I Can Barely Take Care of Myself Jen Kirkman (best books for students to read txt) 📖

with my bare hands like a sandwich in front of the TV every night and washing it down with two glasses of pinot noir.

My husband and I had lived together for years before we got married. We’d already gone through our phase of sitting around drinking wine at home together, ordering in, eating out. I didn’t gain a single pound. But something about that piece of paper and that ceremony, it’s like you’re hosting a ritualistic event that you think means one thing, but in fact you’re involuntarily letting society—first cousins; friends of your dad’s from the Elks Lodge; scheming, jealous, unmarried bridesmaids—put their own spin on it. People always say things like, “I wish I could meet someone so I could have someone to grow old with in forty years.” But when you actually get married, they treat you like it’s time to start growing old now. It’s time to gain forty pounds in a year and not even question it. I swear that people were comfortable with my weight gain because it was the closest I was going to get to a baby. Even though I wanted to crawl out of my skin—my friends, family, and total strangers were welcoming me into it. “You’re just settling down.”

The weight gain snuck up on me. I’m really lucky because when I gain weight I gain it in proportion. I’m glad I didn’t inherit my dad’s body. He has chicken legs but the stomach of a woman in her third trimester. I don’t have a lot of “hangover” on my pants (although I had a lot of hangovers from the pinot noir). I didn’t even really notice that I’d gained weight until the first twenty pounds had found their home on my stomach, thighs, and butt. In every photo that I was tagged in on Facebook, it looked like someone had Photoshopped an extra face around my face. I could still button my pants but none of them were fitting in the crotch anymore. That area went beyond looking like I had camel toe—it looked like one of those Pillsbury Crescent rolls that during its baking period starts to explode and grow a deformed bread buddy that rides sidecar on the original. I wondered, Did nobody tell me that after age thirty-five a woman’s balls drop? I started saying things about those pants that I could no longer pull up (“They don’t make them like they used to!”), even though I’d had the pants for years and at one time they fit perfectly. It’s not like a pack of tailor-elves had been coming into my room at night, saying, “Hey, they’re not making pants like they used to! The store sent us here to change the inseam.”

I couldn’t even really wear Spanx anymore. The Spanx weren’t strong enough to suck anything in. It was just a bunch of stretchy material that sat between my skin and my clothes, adding another sixteenth of an inch of fabric to my all-over bulge. I was a new woman. I was round and on my way to Rubenesque. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I’ve always been mindful of my weight. (Although I’ve never been anorexic or bulimic—mostly because the only thing worse than feeling hungry is the feeling of throwing up, so I’m not a good candidate for either disorder, but also because I’m lazy. I can’t add calorie counting or hiding vomit around the house to my already packed schedule of procrastinating.) And because I took ballet every weekday for almost thirteen years, I was naturally skinny. I ate Pop-Tarts and ice cream after dance class every day and didn’t gain a pound. I know, I hate people who say that they can eat whatever they want and not gain weight. But don’t hate me, that metabolism stopped when leg warmers went out of style.

I didn’t have enough body fat to get my period when everyone else did. Every girl wants to get her period because we’re told that it means we are “women.” All getting your period really means is that now you can get pregnant—and as we’ve seen from all of these reality shows about teen moms, these girls can barely be considered women. Female, yes, but what does that even mean anymore? The Pregnant Man used to be “all-female” and having a baby didn’t make him any more of a woman.

Getting your period is also the beginning of an approximately forty-year stretch where once a month you don’t feel like having sex or wearing white pants. And in the sixth grade all of the other girls were becoming “women” all around me. My mom had a box of maxi pads in the cabinet under our bathroom sink. I used to hope that just touching it would signal my body to start shedding my uterine lining and I’d be on my way to walking carefree on the beach in a white linen dress, just like the woman on the box. I didn’t hit “womanhood” until I was fourteen years old. And once I did—all I wanted was to run back to girlhood and not have to wear what seemed like a small neck pillow between my legs five days out of the month.

My postmarriage weight gain forced me into a new daily uniform: stretch pants with a beach cover-up/tunic that covered my butt and the tops of my thighs. It was comfortable and I never had to face the reality that my skin didn’t fit into my usual clothing. Stretch pants and beach cover-ups are enablers. They’ll never tell you the truth like a pair of jeans that won’t go up your thigh. Stretchy clothing will accommodate you no matter how heavy you get, with no regard for your health. The fabric just hangs on you like your alcoholic friend who needs to get sober and gets mad at you when you say that you want to cut down on your drinking.

When I told my closest friends how much