Tag Archives: weight

They’ve Seen My Boobs In Greece

Sunbathing in Crete

Soaking up the sun

Now THAT’S how you write a title.

We’ve been swimming a lot this summer because Carlos is tall enough to touch the bottom of the shallow end on his tippy toes.  Vivi is a fish.  Finally, an hour in the pool isn’t a constant vigil to make sure no one dies.  I can even sit in the inflatable recliner while they entertain themselves.  And if a nice glass of wine sits in the cup holder on that recliner, who am I to say no?

Last week, Vivi wanted to play horse and pull me around by my foot while I rode in my “carriage.”  Again, who am I to crush her dreams?  As she towed me around the deep end, the water kept flipping the loose top of my swimsuit up over my belly.  And I kept jerking it down.  The first time it happened, I felt a real moment of panic for a second–my BELLY was out in the OPEN.  Every time the pale wobbly skin peeked out, I rushed to cover it back up.

Imagine the horror.  My very own skin, exposed.  In front of…my children?  In…my own pool? Right out there…behind an eight-foot privacy fence?

What the hell?

Seriously…what the hell was I ashamed of in my own space among people who have actually occupied that belly?  What do I have to hide?

For the 10 years that I was with Fartbuster, I didn’t put on a swimsuit.  Not even in my dad’s pool.  His dad’s pool.  No trips to the beach.  No afternoons at our neighborhood pool.  I felt like I was too hideously fat to be able to wear a suit.  For Pete’s sake…I wore like a FOURTEEN.  Monster.

As soon as we split up, that summer, I put on a raggedy old black one-piece and crept into Daddy and Gay’s pool.  By myself.  And I stayed under the surface.  It felt great.  Cool water on a hot July day.  It also felt great to reclaim that part of my life.

I got used to the feel of the sun on my skin again.  There was more skin there than there had been in my youth, but it was MY skin and I got OK with it again.

A few summers passed in conservative black one pieces.  Sturdy suits.  No frippery, all function.

Then along came Greece.  Richard and I had been talking about it for a while.  He knew it had been #1 on my bucket list since I was a girl.  Flights got cheap, the vacation days built up.  We decided to go for it in the summer of 2003.  Our first destination was Crete for some beach time and archaeology.

Do you know what people do on the beaches in Greece?  They avoid tan lines.  They are right up there with Brasilians in their hatred of tan lines.

I didn’t think I could go the Full Monty, but I was willing to take The Girls out for a spin. Unfortunately, you can’t just put the top down when you’re wearing a sturdy one-piece.  This adventure called for a BIKINI.  Yipes.  Because at this point in my life, I was still wearing a FOURTEEN.  And Richard loved me nonetheless, go figure.  Luckily, by that late date, the tankini had been invented.  I got myself one (and some SPF 80 sunscreen for the girls) and off we went to Greece.

I slid into my nautical striped tankini in the hotel outside Xania then made my way down to the water.  It was a Tuesday morning, not crowded at all, but I was still nervous about the unveiling.

Here’s what I learned on that beach.  We Americans think that only the hot people sunbathe topless.  Nope.  Everybody does it. Y’mom and them.  Errabody.  I looked to my left and there sat a German couple in their 70s, letting it all hang out.  Not even sitting on a towel.  To my right, another pair, maybe Dutch, maybe 50ish.  Flapping in the wind.  I was The Hottie on that beach…and it didn’t matter.

I wiggled out of that top and slapped some SPF80 on The Girls.  I tried to act like it wasn’t the first time they had seen the light of day since the 1970s.  After a while, after I realized that nobody gave a damn what my boobs looked like or which way they were heading, I forgot all about it and just had a lovely day at the beach.

With no tan lines.

I discovered that, the less swimsuit I wore, the more comfortable I felt with my body.  Even a few days later on the weekend, when the real hotties showed up, I was OK. I let the girls out to play in Crete, Santorini, Mykonos.  The Greek Islands Boob Tour of 2003.  We should have sold t-shirts but no one would have worn them.  A few weeks after we returned, I went to the beach in Maryland with my brother and his family and I remember thinking, “GAH!  This suit is so hot!  Let me outta here!”

So how did I end up 10 years later, hastily hiding my white belly from my children in the safety of my own backyard?

Well, that’s a story for the therapist’s couch.  Regardless, we’ve been swimming so much this summer that my old Mom Suits have begun to disintegrate.  That means…it’s time to buy a swimsuit.  The other day, I read a story by Jenny Trout called “I Wore a Bikini and Nothing Happened.” It’s an entertaining tale with a surprise ending–no one was struck blind and the sky did not rain toads when she dared to wear a bikini in public.  Imagine that!

I did imagine that.  My bikini came in the mail today.

GULP.

I’m going to put on a little Greek music, throw some lamb on the grill, and see if I can’t recapture some of that woman who let it all hang out in 2003. I apologize in advance for any toads that rain from the sky!

Bikini Season Is Coming! Bikini Season Is Coming!

A quick message today.  

Bikini season is coming!  Or so I hear–the last one I participated in was around 1989.  I got my license renewed a few months ago and it still lists the weight that I was in 1989.  But I digress.  

Every other sponsored post on Facebook these days contains four cartoons of women shaped like fruit or admonitions against the evil fruit that causes belly fat.  Please keep scrolling past all that shit.  Here’s the real message:

 

bikini season is coming!

You are beautiful.  I hope you enjoy some sun on your face this weekend (after a liberal application of sunscreen, of course).    

 

Fourth Trimester Bodies

Fourth Trimester Bodies

Allison Prejna and her child photographed by Ashlee Wells Jackson

What’s the first word that comes to mind when you look at this photograph?  

Softness?  Nourish?  Mother?  Comfort?  Completion?  Beautiful?  Joy?  

Flab?  Fat?  Cellulite?  Dimples?  Ripples?  Sag?  

This picture makes me ache for the days when I nursed my babies, when they fit so exactly into the curves of my body and the curves of my body were made for sheltering and nourishing them.  For forty weeks, my body gave itself over to the making of another person.  Every cell, every breath, every bite was dedicated to their creation. My body transformed itself–twice–into a ship that carried my two favorite people to this world.  For the first six months after they arrived, my body and not a drop of anything else kept them alive and caused them to flourish.  Even after they began to eat other foods, my daughter and my son returned to me and my body for over a year for nourishment and comfort.  My soft body was and still is their safe harbor.  

This ship, this harbor is a holy place to my children.  Now it is my ship alone, the only vessel I have to navigate the rest of my life.  How can I find its holiness again?  How can I honor it for the work it has done and the adventure that is yet to be had?  

I can look at this picture of a mother and hear the words “softness,” “beautiful,” “completion.”  But were I to pose the same way and fit my toddler in my lap, I am afraid that I would look at the image of my miraculous body and hear the biting words “fat,” “sag,” and “flabby.”  When I walk by a mirror naked, I don’t stop and say, “Wow, this body has done some incredible things!  Thank you!”  Instead, I turn to the side and suck in, poke and prod and sigh.  Or I don’t even stop at the mirror to say hello.  

Today a friend who has recently had a baby confided that she is feeling these “fat” words and fighting with her image of herself.  I knew just what to say to her and meant every word, but if I try to say the same things to myself….well.  So I knew it was a serendipitous gift when another friend posted a link to this wonderful article on Huffington Post about Ashlee Wells Jackson and her Fourth Trimester Bodies Project, “a photo series that embraces the changes brought to women’s bodies by motherhood.  By showcasing moms, Jackson hopes to shine a light on cultural interpretations of female beauty and change women’s expectations for themselves and those around them.” Please click through that link to see a gallery of 27 images of mother bodies.  Jackson is raising funds for her project and hopes to publish a book of images next summer.  She also calls for models!  

There are people who survive to adulthood with intact healthy body images–hooray for them–but many of us have been brainwashed by the Photoshopped, hypersexualised glossy magazine ideal that we hardly know what to think about a lumpy body that bears the marks of life.  I am practicing accepting this body, honoring it for the favors it has done me, and strengthening it for the journey ahead.  

Today’s challenge:  stop by a mirror and say hello.  Look yourself right in the eye for 10 seconds.  Then smile.  Say “Hello, Gorgeous!”   

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Saturday Snort – Courtesy of Dr. G

Living with a chemist isn’t always easy.  We go through more bleach than your average household.  He thinks the swimming pool is a big lab for experimenting.  When I wanted to use a pressure washer on the concrete in our new screened porch, he said that was crazy talk…we should use hydrochloric acid instead.  Much safer.

But he’s funny, that G.  He found this easy-to-understand infographic about the way our weights would differ on other planets:

weight on other planets

Shut Yer Pie Hole, Scale…

pie-chart-20090811-123901If my talking bathroom scale talked to me like a sassy girlfriend…

Dang, Girl!  Are you holding the baby?

No.  

Are you HAVING a baby?

I ate a lot of salt.

You ate a lot of something.

Salt makes me retain water.

It sure does.  But what makes you retain CAKE?

Cake, I guess.  Cake makes me retain cake.  

Want to hear the formula I use to calculate your weight?  I take the square root of your previous weight and multiply by PIE.

Big Girl Panties

Objects on blog may appear smaller in real life.

Objects on blog may appear smaller in real life.

I am hesitant to write ANOTHER post about panties–even though the one about walking out of your panties has been my most popular to date!–but here goes.  Well, this is hard to talk about but I hear that it happens in a lot of mixed marriages–when NORMAL people marry Brasilians…

OK, no more stalling…

The cleaning lady keeps mixing up my panties with G’s underwear.  

I frankly don’t know which of us should be more offended.  We have to unstack the stacks and sort them again after she leaves.  Maybe it’s a vision problem, you say?  Could be.  But I think there’s more to it.

About once a year, G’s mother sends him a package from Brasil and invariably, it contains a few pair of…sultry Latin undergarments for the modern man on the go.  I guess over our years together, through attrition and acts of God, the ratio of sultry Latin undergarments to normal underwear has grown disproportionate.  Then you have to throw in the fact that, along the same time line, I discovered maternity underwear and the forgiving nature of cotton.  As his underwear got smaller, mine…didn’t.

Well.  We could maybe make a graph that shows how the accumulation of sultry Latin undergarments versus the accumulation of voluminous panties has culminated in this laundry catastrophe.  But I’m not sure how to set that up in Excel.

Truth is, I think it’s time.  I plan to get back to the healthy weight that I was when I was running and eating cleaner.  But until then, I think it’s time for me to go buy new panties and I’ve just got to get over the fact that they’re not going to be in the size they were before I had a baby at 42.  But I deserve some big, girl panties.  I don’t need to be bound, twisted, bunched, pinched, itched, and constricted on a daily basis.  And maybe the cleaning lady will be able to tell the difference between mine and his.  I wonder if they have Hello Kitty in my size?