organized chaos

I’d like to take this moment and step out of my usually organized (ha ha) system of writing and express some randomness. Weekends aren’t the best for creative thinking for me, since as you probably already know, I work weird night hours three nights a week.

I’d like to vent a bit about the skinniness factor. Last night, I got stuck checking in one of the express lanes, which I normally like, but the downside is that I get to stare at all the magazines right across from my register. For the last week, as in all weeks, super skinny women have plastered themselves onto these and shout at me in large, bright headlines about how I can be like them.

“How the Stars Slim Down”

“Lose 15 pounds in Two Days!”

“Eat Whatever You Want and Still Have One Chin”

One of the women I got to look at for two hours last night was a skinny, toned Leann Rimes in a bikini. It was Shape magazine and it promised to tell me just how she got those rockin’ abs. They were rockin’. And mine are so not rockin’.

Here’s the deal. I grew up so skinny my knees looked like knobby grapefruits with dowel rods sticking out of the tops and bottoms of them. I looked sickly. I was the target of the cool kids.

Then I had kids. Need I say more? Well, maybe I do, because I have a couple of friends who have more than one kid and they are still really, really skinny. I don’t hate them. They just have good jeans genes. Ha.

Usually I don’t have too much trouble shedding the pounds after a baby. But this time I had The Surgery, in other words, “No more babies for you” and I think it messed up my plan for sliding back into my skinny jeans two months postpartum.

I’m really split in half on this issue. There was a time, during a deep depression, when I obsessed over my extra 20 pounds so bad that I could quite literally not think of much else. Now, I can go along my merry way, aware that I’d like to lose some of this weight, but merry nonetheless. Then I get to stare at Leann Rimes with the rockin’ abs for two hours and, by golly, that monster of insecurity takes a big ol’ bite out of me and I pine away for rockin’ abs, rockin’ thighs, heck, I’d settle for a rockin’ chin at this point.

My Man likes me a lot. Age has mellowed him out. I think that’s why this whole thing doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. But security from the husband really only goes so far for women. As long as there are rockin’ women plastered everywhere, we will fight this battle, I think.

The part of me that doesn’t give a rip about skinniness is getting bigger and bigger. Well, internally anyway. I love seeing magazines use “plus size” models, which should be called “normal size” women. They’re the ones that look good, and healthy. They can eat a donut and not feel the need to throw up later, or do the stairmaster for an hour the next day.

Yes, I want to lose weight. But at this point my focus has changed. I just want to fit into my pre-pregnancy clothes, cause I’m too poor to buy new ones. After that, I will battle this issue from time to time. As all women will.

In one of Lisa Samson’s books, “Straight Up”, one of her characters is in a coma and sees her dead mother and grandmother. In one of their many conversations about life, they mention that we will be surprised regarding the issue of body shape when we get to heaven. They said the former generation had it much closer to the truth: think Marilyn Monroe.

One of the characters said something about Eve (you know, from the garden) has a nice plump bottom and a round tummy to boot. And that’s what normal is.

I liked that.