The Chubby One  

Imagine you’re a mechaneches/menaheles/camp director and you receive a call from a mother telling you that her daughter is baruch Hashem recovering from cancer and wants to attend the shabbaton/Bais Yaakov convention/camp trip. But even though her daughter is comfortable wearing a wig among her friends and classmates, the idea of meeting new people who don’t know her story is making her anxious. The mother suggests that her daughter wear a cap atop her wig so no one will notice her wig isn’t her real hair, and that the whole school does, too. This year the “thing” will be caps, perhaps with the GO logo on it… let the other places give out cross-body bags as souvenirs.

It wouldn’t cross your mind to say, “It’s just too complicated,” or “Caps are nebby, the girls won’t go for it,” because you care and you don’t want this girl to be bogged down by her status as a “cancer patient.”

Maybe I shouldn’t be comparing, considering the difference in the situation, but imagine now that the girl didn’t have cancer, but obesity? And that her problem was fitting in, quite literally!

I’m writing from personal experience. I remember those agonizing moments when I went to pick up my camp shirt from the office. The biggest one was size XL, and no, it didn’t close on me. My face became hot, my hands moist. The sweet girl handing out the shirts looked lost; she told me not to worry, that, “We’ll take care of it.”