So Long, Skinny Genes…

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.