As a para-educator, I spent the last school year offering support to seventh and eighth grade students. Join me for a work day in my fat body.
I stand in a long corridor lined with red lockers, hands in my pockets, n-95 mask attached securely over my mouth and nose, when I hear an electronic bong. Moments later, teens filter past me towards their classrooms. Middle-schoolers aren’t known for their self-awareness, but at this moment, my own self-awareness is high.
If I stood in the center of the hallway, the kids wouldn’t shove me, but my body would be like a boulder in a stream, effectively blocking the flow, so I make myself as small as possible, lean my back against a wall, press against a bank of lockers, stand in an alcove to stay out of the way.
Soon the crowd dies down and I make my way up and down the hallways, talking to kids, greeting staff members as they return to their classrooms after grabbing a coffee from the break room or making their copies for the day. I am the fattest adult and the fattest person in the hallway, maybe in the entire school.
“A kid said he was going to beat me up.” A student stops to talk to me.
“Do you think they’re serious or are they all talk?”
After the student tells me what led up to the threat, we conclude that the threat is likely empty, but he’ll let me or another adult know if he feels like he’s in danger so we can help.
I step into the girls’ bathroom and say a friendly “good morning” to the girls doing their makeup at the mirror. My greeting is as much an announcement that I am here and paying attention to what’s going on as it is a well-wish.
When first period starts, I squeeze myself past a teacher in the doorway of the classroom that houses my personal belongings. I grab the backpack that holds my laptop and the other materials I need for the day, squeeze back out, then squeeze past the science teacher who stands in the doorway to greet his students; this is where I’ll start my day.
In first period, there are large counter-top lab tables forming little bays around the perimeter of the room. In the center of the room, there are tables with two students seated at each. I look at the spacing of the tables in the center and plan my route to the other side of the room to check in with a student. Planning is necessary when you are large, spacing between tables is small, and the tables are constantly shifting in a room full of young people with still developing body awareness.
Moving through the room is like a game of frogger, with students passing through to sharpen pencils, sign out to use the restroom, or talk to the teacher at his desk. I step back, step aside, say “Oh, sorry,” as we confront each other.
I like this room, because it’s a science room, and science rooms have stools at the counter tops and chairs at the desks, all seats I can sit in with a reasonable degree of comfort. Still, there aren’t a lot of extra chairs, and when a student needs help locating information in a reading passage or they have an in-depth question about a concept, I usually have three choices: stand over them (they hate this), squat near them (which I can only sustain for a limited time), or take a knee on the floor (and deal with sharp pain in my knees afterward).
Nobody calls me fat or rolls their eyes at me. Unlike some adults I’ve encountered on airplanes, tmiddle school students never make rude comments to my face about my size. Still, I am aware of where my body is in space at all times, always pulling my arms in, pressing myself against walls and furniture, moving around to stay out of the way.
When the first two periods are over and it’s time to move to the next class, I’m a little relieved. Period three is a support class with less than ten students. The desks are all attached desk-chair combos that are popular in secondary classrooms across America, but I’m fortunate to have accessible seating in the room as well.
One time, a year or so earlier, I came to a meeting for my own child in this same classroom, where the teacher (a lovely person) had arranged the desk-chair combos in a circle for the eight or so adults who’d attend. I eyed the desk-chairs, and did a quick calculation. I knew I could cram myself in; I weighed the humiliation of stuffing my ten gallon body into a five gallon seat versus the humiliation of asking for a chair that would better accommodate my size.
It only took a split second to choose cramming myself into the chair. As soon as I did, I knew it was the wrong choice. It was too late, though, and I sat through the meeting with the agonizing awareness that I resembled a Chris Farley sketch from Saturday Night Live of the 90s.
Now, a year later, this classroom is home to me in a way it wasn’t before, and I never hesitate to find one of the regular plastic school chairs that are arranged around a half-circle instruction table at the side of the room. When students need help, I have them come sit by me, or I grab one of a couple of stools situated around the room and sit myself down by the student’s desk.
Most days, I have to adjust my clothing a lot. My wardrobe is almost as small as my salary; I don’t really make enough to pay the bills, much less buy clothes that fit me properly. I have two pairs of too-big jeans, one I thrifted and a nice pair I ordered from a popular online plus-size retailer alongside the size that ended up being correct to ensure I got at least one pair that fit in the order. The one well-fitting pair is worn out, so I wear them sparingly. This clothing situation has me forever tugging at the waist of my pants, pulling the legs up when I sit, tucking and re-tucking shirts.
Clothing spills or other wardrobe snafus are embarrassing under the best of circumstances, but when paired with a fat body, I am a walking fat-slob stereotype. I treat my laundry with great care to preserve what I have.
At lunch time, I sit down with my meal, and I eat at the same half-circle table I used as my home base for the previous class period. The room is shared, so it houses two teachers as well as myself and one other para-educator. I like it when the others are occupied during lunch so no one sees me eat. I like visiting with them, and none of them has ever made a single comment about my body or my food choices, but it still feels stressful eating in the workplace with a fat body, feeling people silently judge my spaghetti leftovers or the white bread and processed deli meat of my sandwich.
I have packed my lunch with public eating in mind, but I no longer pack meager portions like I did in my twenties. I am always balancing being brave enough to eat food that is accessible and fills/nourishes me with the need to minimize the shame of having others see me put food into my mouth. Every once in awhile, someone accidentally leaks their thoughts about my body and my food by making comments about their own: They say they should be eating something healthier, or confess that they’re being “bad” by eating [pasta, carbs, dessert, pre-packaged food, fast food, insert the person’s food hang-ups here].
After I finish eating my own lunch, I make my way to the cafeteria to supervise students during their lunch break. I stand in the doorway and use my size to direct kids from the exiting lunch period toward the correct exit as a crowd control measure. I wave my hands like I’m standing on the tarmac directing airplane traffic.
As the kids for the incoming lunch arrive, I move quickly to a place where I can be out of the way, squeezing, pressing, rolling myself into alcoves and corners to stay out of the way. I am fully aware that this practice fools no one, that my body is the size that it is regardless of how much I pull my arms in and step aside.
The cafeteria is big, so it’s easier to move around once everyone has gotten their lunch and settled down, but watching how many kids choose to forego lunch rather than eat under the watchful eyes of other insecure kids feels difficult to watch most days.
One day, during “karaoke Friday” in the cafeteria, I notice a student laughing and mocking the student on stage, phone in hand as she records a video. I don’t say a word to the student, but I stand in front of her, blocking her phone’s view of the stage.
“Can you please move?” She asks.
I smile back at her. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to let you make a recording in order to mock someone.”
The student argues, but I don’t engage and I don’t budge. I just stand there, letting my fat body protect a student who doesn’t know they need protecting.
After lunch, I take the elevator, to the upper floor. I am certainly mobile enough to take the stairs, but the stairwells are narrow and I don’t want to be in the way of the exuberant torrent of kids — another boulder in the stream scenario for me. Some days I use the stairs and make them deal with my fat ass in the stairwell, but today I don’t have the energy for that.
I spend the afternoon in a history classroom filled with the dreaded desk-chairs. Fortunately, this teacher has a second adult office chair that I usually sit in during instructional time and in between helping students. This classroom is smaller than most of the others. Desks are arranged in rows, the front of one desk touching the back of the chair in front of it, and the aisles are narrow.
As some of the rows shift through the course of the day, some of the aisles become too narrow for me to pass between desks, and finding a route to a student who needs help is tricky. Sometimes I move desks out of the way so I can pass through, and move them back when I’ve returned, their feet scraping against the floor to announce my coming and going. When I kneel next to a student, I block the whole aisle so the other students can’t pass unless I stand and get out of the way. It works to my favor that this teacher is a stickler for students getting out of their seats during class.
My afternoon supervision assignment is probably the most accommodating assignment of the whole day, as I get to stand in the wide, mostly empty commons as students pass by in a narrow stream into a stairwell that takes them upstairs to the buses. I’m free to move around.
“Have a good afternoon!” I call to them as they swoosh past.
I head back upstairs when they’re gone, my work day finished. My daughter is already in the car by the time I gather my things and head to the parking lot. “Can I listen to the new Melanie Martinez?” she asks.
When I close the door and buckle myself in, I get to release the pressure of having a public body. With the school day over, my body is mine again. I pull into the garage and walk inside, and my partner is there waiting. She squeezes me in a hug. At least until tomorrow, I don’t have to worry about blocking the stream or squeezing between too-small aisles of desks. At home, I am just a boulder, exactly where I belong.
