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.