I'm not putting this on my Facebook page because if my daughter sees it, she'll feel bad, and I don't want her to. I'm talking about the general practice, not what she in particular said. She's totally forgiven, and in her case I *know* it was only a joke. Trouble is, family members before her (where she learned it) might not have been so innocent about it.

After recovering from an injury, I'm getting back in the swing of things at the gym. Due to physical disability, my main form of exercise is in the pool. I can do things in water that I can't even begin to do on land. Well, the last time I was there, while I was jogging in the water, I nearly lost my bathing suit bottom. I couldn't hold my water weights as I normally do, because I was busy holding the bottom of my suit up. (You can laugh at that if you want to. ) It's a tankini type, two separate pieces with the coverage of a one-piece. It's been getting loose on me. And it's already a size smaller than the last one was. We don't have it in the budget to buy a new bathing suit right now, and this one isn't very old. I know how to sew pretty well. So I put some darts in it, taking about 2" off the waist, and 2" apiece off each leg hole. It held up better today, but I think I could have taken off a little more.

Mentioned to my daughter that I'd had to do this bit of tailoring on my bathing suit. With innocent facetiousness, she responded, "Why? Because it stretched out?"

She immediately let me know she didn't really mean that, but she felt like she *had* to say it. I answered yes, I knew somebody was going to. We agreed that if my grandmother had been here, SHE would have been quick to say it must have stretched out, despite it not being old and worn enough for that to be true. My mother would have said something like, "Oh, you've lost weight? Well, turn around... there it is behind you." If questioned about it, they'd call it joking. I call it never letting me feel good about myself. And that's the environment my daughter was raised in too, so I understand her conditioning.

Where do you draw the line between "just joking" and put-downs?