Mom Blogger Shares Powerful Lesson on Body Acceptance After Her Kid Calls Her Fat

Katie Reed, a mom of three and blogger at A Mother Thing, has what she calls a “mom bod.” Like many moms, her body didn’t “bounce back” postpartum and Reed admits on her blog that she struggles with how her figure looks after three pregnancies. Even so, Reed never expected her child to make a negative comment about her body. While tucking her sons, Dexter, 5, and Daniel, 3, into bed recently, Reed leaned over to kiss her older child on the forehead and he started to laugh. When she asked Dexter what was so funny, he said, “Mommy, you look like you’re having a baby!” Then he added: “Don’t worry. It’s just ’cause your belly is so fat!”

Reed was left reeling from the unexpected comment. “Yes, I’m overweight,” the Salt Lake City mom wrote on her blog. “I am even what you call ‘fat.’ Three kids in four years took its toll on my body, and a whole host of health issues in the last year meant I put on a ton of weight.” But the comment made Reed wonder what kind of men her boys would grow up to be and realize that she has a big say in that. “Will they be the kind of guys who call an impressionable classmate ‘fat’ because she still has some of her baby weight? Will they be the kind of guys who won’t look at the overweight cheerleader because they’re afraid what their friends will say? Are they going to grow up believing that what they see in magazines is real? Not if I can help it.”

She decided this was a teachable moment for her kids. So Reed went with them to Target and bought a rainbow bikini that Dexter picked out. She was determined to wear it in front of her kids to show them that there’s nothing to hide. For Reed, it was more important for her children to see her body as it is, rather than letting it stop her from living her life because her body is not “perfect.” Reed then asked her kids to take photos of her in her bikini.

“The reality hit hard,” she said after seeing the photos. “I wanted to cry. I wanted to delete the photos. I wanted to put on a coverup and run back inside. Most of all, I wanted not to care. I wanted not to worry about how I looked and focus instead on how I felt. Because the truth is that it was a hot day — over 100 degrees — and I wanted to run through the sprinkler with my kids. I wanted to be silly. I wanted to lay out in the sunshine and get a little Vitamin D. I wanted to relax.”

She added: “But I was at war with myself. I saw only my cellulite, my lumps and bumps, my body that was so far removed from what I thought it was.”

At the same time, Reed wants to celebrate her body for what it is now. “It has done more than I ever thought it could,” she wrote. “It has seen me through 34 years, three kids and two marriages. So while I know that I need to lose some weight to better my health, I am going to work very hard to remember that this is the body I have. It’s a miracle. It’s beautiful. And it’s the example for my boys of what one version of a ‘real woman’ is.”

Reed hopes that her children will learn that there is beauty in everyone, regardless of someone’s body size, shape, or color. “I’m hoping my children will learn that you can truly love someone and think they are beautiful even if they don’t look like what society thinks they should look like,” she tells Yahoo Style. “I want them to realize that we are each truly unique, and our personalities, capacities for love, and abilities to feel confident in ourselves are more important measures of our worth than how many inches our waists are.”

She also has some words of advice for fellow moms struggling with their post-baby bodies: “I’d simply tell them that, though it is difficult sometimes to feel good when our bodies have changed so drastically, it is not impossible,” she says. “Look at yourself through your child’s eyes — they don’t care if you’re a size 2 or 20, they don’t care if you have dry skin or hairy legs or haven’t showered in a day or two. They care about the love you give them and how well you cuddle. You can always lose weight and tone up if that is your goal, but you will never have this moment with your child again — so enjoy it.”

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