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Archives from 2002-2006

I have always disliked my belly, except during pregnancies.

I was just going to type the first part of that sentence because it felt true enough but then I remembered the way I felt when I was pregnant, like this part of my body that had always been the ultimate big boss enemy was suddenly my closest most beloved friend. I couldn’t stop touching it, I wore clothes that accentuated it, I loved my big bountiful belly right up until the babies were scooped out. (After that: DeflateGate, physically and mentally.)

Two c-sections and eighteen years later, I do NOT love this belly of mine. I’ve got that Apple Body Shape (boots with the fur) to start with, I’ve put about 20 pounds in the last few years, add in the body fat redistribution that’s going on with my aging/menopause progression and my midsection has really expanded its services, assuming “services” include “erupting Mount Vesuvius-style out of any and all fitted waistbands.”

It’s just so SQUISHY. It’s so…floppy! There’s a whole area that is right above my surgery scars that’s like a fleshy fanny pack that FOLDS OVER. I believe the term for this is “apron belly,” which sounds almost kind of nice, like it might be cute and flowery and come with deep useful pockets but NO.

(Also, the rearview! What’s even going on with my back, it honestly looks like someone superglued a whole dog team of Sharpeis on top of a melted pillar candle back there. It’s so STERN looking somehow?! My front says please and thank you and tips at least 18%, my back wants to see the manager right goddamned now.)

Sometimes I am able to big-picture my way out of spiraling over my midsection, sometimes I seem to exist in a state of feeling actively bad about it nearly every minute of the day, and sometimes I don’t care at all.

These varying mindsets likely have a lot to do with how I’m feeling about myself overall and what sort of problematic clothing I might be actively wrestling with, but it does sort of feel like a familiar rollercoaster ride: Here we go into the long coast of “meh,” but now upside-down into the Loops of Despair!! And then straight into the gravity-defying Viewpoint of Wisdom — my gosh just look at how small those other concerns look now — but wait here comes a hard turn RIGHT BACK INTO THE LOOPS!!!

Anyway. This is an area where I am not feeling graceful about aging. It’s a lot like how I feel about my under-chin area and rapidly-dissolving jawline: like, yes I have gratitude for the gift of being alive to complain about it, but also: I’m gonna complain about it.

Sometimes I feel like the most definitive part of aging is the sense of zooming out. As though every year provides an outlook that is slightly wider and more comprehensive than the one before. As though I maybe started out with an extremely narrow hole of a perspective and the hole keeps getting bigger and bigger and more and more things come into focus.

I feel like I am increasingly able to look at my whole life in this way, too. I mean, the stories I created and internalized and never questioned for decades. The workplaces that sometimes felt like my whole world but were in fact just jobs and now I barely remember them. The entire experience and spectrum of being female over the last 50 years, including that one really special year we all realized America would rather elect a lumpy bag of angry misspelled Cheetos than a woman.

The trends and moments that come and go, come and go. The way memories fade more slowly when they have a little shittiness to make them stick. The great big world around my small life.

Many years ago my mom’s partner flew us around the Seattle area in his little 4-seat Mooney plane and I’ll never forget the perspective of seeing Mt. Rainier in comparison to the city. I’d seen the mountain from a commercial aircraft but this was somehow different: the mountain just towered over everything. It felt comical that humans thought they were more important than this ridiculously majestic thing.

It seems to me that in my own process of aging, there is a Mt. Rainier of sorts that is juuuuuuuuust starting to come into sight. Like I’m slowly starting to round a corner that leads away from endless despair over wrinkles and sagging flesh and the end of young everything including motherhood. Like every step broadens the view.

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