“It’s all about willpower,” says my dad, sipping his coffee (black) and wiping a crumb off his beard, leftover from the (one) slice of batch bread he ate for his lunch. “Or, should I say, won’t power.”
My Dad has spent the last decade slowly losing weight. “I’m on a quiet diet,” he would say, although, to paraphrase The Princess Bride, I do not think that word (quiet) means what he thinks it means. As a result, he is now an expert on the topic.
“It’s just so boring,” I reply, showering myself in crumbs from the homemade shortbread biscuit I am making short work of.
“Yes,” says Dad, holding eye contact for a worryingly meaningful amount of time. “But you have to ask yourself, are you happy to stay at the weight you’re at now?” The question seems rhetorical.
I walk into the kitchen from our conservatory, where I’ve been sweating for seven minutes straight. The thermometer that lives on the table out there says 45C. “It’s barely warm,” says Dad, whose tolerance for heat has always been impressive.
The kitchen smells like my parents’ kitchen: tea leaves and Fairy liquid and, a recent addition, the very faint aroma of sourdough starter, always to hand for a last-minute batter, an unplanned pancake or a midweek pizza. But also, it smells of something else.
“I smell gas,” I say, and then notice that Dad’s cooking something on the gas hob. I laugh at my own stupidity. “I have the nose of a cocker spaniel,” I tell him, as I reach into the press for my breast pump.
“And the arse of a Bernese mountain dog!” my Dad adds. We both laugh, and then, semi-seriously, I ask him, “Do you think you could go a full day without saying anything about my body?”
Dad’s eyebrows shoot up and backwards, his forehead along with them. “Did I say anything about your body yesterday as you were stuffing your face with 17 sausages and as many shortbread biscuits?!” he asks.
Again, I sense the question is rhetorical. (I ate four sausages, not that it matters.)
I buy myself a new pair of jeans in Penneys; they are mom jeans, black, in a size UK 16 because that is all I could find and also, they look enormous. These will definitely fit, I think, as I pile them on top of the oodles of baby clothes that Atlas doesn’t need.
When I get home and try them on, they do not, in fact, fit. I get them up my thighs and over my bum and they’re not even that tight on the calves, but my stomach spills out, the soft flesh that now hangs over my C-section incision trying to escape between the zippers.
“I don’t think they fit you,” says Dad, rather unnecessarily, as I attempt, unsuccessfully, to shove parts of my body back in and out of the way.
“It’s since my C-section,” I tell him, pointing to my stomach, trying to find a way to explain how my body has changed. I was fat before, I know, but there was somehow less of me than there is now. I can’t find the words.
He raises an eyebrow. “Sure,” he says, unconvincingly. “Suuuuure.”
Have I mentioned: it’s great to be home?
Spare me Your Rhetorical Questions