The Boy Who Called Me Fat And The Childhood Bullying Scars, I Remember You

Going to Kings Dominion the day after school let out was one of my favorite childhood memories. It felt like the official kickoff to summer. The beginning of long days.

Sprinklers.

Sunburns.

Riding your bike until the streetlights came on.

Coming home after dark without anyone knowing exactly where you'd been all day.

Peak Gen X childhood. The good old days. Or at least that's how we remember them.

What we don't talk about are the things that c

ame home with us.

The scars...

I've been fat and dieting for most of my life.

Even now, after years of therapy, age, wisdom, motherhood, and a much healthier relationship with food, there is still a tiny accountant living in the back of my brain calculating everything I eat. Calories. Carbs. Protein. Water. Consequences.

There has rarely been a time in my life when I put something in my mouth without first considering whether it was "good" or "bad."

As a child, I remember taking a plastic baggie of plain chicken breast, carrots, and cantaloupe to a friend's birthday party while everyone else enjoyed hamburgers, hot dogs, chips, and cake.

I wasn't trying to be healthy.

I was trying to be acceptable.

There's a difference.

And though I have a much better body image and relationship with food today, I am undeniably scarred from those years. You don't spend a childhood learning that your hunger is a problem to be managed and just... move on. The scars are quieter now. But they are real, and they are mine.

One year, after losing a significant amount of weight, I was finally feeling pretty good about myself. School was out. Kings Dominion day had arrived. I had a brand-new outfit waiting in my closet — white shorts with pastel polka dots, a matching T-shirt featuring teddy bears in leg warmers that said WORK OUT. 

Very Olivia Newton-John.

Very Let's Get Physical. 

Very 1980s.

Pinned proudly to my shirt was a button my mother had bought me that read:

I'm Proud To Be Me.

The irony still makes me laugh. And wince.

I walked into that park feeling, maybe for the first time, like someone who belonged in her own body on a summer day. I was standing in line for the log flume when three boys walked past.

One looked directly at my shirt. Then directly at me.

"Work out," he said. "You need it."

The other two laughed.

That's it. Five words. Not a punch. Not a shove. Not some dramatic act of bullying worthy of an after-school special. Just five words from a boy who probably hasn't thought about me once in the forty years since.

But I remember everything and have the childhood bullying scars to prove it.

His face. His voice. The inflection. The snickers every time our paths crossed in that endless, inescapable line. The feeling of wanting to disappear. The helplessness. The shame. There was nowhere to go. No exit. No escape hatch. I was trapped in line with my pain and my polka dot shorts and my I'm Proud To Be Me button, and I had to stand there and absorb it.

I can still feel it. Forty years later.

That's the thing about childhood wounds. The people who inflict them often forget them by dinner. The people who receive them carry them forever.

This summer I took my own children to Kings Dominion with my mother. Three generations. A perfect day. And there we stood at the entrance to the same log flume ride.

Suddenly I wasn't fifty years old anymore. I was ten. Standing in that same line. Wearing those same shorts. Hearing those same words. It hit me so hard it felt physical — like unexpectedly coming face to face with someone who had hurt me years ago. My daughter was excited. My son was laughing. My mother was smiling.

Kings Dominion 2026

And all I could think was: What would I do if someone said that to one of them?

I didn't ride the log flume that day. I stood on the sidelines with my son and filmed my daughter and my mother as they laughed their way down the steep drop. Genuine, unguarded joy on both their faces.

It was still a good moment. But I wasn't on the ride, and we should be honest about why.

This isn't parent-shaming. I love my mother and she has loved me fiercely my entire life. The 1980s were a different world. People didn't talk about emotional wounds. We didn't have language for trauma, triggers, or body image. You got hurt. You got over it. Or at least everyone assumed you did.

But standing there, I realized: many of us never got over it. We simply got older. We carried those moments into adulthood. Into relationships. Into dressing rooms. Into mirrors. Into the way we speak to ourselves. Into the way we raise our children.

Kids can be cruel. That's not a new concept.

What is new is that we finally understand how much their words matter. The comments we dismiss as teasing. The jokes we tell them to ignore. The little cuts that don't leave visible scars.

Some of those wounds last a lifetime.

So if you're raising children, teach them this: you never know which words someone will carry forever. You never know which joke will become someone's inner voice. You never know which careless comment will follow a child all the way into adulthood — into the line of a log flume ride forty years later.

And if you're carrying an old wound of your own, maybe remember this too:

The boy who said those words defined himself in that moment. Not you. He revealed his character. Not your worth.

It took me forty years to understand that.

But standing at the bottom of that log flume, watching my daughter laugh without a care in the world, I finally did.

And that felt a little like healing.

Go get on the ride. You were always allowed to take up that space.