Letting Go (the Skinny Of It)

Now before you click away this post, let me reassure you: this is not going to be about my journey of self-exploration that got me from the total mess of a human being to the well-balanced Martha Stewart-like person that I am today. It's about my body and how I seem to be letting go of it, or rather, how it seems to be letting go of me. (Okay, men, feel free to click away now - unless you want me to let you in on an age-old femine secret that will undoubtedly aide you in understanding the female psyche once and for all.)

The other day, I was going to take a shower. Just as I was undressing, my son Bram barged into the bathroom, which, incidentally, is something we encourage in the hopes this will familiarize him with the concept of doing pee-pee on the potty. Anyway, he barged in and saw me naked. He has seen me in the nude before, but now that he is a bit older and has developed some more brain cells, he must've experienced it on a different level. If you're wondering what he did, I'll tell you: he laughed. Seeing me in my birthday suit made my two-year-old son crack up.

Now, I am well aware that my son's uninhibited sense of humor should not in any way be a device with which to measure my own self-confidence, and yet I felt compelled to take a scrutinizing look at the fleshy exterior I had admittedly been neglecting the past few years.

 Hello, full-length mirror. Behind the greasy fingerprints and drool smears (I mean on the mirror), I managed to get a good look at my body. There I was, looking to me something like Mrs. Potato Head with a couple of tea bags dangling from her shoulders. Where the heck did my boobs go? I was sure I had them last year... Not to mention my waist - it seems to have packed up and left town, leaving lots of room for the rif-raf to move in and start constructing mega apartment buildings. Dare I turn around? I dare. Lord, there are less craters on the surface of the moon! Okay, let's move away from this particular hemisphere. What the -! Is that long, wirey grey hair actually growing out of my scalp?! Omg, there's another one. And another! Since when did I have grey hairs?! Wait, when did I stop dying my hair? A-ha. Mystery solved.

Has it really come this far? Have I actually let myself go? Is this the fate that every engaged man dreads his wife-to-be will someday succumb to? I sucked in my gut - that looks a bit better. But how long can I actually go around without breathing? Not long enough. Seeing as I was already in the process of torturing myself, I decided to pull out that one piece of clothing and subject myself to the test that will determine whether or not I should send myself off to a fat-farm this very afternoon. Yes, (ladies, you know what I'm talking about) it was time for the 'skinny me jeans' test.

Every woman has a pair of jeans she wore long, long ago when she was young and thin, affectionately known as her 'skinny me jeans'. These jeans may never be discarded, since they are required for a periodic trying-on session; the result of which can cause the woman in question to be hurled into a fit of either unadulterated rapture or send her careening into a full-blown depression.

Every now and then, (coincidentally, just around the time the woman in question is about to get her period) the 'skinny me jeans' emerge. The trying-on commences. One foot goes in. The anticipation builds. The other foot goes in. Suspense can be cut with a knife. The jeans get pulled up, slowly, gradually, until they reach that oh-so crucial point: the lower thighs. Oh, fellow pear-shaped ladies, how we loathe those lower thighs! If the jeans can't even make it over the lower thighs, you can pretty much forget trying to get them up at all. If that happens, you've failed the 'skinny me jeans' test and you might as well go and eat an entire cheesecake.

So there I was, trying to pull on my 'skinny me jeans'. The pulling continued. The pulling became jerking. Jerking turned into wrenching. I had reached my mid-lower-thigh area and was starting to chafe my skin. I had no choice but to proceed with the 'lying down on the bed and yanking' method (see, I'm not making this up - if there's a copyrighted stock photo of it online, then it's true). I threw myself down on the bed, sucked my gut in so far I was close to imploding, and started yanking. I cringed, I grimaced, I broke a nail. But my efforts were not in vain. Hallelujah! I made it over my upper-thighs! My 'skinny me jeans' were on! Now came the next obstacle... zipping the fly.

Instead of getting up from the bed and letting gravity have an adverse effect on my accomplishments thus far, I decided to remain lying down in the sucked-in-gut position to attempt zipping up my beloved 'skinny me jeans'. This was a momentous occasion in itself, considering the number of times my 'skinny me jeans' and I even made it this far. It was a delicate procedure, seeing as vulnerable tummy flab could potentially get caught in the zip, resulting in physical as well as emotional agony. I felt for that oh-so familiar zipper-puller thingy and started to zip. Nothing happened. For a moment, I considered forgoing this stage of the test and just wearing an extremely long, baggy sweater over the unzipped 'skinny me jeans'. But I knew it wouldn't fly. My conscious simply wouldn't allow it. I pressed on. The zipper began to move. And under the control of my steady hand and my relentless determination to succeed, it zipped.

Now, don't think I could actually stand up at this point. My 'skinny me jeans' were on, and zipped, but that didn't mean I could actually wear them in public. The excess skin that had been forced upwards was now hanging over the waistband of my 'skinny me jeans' in such a mass that no sweater I owned could conceal it. Not to mention the fact that the 'skinny me jeans' were rapidly cutting off the circulation to my upper body.

What mattered was that I had passed the 'skinny me jean' test. This time. After more pulling and perspiring, I managed to get my 'skinny me jeans' off again, folded them neatly and returned them to the back of my closet, where they will remain until the next time my self-image is in doubt (which should be some time next week).