Battle of the Bulge

I realized that there were some hard truths to be faced this week when I begged MR. DD to drag 3 heavy boxes of summer clothes down out of our stuffy attic so that I could stop sweating profusely in my winter long sleeves. (The fact that the weather has now turned slightly more “seasonal” is not lost on me)

When one blows up a balloon for the first time and then deflates it, one will notice that it is no longer the taut, rubber bit of merriment that it once was. It does, in fact, more resemble a deflated testicle than a previously entertaining bit of latex. So it goes when inflating a human belly. There are, shall we say, bits left over that made it well nigh impossible to fit into ANY of my previously worn summer clothing without said bits hanging unceremoniously out the bottom. There were very nearly tears. And so it came to pass that I ended up in our local shopping centre looking for something to clothe myself with that didn’t make me look like a whale that wandered up a shallow tributary.

I can’t say that fashion interests me. Fashion is for people with too much time and money on their hands. Fashion is for people who conveniently “forget” to wear underwear to nightclubs and then make damn sure they open their legs wider than the Grand Canyon while getting out of their car so that the assembled throng of camera jockeys can get their money shot that will inevitably make it onto the pages of tabloids everywhere, but that’s ok because AT LEAST PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT ME. The only time that fashion interests me is when it precludes me from dressing myself in a flattering manner.

I’m in luck this summer, because the “thing” seems to be long shirts that cover a multitude of sins as well as reproductive detritus. Some of these “things” are very flattering- empire waist tank tops, etc. But, is it me, or do the vast majority of these “things” happen to be shapeless sacks that flatter NO ONE including the morbidly thin? How does something that makes someone like Kiera Knightly look like she’s been eating butter on EVERYTHING including breakfast cereal become popular? Something that looks bad on thin girls and fat girls alike shouldn’t be flying off the shelves. (And can we not even talk about the cropped 80’s “Desperately Seeking Susan” leggings that seem to be making a comeback? For anyone with calves of a circumference greater than coke can, these are a real no-no. Kiera Knightly, for example, or perhaps the Olsen twins, are the only people I’ve seen who make them work without looking like they belong on the US Olympic hurdling team.)

I managed to acquire a few items of clothing that I’m promising myself that I WON’T be wearing next summer; hopefully not even at the end of THIS summer. While I spent most of my pregnancy thanking the almighty that I wasn’t carrying through the heat of summer, I failed to realize that I would be giving birth too near to swimsuit season to have a chance in hell of not looking vast. While Hollywood people seem to emerge from the hospital wearing size 0 clothes, the majority of us do not. (I have a theory that no one in Hollywood actually gets pregnant. They pay surrogates and strap on a fake belly for 9 months. It’s the only real explaination.)

Size 0, however, is not my goal. I’d settle for a size 12 at the moment. Here’s to the hard work ahead.