My mom died on New Year’s Day this year. She had strong opinions on a lot of issues, and two of those that never changed throughout my life were:

1. She loved the gospel.
2. She hated being fat.

She was a popular speaker at local Relief Society meetings, and her presentations would inevitably include jokes about getting to be skinny in the resurrection and heaven being a place where chocolate has zero calories. All the women would laugh because it was so relatable.

Going through her belongings after she was gone, I found this cartoon image she’d clipped and saved from a 2009 Wall Street Journal. Somehow it captured the underlying sadness I always felt from her wanting to fit into something smaller.

In the year and a half leading up to her death, I watched my mom drop so much weight that her skin sagged off her body and her pants wouldn’t stay up. It was ironic to realize she’d spent her whole life hoping to reach a number on the scale that could only be achieved once her body was actively dying. In fact, we placed her on hospice care a full year before she passed away and I think the extra weight kept her here longer. She’d stopped eating long before dying, but her body still had energy left to burn to stay alive. The extra weight she’d unwillingly carried ended up giving her extra time in that body.

If I could’ve given my mom one gift during her life, would it have been better to make her skinny, or give her the ability to love her body despite the fact that it never would be skinny? I don’t really know.

Either way, I saw throughout her life how brutal our culture and religion can be to women who don’t fit (literally and figuratively) into the tiny boxes prescribed for them. My mom was fat, loved reading and writing, and I think she would’ve loved me putting together a guest series on this topic. 

If you are (or ever have been) a fat woman within the LDS church, I would really love to hear your perspective. From practical matters (the chairs in the overflow are uncomfortably small for larger bodies) to social matters (dating in a religion where being small is considered best) to spiritual matters (like bishops who tell women they aren’t following the Word of Wisdom if they can’t fit into the seats at the temple). You can write under your real name or use a pseudonym and remain anonymous. I’ll also take short anecdotes and compile them into posts, so if you have a short story but not a full blog post – send that to me as well.

Email [email protected] with questions or with your guest submission for the blog. I’ll get the series started as soon as I have enough posts. Thank you!

(In memory of my mom, Donna Maxwell. 3/24/1948 to 1/1/2024.)