Whenever I plan to get together with people I haven’t seen in a long time, the first thing I stress out about is my weight. I gained fifty pounds with my first pregnancy. By the time I got pregnant again 17 months after Viva was born, I’d lost forty of it. I gained thirty-five pounds with my second pregnancy and lost nothing. This weekend I got together with people who haven’t seen me since I was wearing a wedding dress I’d spent five months starving my way into .
I worried obsessively that Odie’s friends were going to take one look at me and think, “Whoa, the years have not been kind to her!”
Lately, I am at home in my own skin. Not so much my loose, saggy neck skin that belongs on a 70 year-old version of me, but the rest of it. That is not to say I am happy being 40 pounds overweight. I’m just comfortable. I have things in perspective.
When I was 25, I took a steak knife to my right thigh and sliced seven parallel gashes into it because I hated my thighs. I still don’t like the way they look, but I dislike pain even more. And Gwyneth Paltrow even more than THAT. If she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, then I’m doing okay.
Every vacation I have ever taken was preceded by weeks of me planning to lose “x” number of pounds by “y” date. Unlike most people, I love algebra, but these equations never worked out. I was going to be a size 4 on my 1997 trip to Paris. Mais, non! I could barely snap my pants when I got on l’avion. In 2002, I accompanied a boyfriend to a wedding in Hawaii. Good thing I purchased a back-up dress, because my slimming plans went down in Flaming Hot Cheetos.
There are so many more trips, each one a collage of memories of self-denial, self-rebellion, and self-loathing. The only reason I actually got into my wedding dress is because when I brought it home from David’s Bridal (well aren’t I fancy?), I put it on and the zipper went up about 3/4 of the way. With one month remaining before my wedding, I had no choice. Unlike the Hawaii wedding, I couldn’t dash into a store at the last minute and buy a different dress.
We planned the camping trip six months ago, so I figured I could easily take off sixty pounds in that time. At the end of each month, when I saw how ineffective my Ben and Jerry’s Red Velvet Cake ice cream diet was, I shrugged and decided “next month.¨ You don’t need much algebra savvy to recognize that come March, a 60 pound weight loss by April 5 is incongruent with reality.
I only had one choice: Show up fat.
It turns out, no one was there to see me looking fantastic by the campfire. We shared meals, drank beers, chased kids, pretended we gave a shit about every single lady bug the girls caught, and had a fantastic time!
We’re going to do it again next year.
I have about 10 months to lose 50 pounds. Wish me luck.
The Friendly Pedant by Mrs. Odie 
No offense, but…
Since when did “I’m just being honest” turn into a free pass to say any shitty fucking thing you want?
It falls into the category of “I’m just sayin’.”
Oh, I’m not telling you that you are an untalented hack. I’m just sayin’. Now, if I were just saying, well, that would be a whole ‘nother Oprah. I’m just sayin’. See what I did there?
“Mrs. Odie, you look really tired today. I’m just being honest.” Yeah? Well, you look stupid as ever. Just sayin’.
“Mrs. Odie, I think that you give F’s to students you don’t like. I’m just being honest.” Let’s just pretend for a moment that this isn’t a completely absurd accusation, as my gradebook is available on-line to all my students, and while “Assignments”, “Assessments” and “Participation” are all categories, “Likeability” most assuredly is not.
Can you imagine if we gave A’s to the students we adore and F’s to the students we hate? I can think of one in particular who would not be at Yale right now.
Just sayin’.
I would never have walked up to an adult and maligned her character to her face. In my day, one did not feel entitled to tell adults how we felt about them. Fourteen years in the business and I’m already at the “in my day…” stage. Good grief.
But sometimes I wonder where the “self-esteem movement” has gotten us. “Bullying” is all anyone talks about anymore. Used to be, I couldn’t go buy my groceries without solicitors asking me to donate to the homeless. Now, it’s anti-bullying campaigns. I’m so tired of being asked to stop bullying, I drive by three different grocery stores to avoid twenty-somethings with pamphlets blocking the entrance.
No one talks about teachers being bullied. It happens every day to varying degrees. They go on-line and write vicious, untrue things about us. A parent whose child is about to be in my class is likely to Google me. That’s the biggest reason I write under a pseudonym, but I don’t teach under one.
My husband came home all riled up about a viral video the students love where “one of them” tells off “one of us.” They applaud the little shit while we identify with the adult. If I so much as took a photograph of a student vandalizing school property, or recorded him cussing me out, I’d be fired.
It’s probably always been this way. I’ve just reached a certain age where I’m so far away from 15, I don’t remember what it feels like. Adults have forever been horrified by the way youth challenges our way of being in the world. It’s just that in the fifties, when kids were standing up to adults and demanding that they stop being racist cockbags, it seemed more like a movement. I’m not “the Man.” I just want you to know the difference between a gerund and a participle. Now, it just seems like the purpose of standing up to grown-ups is to get a video on You Tube and to be an asshole.
I’m just being honest.
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