The comment never announces itself. It arrives mid-meal, folded into something that sounds almost like concern, a glance at your plate, a remark from a chacha or a colleague or a husband who thinks he is being helpful. Your body becomes a topic at a table where you did not offer it up.
You know the taxonomy by now. There is the clinical version: "You've put on a little, no?" Delivered with the calm authority of a diagnosis. There is the comparative version, which invokes a cousin or a sister-in-law who "managed to lose it after her second child." There is the affectionate version, which is the most disorienting, the pinch on the arm, the laugh, the "we're just worried about you." And there is the silence version, which is not a comment at all but a look, held a beat too long, that you spend the rest of the meal translating.
