Too Fat for My Earrings

I've gotten so fat, my earrings don't fit.  Okay, I don't even think that's technically possible, but I've certainly gotten too fat for my earrings.  I hadn't worn earrings in about fifteen years because of a nickel allergy, but I decided to try to get back in the game.  I so used to love my huge, funky earrings.  My husband's nickname for me was "Chima," because my earrings were like windchimes.  At this stage of the game, I had no desire to go quite so flashy, but I did want earrings with a bit of pizazz.  I found some pretty amethyst-colored dangles that my eight year-old daughter adored and I liked too.  I started wearing them and putting on mascara and even wearing real shoes (instead of my raggedy Lands' End clogs of six years).  I've always put on eye makeup pretty much every day.  (And since I've copped to my propensity for being furry and fat, it's fair for me to admit that I do have beautiful eyes - big, green, and well-lashed.)  Because my lashes are naturally lush (the only good part of furry), I only use mascara when I'm being fancy, and I was trying to bring a little fancy to my life.  And then my jeans got tight (these being my fat jeans).  And stayed tight.  Without invoking the Sarah Palin/lipstick debacle, let's just say I didn't feel in a position to hang ornaments from myself. 

I realize I have several options here.  First, I could slim down to my earring size.  Second, I could embrace the beauty of who I am now and celebrate it (I'm making that cat-with-a-hairball noise).  Third, I could get over myself and wear earrings or not, without the sturm und drang.   I envy the attitude of Kristin, my daughter's piano teacher.  Kristin is about twenty-seven and a pretty girl with a bit of extra poundage.  She dresses her age, wears makeup, has cute hair, blah blah.  She gives lessons from her parents' gorgeous home.  While my daughter takes her lesson, I sit on the couch and read.  Last week, I noticed a coffee table book of Kristin's wedding photographs.  I told her she was a beautiful bride (and she was).  She thanked me and mentioned that she's lost about a hundred pounds since then.  I honestly hadn't noticed.  The photos in the book were of a lovely girl on a happy day.  More important, she was still proud of her wedding pictures and didn't hide them away because they were of the fat Kristin. 

Yesterday, I was sorting through cartons of old family slides to be transferred to DVD as a Christmas gift for my mother.  Going through the slides from the time of my parents' wedding and my and my sister's early childhood (til about the age of 8, when the photograph took place of the slide), I made of pile of stuff for  my mom's DVD, including her wedding, Christmases, vacations, first-day-of-school/birthdays/etc., with just enough inclusion of my dad to acknowledge his presence without making the whole thing a big downer.  The pile for my dad included all the pictures I'd excluded from my mom's pile, plus a few representing us girls in our early years.  (To stem complaints of short-shrifting him:  when my dad left my mom, he apparently took the slide projector and all the slides from his year in Vietnam.  I'm guessing that if he'd wanted the memories of us as little kids, he'd have taken some of those as well.)  My third pile, and a large one at that, I simply labeled "Yuck."  These were mostly fat pictures, often of my mom, but sometimes of me and my sister.  None of us were fat all the time, with my mom winning the award for greatest pendulum swing, and my sister and I were never fully fat, just off-and-on chubby.  Even though I was as young as seven in some of those pictures, I felt such shame looking at them.  More pathetic, I was mortified by the thought of my husband seeing them. 

I don't need to worry about ruining the surprise of my mom's Christmas gift, because while I post this, she's just arrived in Bhutan, the first stop of her trip to Tibet (her first time in Tibet, second time in Bhutan), and she's not likely to scroll backwards through this blog.  My mom, at 73, is traveling with a group of strangers halfway across the world.  The only reason she's traveling alone is because Art (her boyfriend/partner/whatever) can't handle the altitude.   Since my dad left, my mother has continued to gain and lose weight, but she's also traveled to the five continents she hadn't yet been to (and now can say she's hit all seven), and found a man who acts as though he's the president of her fan club.   Somehow, my mom and I have been conditioned to consider just the first of those to define her.  It stands to reason that I define myself with those same parameters (though my mom has always thought me beautiful).  I just don't really want to anymore.