It took one woman decades to make peace with the taunt that defined her. Then she heard it come out of her own daughter's mouth.

"Ok," I said to my daughter as she bent over her afternoon bowl of Cinnamon Life. "What's going on with you and J.?" J. is the ringleader of a group of third-graders at her camp—a position Lucy herself occupied the previous summer. Now she's the one on the outs, and every day at snack time, she tells me all about it, while I offer up the unhelpful advice I've been doling out all summer long. Find other girls to sit with. Ignore them. Be yourself. Be patient. It does get better.

"She's bossy," Lucy complained.

"Mmm-hmm," I said as I returned the milk to the refrigerator, thinking that my daughter can be a little on the bossy side herself.

"She's turning everyone against me," Lucy muttered, a tear rolling down her cheek. "She's mean, she's bad at math, she's terrible at kickball. And...she's fat."

"Excuse me," I said, struggling for calm, knowing I was nowhere in calm's ZIP code. "What did you just say?"

From the way her eyes widened, I knew that she knew she'd done what her sister, four-year-old Phoebe, called a Big Bad. "She is fat," Lucy mumbled into her bowl.

"We are going upstairs," I said, my voice cold, my throat tight. "We are going to discuss this." And up we went, my blithe, honey-blonde daughter, leggy as a colt in cotton shorts and a gray T-shirt with Snoopy on the front, and her size-16-on-a-good-day mom.

I'd spent the nine years since her birth getting ready for this day, the day we'd have to have the conversation about this dreaded, stinging word. I had a well-honed, consoling speech at the ready. I knew exactly what to say to the girl on the receiving end of the taunts and the teasing, but in all of my imaginings, it never once occurred to me that my daughter would be the one who used the F word. Fat.

I am six years old, in first grade, and my father is hoisting—that's really the only word for it—me up into the backseat of the family's Chevy Suburban. "She's solid. She weighs 65 pounds," he's telling a friend. I have no idea why he brings it up, what it means, if 65 is a little or a lot. It is a number, two digits, out of context. It means nothing. My father's arms around me, the bristle of his beard against my cheek, the smell of his soap, the starch of his shirt—that means everything.