I have seven-year-old twin boys. I’ve been a single mom for almost three years, and in the time leading up to my separation, we had a family bed. I mean, the boys had their own room, but most nights we slept together. This made sense being that I breastfed them until they were two, but it was also a parenting choice that made sense to my co-parent and me on a personal level. The family bed.

As time has gone on – as the boys have gotten older – it’s made more and more sense to redefine boundaries. We talk very openly in our house, and the phrase “personal bubble” is used to describe limit setting and expectations. Nonetheless, I remain steadfast in my belief that the human body isn’t something to be ashamed of, and in many ways the boys are still too young to sexualize it. We have basic rules of courtesy in the house, like to knock on the door before entering bathrooms or bedrooms, but we don’t always remember to shut the door in the first place.

So, imagine my surprise when, as I was getting dressed one day recently, one of my sons came in and, for reasons I’ll never understand, lifted up my breasts, looked at me, and said, “Didn’t these use to be up here?”

Cue the sound of a needle skipping off a record.

Cue the sound of my door closing. Forever.

Mom’s bubble just got bigger.

I have skinny jeans and I’m not happy.

I’ve never had skinny jeans before.  Of course I’ve put on weight since my college days – probably around 20 pounds (I was 5’8″ and 125 when I graduated.  Hate me?  That’s okay.  I hate me too now).  But I never noticed a dramatic change.  It just sort of snuck up on me – this morning.

Sure over the past 10 years I’ve given birth twice – once to twins – and I noticed that I am rounder, softer…a bit more “zaftig”.  And it’s not like 143 pounds is even so bad.  I actually feel pretty good about myself naked.  My butt is still kind of yummy, when I suck in from the side I can achieve a lovely silhouette, and my boobs have magically maintained a firmness and defiance of gravity despite the shifting landscape upon which they are perched.  It’s just that there’s more “stuffing”as my daughter referred to it recently, and I never really noticed.

I had always been thin.  Naturally thin.  I spent my life eating exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, and it burned right off.  When my 10 year old was a toddler, I could eat the macaroni and cheese off her plate and still look fabulous.  It wasn’t till I hit 40 that I noticed the hint of Spaghettios on my butt.  But I chalked it up to just not having a lot of time to exercise.  I could get rid of it whenever I wanted to.  Or so I thought.

“I’m so lucky, I have a fast metabolism,” I would say to friends who dared to eyeball the cup of chocolate pudding occasionally found in my hands.

And I believed this twist of fiction.

My jeans always went out of style, or I had long since lost track of them, before I ever outgrew them.   And if I did have a pair of jeans long enough to notice they were getting ‘snug’, I always had a great reason why they were no longer hugging my hips, but rather strangling the bajeezuses out of them; they were in the drier too long, I’m bloated…it’s Thursday.

Maybe if designers had kept the waistline of jeans up around my midsection, I would have had some sort of “control” group — some reality-smacking way to gauge the growth.  A “constant” against which I could judge the ever increasing, pudding-and-childbirth-induced wave of flesh.  Maybe then this wouldn’t have happened.  But no.  My fat responded positively to this fabulous new trend and like a tube of toothpaste being squeezed flat from the bottom, the “paste” came up and out the open flip-top cap.  Hey, if they closed, they fit.

But this morning, I went to put on my favorite jeans, which had disappeared for about a year and had  resurfaced after a good closet cleaning.  They didn’t close.  And it wasn’t pretty.

I couldn’t use any of my old excuses, and I had to face the music.  And put down the pudding.

So now I have “skinny jeans.”  And maybe – just maybe – one day they’ll fit again.  If I diet and exercise and don’t pick at my kids’ chicken nuggets.

Or maybe, even better, I’ll just wait for them to go out of style.