It was one of those questions that only a 5-year-old could ask, especially a 5-year-old who has always been encouraged to talk to Mom and Dad about anything. Today my son, Allen, wants to talk about my size-24 body and I am trapped by love and honesty into answering him.
"Oh, lots of reasons," I say, trying to keep my voice studiously neutral, matter-of-fact. "I like to eat. I don't like to exercise. And my body is different than it used to be."
Fortunately, this conversation is happening in our minivan. From his seat Allen can't see the expression on my face--half-horrified, half-amused..

"I like to eat," he says. "Does that mean I'm going to be fat?" "Not really. Your body is more like Daddy's. He likes to eat, too, but he's very thin. And both of you move around more than I do."

"So why don't you move around?"

"Because it's hard for me sometimes, and because I don't like to," I say. Eager to distract Allen and leave this subject behind, I continue with, "But you like to jump around and play--I've seen you."

"Yeah, I like to run, and I like swinging, and I like sliding too," he says. "Can we go to the playground later?"

My distraction works. Allen is already considering his next move, leaving me to drive in silence and unease. Except in moments like these, I hardly ever give much thought to how others see me: as a walking stereotype. You know--I'm either the big, fat Black woman who's loud and ravenous in all my appetites (including food), or I'm sad, lazy, lonely and asexual. Neither caricature fits. My life is full--I juggle writing, graduate school, marriage, kids--and I am happy.

But the message of our culture is clear: Thin is in; if you're overweight, the world sees you as someone who's obviously unhappy and out of control. Even at age 5, my son has soaked up this message. The women in his schoolbooks--the ones who seem to have perfect lives--are thin; even on Nickelodeon the women are thin. Everyone is thin, it seems to him, except Mommy.

With images like these bombarding all of us on TV, in magazines and on billboards, I don't have to wonder why Black women are becoming less satisfied with their bodies. There was a time when, in the face of a society that didn't even acknowledge us, we defined beauty on our own terms. No more. Now "physical imperfection"--whether in the form of a thick waist, thin legs or A-cup breasts--is unacceptable to many of us. And for more than a third of all Black women, that "imperfection" comes in the form of extra pounds.

THE THIN RAGE
There was a time when my son's innocent question would have upset me for weeks. For many years I longed for thinness, lusted to be like women who could ease into narrow spaces on trains or wear a swimsuit to the beach without much thought. Like a sign printed on my forehead, I wore my self-contempt. Strangers felt fine commenting on my weight or warning me not to eat something in restaurants. My response ranged from tears to frantic fasting plans to repeat sessions with Weight Watchers that only made me obsess more about food.

When I'd been a size 14 in my twenties, I wasn't runway-model thin. I was comfortable with how I looked. I loved the sense of endless energy, the ability to run from event to event without breaking my stride. But I also remember how, once after I'd dropped 80 pounds on a medically supervised liquid diet, every word of praise I received about my new size made my flesh crawl. The exclamations of delight from friends and coworkers were invitations to conformity, litanies of approval that, finally, I was playing the game with every other woman who obsessed about thinness. Their unspoken message: "Thank God you've changed--you look the way a woman is supposed to look." Until then, I had no idea how much I loved rebellion, how much my being fat had everything to do with rejecting others' messages about what kind of woman I ought to be.

And so I gained the weight back--every single pound of it. No, I didn't sit down and consciously decide that I would assume my rebellious posture, that being fat was something I understood far better than being thin. But some part of me did decide those things; that's how it suddenly became too inconvenient to go to the gym, how grabbing some greasy fast food was a better idea than making myself a real lunch. As I watched the weight return, I found myself just as much relieved as sad. For all the inconvenience of being fat, it was comfortable.

Curiously, my depression about my weight didn't seem to seep into my relationships. Even before I married nearly 16 years ago, I enjoyed an active social life, with a series of long-term relationships that failed not because of my dress size, but because of more essential differences. Then when I married Bob, my pursuit of an elusive thinness dissipated. The urge to be small didn't go away, but loving and being loved for myself quieted the voices in my head that shrieked about my unworthiness. It didn't hurt that Bob, no matter my size, always found me attractive, and our long years of intimacy did much to reinforce my self-image. The rage to be thin settled into a quiet fantasy.

BLACK AND BARBIE?
For more and more sisters, the ways in which we regard our bodies have begun a dangerous shift. There was a time when the full, lush curves of our bodies, whether in or out of proportion, were a cultural bonus, particularly in the eyes of men. For decades our jazz and blues classics extolled the beauty of big women. And though our society has always encouraged us to seek thinness in the same way that we might seek fair skin or straight hair, Black women have been able, up until now, to resist these dubious temptations. But that is changing.

Now, as we take our lives and careers and dreams further into mainstream America, we're absorbing the messages of the culture we have joined. That message is relentless in its insistence on thinness and especially its adoration of a supermodel's body--minuscule waist and barely evident hips. It's because of that message that an accomplished woman such as Jenna, five foot six and an elegant size 16, agonizes about the size of her behind. "You need those long jackets to cover it," she says, sighing.

Jenna's comments are ubiquitous: Whether it's our hefty thighs or our bony calves we're ashamed of, we sisters are becoming just as unhappy with our bodies as many White women have always been.

That's what T. Joel Wade, associate professor of psychology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, has discovered. He's one of many African-American researchers who have made Black body image a key part of their work. "Black women have moved away from having an appreciation for bigger bodies and considering that to be beautiful," he says. "The ideal for them has gotten slimmer, and the ideal is an outrageous comparison.... Given what we know about hormones and changes in women's bodies, it's impossible for most women to have a model's body without negative health consequences."

Yet every magazine and newspaper, doctor and health adviser warns that there are negative consequences, too, for overweight women like me--and for the 37 percent of all sisters who are defined as obese, or about 30 pounds above their ideal body weight. Even at age 44, I have so far managed to avoid all the bugaboos that might affect a woman of my size. I have low blood pressure and a cholesterol level so low my doctor asked if I was a vegetarian (I'm not). I have not been plagued with diabetes, and there's nothing wrong with my heart. It helps, I'm sure, that I neither smoke nor drink, unless you count a glass of wine every two months or so. But since I was a girl, I have hated exercise; except for sporadic efforts at walking or aerobics, I am an admitted couch potato.

Still, everywhere I turn, there's another story of someone whose heart quit or whose high blood pressure got out of control. So why do I remain unswayed by stories of impending doom or even by the questions of my beloved son? Why do I remain fat in spite of what I know?

Beneath the Weight
Michelle Joy Levine, a psychotherapist in Dix Hills, New York, and the author of I Wish I Were Thin, I Wish I Were Fat (Fireside), works with those who talk about losing weight and rarely do, and those who lose the weight and nearly always regain it. She says that many sisters "aren't aware of the real reasons they remain overweight." Though most of these women work to lose weight, they often have secret, unconscious fears of being thin--powerful forces inside their psyches that keep them heavy. "They really aren't aware of why they're overeating in the first place," she says, which is possibly to dull the pain of loneliness, work stress or failure in a relationship.

Levine explains that all of us live with conflicts about many kinds of issues that stem from our backgrounds. Some of us want to please people so much that we spend our time meeting everyone's needs but our own; some of us fear our sexuality or dread intimacy, so we protect ourselves by remaining fat. Though we repress these conflicts, they don't go away--they simply go underground, continuing to exert a powerful influence on our lives.

"Overeaters' conflicts are the same conflicts everyone else has; they are simply more visible," Levine says. At the root of many of these conflicts that manifest themselves in excess weight is the unexpressed need to be nurtured and cared for.

Which brings us back to African-American women, to our legendary (and once enforced) caretaking abilities and our steadfast willingness to put ourselves dead last. Could there be, I must wonder, a correlation between the high rate of obesity among us and our embrace of this picture of ourselves as superwomen? Have we internalized our own self-sacrifice?

Maybe. That's why all of us, whatever size we are, must learn the lesson of putting ourselves first. That means making the honest effort to learn how to care for ourselves, provide for our own emotional needs, and surround ourselves with people who love us at least as much as we love them. We must become the guardians of our own souls. And most important, we must stop looking to others to define what our bodies should look like and instead work toward overall wellness as a standard. "Why can't we have bodies that are good enough, slender enough and beautiful enough? This is my plea for exactly that," Levine says. "Let us all strive toward losing the weight we need to in order to be healthy and look attractive--but not perfect."

Good-bye, Big Woman?
There is still much I don't understand about the issues connected with my weight. But even my renewed consideration of why I hang on to this second skin is prompted by more self-sacrifice. I am thinking ahead to the days when Allen will care less and less that I am his mother, and more and more that I look like other mothers. Already I resent the inevitable comparisons, but they are hardly my son's fault. In the end I am the only one who can choose who and how I will be in this world.

At least one young sister I know, 21-year-old Alicia, has made her choice. She is not fat, but she is not superthin--a size 12, and that's fine with her. "I'm satisfied with the size I am and how I look," she tells me. "I'm not doing any crazy diets. I think I look pretty good."

I, on the other hand, continue to work through my issues. But whatever choices I ultimately make about losing weight, they will not focus on how I look--my resistance to that standard is perhaps firmer than ever. But I am persuaded by the dreams I have to do more and work harder; I am remembering the joy of boundless energy that came from weighing less. Exchanging what I eat and how much I move in return for that exhilaration would be a fair trade. Whatever I decide to do, I'll be more conscious of the internal me, the big woman who is still there. I'm working toward being able to say good-bye to her one day soon, to ask her to make room for a different me.