Her: “Wow Maggie, you used to be chunky”
No, I used to be a baby. It’s probably my pennance for flashing this photo around to a group of people I don’t know terribly well and proclaiming, ‘wasn’t I cute?’. But I really wasn’t expecting her to call me chunky. When the photo was taken I was around 14 months old, so not exactly in control of my calories. Might I suggest that’s why it’s called baby fat? Yes, I admit my head does look rather large, but I believe it was in proportion with the rest of my body and while my fingers may perhaps be described as chubby, I don’t think they look engorged or otherwise abnormal. Just oddly positioned – I suspect my gown was chafing, I’ve never really liked a high neckline. Also, my cheeks are quite rounded but I expect this was necessary for my grandparents to pinch them without bruising – probably an evolutionary thing. My cheekbones didn’t start to stick out until I was bulimic, which was good because my grandparents were dead by then. Plus my fingers had thinned quite out a bit which helped.
I could have said any of these things to her to justify my infantile podginess. Anything instead of the unecessarily self-deprecating:
“Wow Maggie, you used to be chunky!
Me: I know, and I’ve still got the chunky cheeks and a pouty lip
— oh how everyone laughed, while I fantasised about jamming porky fingers into eyeballs.