I come from a very large family and in the summer of 1983 some relatives from down in my grandmother’s (my mother’s mother) hometown state of Virginia came up to New York to visit us for a week.
It was one of my grandmother’s sisters, her niece, her niece’s husband, and their two sons.
The youngest son was three years of age and looked to be about one hundred pounds. The little boy was so heavy that he had to crawl backwards just to make it down from the staircase.
His mother had brought along for their vacation his packed items of unhealthy snacks which were four cans of corn chips, cheese balls, and some other junk food.
What happened to the old hearty home cooked nourishing meals the family use to constantly prepare, serve, and feed off to the rest of the family?
I guess my grandmother’s niece hadn’t picked up on the tradition of her own mother’s household from years back.
Nevertheless, why let your kid get fat off of a bunch of unhealthy junk food? Shouldn’t she have been feeding him meat and vegetables and feeding him junk snacks sparingly if it was necessary at all for his young age?
I was about eight years old at the time and the three year old boy who was my second cousin cried at the time because I had eaten some dinner that was made for everyone. The child was so spoiled from constantly being fed all kinds of shit by his mother that he wanted to eat up everything there in sight.
My mother nicknamed him butterball.
It wasn’t until I got older and was strolling through the aisle in the supermarket that I realized she was referring him to the likes of a Butterball Turkey.
The mother of this young child was one of my mother’s first cousins, and to me, this kind of behavior was a form of child neglect and abuse. This kid who actually appeared to be one hundred pounds had no business getting to be that size for three years of age.
He was too big and had gained too much weight from eating too much of the wrong things.
My mother had to send her relatives home sooner than the week that was planned for them to stay at our home. The boy was causing too many problems as he whined from walking down the street.
His weight made him tired, sore, and lazy just from keeping mildly active. When he couldn’t get out of the car that his parents drove his mother asked my mother to pick him up and bring him out of the vehicle.
His mother was also on the heavy side and was a bit too lazy herself to go and lift up her son.
We all had took an outing on the circle liner boat ride in Manhattan and he had a fit about getting his way, and so on.
So my mother sent them all on home packing early one 4am morning.
