Years ago, I sat in a room with a man who looked at me and said, “The problem is, you’re too big. I’m not shy about going out there with you but you need to reduce your weight. Can’t you see what your friends are doing to maintain their shape?”

He went out with women who had the shape he wanted. I sat in my room and looked through the window. I saw happy people in beautiful dresses with their men by their side. They laughed. They cheered. They were with people who loved them for who they were. I couldn’t deserve that because the man I’d been dating for three years thought I was too big to deserve love.

On Social media, beautiful people posted about beautiful places they had been. You see them amid other beautiful people but I was alone looking inside my mirror every minute and asking myself, “Why did God create me like that? Why did he make me this big when he knew the man I would date didn’t like fat ladies?

I saw the moon from the inside of my room and the moon saw me from the outside. I couldn’t be at where it could shine on me so I would beam with a smile. I cursed the life I had.

Many years later, I’m in another man’s bed. I don’t have mirrors because I have him. I see myself through him. Through what he tells me. Through the kids I have with him. He’s my husband. We have two kids. When he said he loved me, I was thicker than how I used to be with that guy. When he married me, I was more plump with excess skin. After our wedding, he said, “Let’s hit the road every dawn. We need to be healthy.”

He bought me a running shoe and to date, I still run every dawn even when he’s sleeping. When I run with him, we see women of many sizes and we gossip about them, especially the tiny ones; “What are they trying to lose, their bones?”

What changed is not my size but the size of love I found in a man. He took me out. I saw the moon and the moon saw me. I was part of the universe, not as a hidden embarrassment but a treasure to behold. My heart smiled. I belonged.

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So when my daughter came home from school and told me her classmates were teasing her body size, I told her; “Your classmates have small hearts so they don’t see the big love that you are.” I hope she understands when she grows up, that the love you don’t deserve will make you feel so small and irrelevant. But when the one you deserve appears, he’ll make you the moon, even when it’s daytime.

—Mavis

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