I Can Barely Take Care of Myself by Jen Kirkman

Author:Jen Kirkman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-04-27T15:27:21.444170+00:00

AFTER MY FIRST year of marriage I gained forty pounds.

I shouldn’t say it that way, like I’m blaming the marriage, but everyone I know credited the marriage for my weight gain . . . in a positive way. Friends said, “Well, you found someone and you’re happy and you guys are sitting around eating all the time.” Or, “Something just happens after you get married; your body starts nesting and just putting on weight.” Really? I thought it was because I was eating a block of cheese 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.

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