I was attending a scientific conference in Verbania, Italy, and one day, I noticed an American family sitting at the table next to us during lunch break.
The mother was morbidly obese, the father was a thin guy, and they had one daughter, who was obese as well. At some point, the daughter was done eating, and pushed her plate aside. And the mother got angry right away.
She started making a fuss, stating that her daughter “had ONLY eaten ONE PLATE,” upon which the daughter responded that she wanted to lose some weight.
Now mommy got really angry, and viciously shouted:
“So you think you are better than ME ? Think you’ll lose some weight, and make ME look ridiculous, is that it ? Are you ASHAMED of ME ?”
(The “ME” was very important.)
Then, the mother filled the plate of the daughter and obliged her daughter to eat everything, because “she was no better than her mother,” and she would NOT start dieting “for no good reason.”
The daughter started crying, and was forced-fed while her thin dad looked the other way. I knew there was nothing much I could do — addressing a mother about parenting never works out, and in this particular situation mom would work it out on her daughter — but I tried to show my explicit disapproval nonetheless by openly and loudly starting a conversation on the matter with my girlfriend (which felt more like standing by the sidelines than anything else).
It made me think of this true story, in which a morbidly alcoholic father decided to stop drinking in order to be the father he never was, only to be forced by his morbidly alcoholic brother to start drinking again (“or else”). And it killed him not much later.
Sometimes we are born in the wrong families. Sometimes we are born to the wrong parent. Sometimes we are not allowed to walk the road less traveled by. Sometimes we have no choice —