Dear Prudence: My Wife Hides Her Overweight Past

[minoanmiss]

Q. Fat history: From the ages of around 7 to after college, my beautiful, loving wife of 20 years was morbidly obese. By the time we met when we were nearly 30, she had lost a huge amount of weight, and since then has been a very healthy fitness geek. While she was obese, she suffered from social anxiety and depression, and regaining her health gave her a huge amount of self-confidence. I’m very proud of her, but the issue is she has entirely erased any part of her life that took place when she was overweight. She has no pictures, yearbooks, or mementos, and when our athletic preteen daughters ask what she was like at their age, or about any event that took place before she lost weight (like her 16th birthday party), she deflects the question. I understand the desire to forget about what was a very traumatizing portion of her life (and she has gone to some therapy), but I don’t think it’s right to hide her entire childhood and the journey that shaped her so much from our children. Who’s right?
A: This is not a situation where being “right” is very important. It would be good for your wife if she could consider her past as part of what made her who she is today, rather than a dark history she needs to keep buried, but you can’t argue someone into making peace with their former selves. If she’s asking you to lie to your children on her behalf, that’s something else entirely; you’re under no obligation to preserve a fiction or present an altered history to your daughters. I hope you can make the gentle suggestion to your wife that she has always been a person of worth and value, regardless of her size or mental state, and that therapy specifically addressing her self-image might be of great use to her. She will be a better mother to your children if she can be more loving toward herself. You cannot believe this on her behalf, of course, but it sounds like she spends a great deal of emotional energy trying to hate the person she used to be out of existence. This is an impossible task, and I hope very much that she gives it up.

Comments

[ambyr]

It might help LW’s wife grow into self-acceptance if LW could learn to tone down their own fatphobia. “Regaining her health” stands out to me as a framing that isn’t doing anyone any favors.

[dine]

so much this!

[torachan]

Also emphasizing their "athletic" daughters. Like, I have been fat ever since I was a kid, but I played sports in high school and rode my bike everywhere. You can be fat and athletic.

[julian]

"Who's right: her, for not talking about things that cause her pain and which she is potentially still conflicted about, or me, for insulting her and thinking I know what's best for everyone involved?"

(I mean, yes, your wife should maybe learn some self-acceptance and *could still* deal with learning some stuff about Health At Any Size, but I wouldn't really blame her for not wanting to talk about it around you, either.)

[ethelmay]

The whole story seems very oddly framed to me. I'm not the only person who owns pictures of me or had yearbooks. I have family and friends who knew me as a child. If she doesn't, or she's completely out of touch with everyone who knew her then, that seems like a more significant fact about her than how much she used to weigh. (She might have a good reason for not being in contact with her family - e.g., they could be dead, they could be abusive - but the LW doesn't mention it, or else it was edited out as apparently unimportant.)

If she were a person in a novel, I would assume from the way this story is told that we were being primed to expect that she was lying about her past and had never been morbidly obese at all.