’m talking about things like accessible, quality childcare. Equal pay for equal work. Affordable housing that is not built exclusively to serve childfree couples or traditional nuclear families2. Do I have the slightest clue how to do this? Er, no. I wish I did.
Perhaps we could start by working on making sure everyone has a comfortable spot to sit. And read.
And yes, there are plenty of fat people and single parents who are neither happy nor healthy in their bodies or lives, for all kinds of reasons, that may have a lot to do with their relationship status and/or size. And their stories are just as important, even though they kinda interrupt the flow of my rant.
Seriously. Try not to feel grossed out now by referring to the biggest bedroom in your place as the “master.”
Love this! Cannot understand why people have an idea that being married would solve all your problems! (Or being thin, for that matter...) Don't know if you've seen the show 'Shrill'? (It's also a book). It was the best thing I watched last year and although it's a comedy, it really made me questioj my own attitides to people's size and whether someone is healthy or not.
Love Aubrey Gordon so much — she helped me tear down my own internalized fatphobia, even against myself, and I'm constantly learning from her. And I wish society saw all families as that — families, no matter the number or makeup of number of parents and/or children, whether it's a widow and a child or a couple with no child or even a single person — they all are families and there shouldn't be one right way to do it.