However, despite the sheer exhaustion and the utter despair that I feel at this moment, I will blog for the sake of sharing this information with those whom might glean some benefit from it. I have PMS. I discussed this the other day. PMS makes me moody. It makes me gain weight both real and imagined and it makes me feel like I should burn my skinny pants and given my bikini to my sister and just resign myself to wearing a potato sack. Perhaps with accessories. In any case. I'm pretty tough on myself about my fitness and training routine, my diet, my weight, the size of my R calf, my L bicep, my waist at the widest point and the smallest and of course my hips. I guess it would be fair to suggest that I'm pretty tough on myself about pretty much anything. Weighing 140.4 on Thursday and then 146 yesterday was discouraging to put it mildly. Partly "bad carb" weight as I refer to it, also water weight and PMS pounds. Whatever sounds most plausible. OK No more typing for now... Ambien working and soon Joni not making sense...
OK returned post nap and ready to finish. I won't go as far as to say well rested but I will say rested in any case. So where was I? Hard on myself. PMS. Crappy night at work. Around mid shift I admitted the wife of a friend of mine who was having their first baby. OK I haven't seen this person in a couple of years, which is to say, I have not seen this person since nursing school, which is to say I have not seen this person since I weighed less than 170 pounds. The reaction, was, I'll admit, not what I had expected. It isn't uncommon for people to not recognize me these days, or at least not people I haven't seen in a while. I didn't think I was that big but I guess I was. And secondarily, I still feel like I need to lose about another toddler before I'll be "skinny". Which brings me to my point. My friend, an African gentleman from Nigeria, did not say "wow you look great." He did not exclaim "holy cow where did you go?!?" Instead he just approached me and said, jaw open, "What happened to you?" As if to imply I had lost my hand in an unfortunate smelting accident or my hair from chemo. That was the inflection. Not, you look fantastic, inflection, but instead, holy cow what did you do to YOURSELF inflection. Later he asked me where my butt went (one of my more pronounced former assests so to speak). This may sound in appropriate but You'd have to know the gentleman to know it is not. Instead it is just honest. Later still he told me he couldn't understand why I'd want to be "so skinny". He like how I looked before, like a "womanly woman" (hands forming an hourglass curve). Even later still he told me my thighs looked like rocks (hands forming fists like boulders). He spent a bit more of the night worrying about "where I went" than I cared to hear about. But I felt very privileged to be part of the birth of his baby.
So while I hesitate on any given to day to even willingly ACCEPT my body as it is, this person sees it as less that perfect, in the opposing direction. And this got me feeling pretty philosophical about size and how we as women so easily start to focus on a size or a number (I just want to be a 6 or 8 or 2 or I just want to weight 140 or 120 or 110) rather than seeing the inherent beauty that exists in our features as they are now. The hips and butt that so readily annoyed me 35 pounds ago, were exactly what this fellow found most lovely about my shape.
Now I've finally started my period so the PMS can stop. I can stop inhaling all food within my grasp. I can stop feeling the size of a bus and I can stop obsessing about the scale number again. But I'm going to remember last night the next time I nitpick my behind or my thighs. I'm going to try to remember that the beauty of you thighs is more in your eyes than you think...
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