I think the answer everyone would like to give is yes, but the honest one is no. Are there times when you’d like to say or do something, but don’t for fear of how others will react? I think that everyone has moments like that, and that means you’re not giving out the real you. I’m not necessarily saying that this is a bad thing, just pointing out that I’m not sure anyone in today’s world really shows their true self all the time.

If you show your raw and uncensored self to the world, you have to be prepared for the reactions you get, and not let them affect you. I only know one person who claims that she is like this and that’s my mother, and she’s one of the most unhappy people I’ve ever known. I don’t know if her unhappiness stems from a complete inability to connect with anyone or whether the inability to connect is because she’s extremely critical of the world and just about everything in it, from my father on outward, but there it is. And I’m not sure she really operates that way all the time anyway, no matter what she says.

The problem is that the only place that you can really be you without the pressure of what others think of you is in your head. You can’t even keep a journal really, because if someone reads it you’re exposed. And heaven forbid that you put your thoughts on the Internet and tell anyone you know where they are, because at some point, the temptation will be too great and those who might not like what they see will give in and read it.

I saw this happen just recently with a blog that I occasionally read; nice lady, sahm, two kids, one with some sort of learning disability, and she blogged about her life as a way to connect with others, sort out thoughts, make sense of things, etc. Her 11-year-old son gave in to temptation and read everything one day, and didn’t like what she had said, none of which was untrue, but some of it evidently left him feeling exposed and violated. I checked back in today, and her blog is completely gone from the face of the Internet, which is a bit sad. Blogging and/or journaling can be cathartic, and now she’s cut herself off from that kind of outlet. I’m sure she did what she thinks is best for her son at this point, but what about what’s best for her?

I know that no one knows the true me, not even my husband who comes the closest but still falls far short of the mark. I also know that I have things I want to say about my life that I wouldn’t necessarily want to share with people I know, but that I still need to get out of my system somewhere somehow. Even here at Size 4 Jeans where I blog privately and completely unconnected from the rest of my life online and off, I’ve probably censored myself whilst worrying (albeit subconsciously) about what people who read here (all two of you) will think of me, despite my thoughts in the beginning of being here to say what I want to say without worrying about what other people will think or do.

Screw that. How’s that for the raw me? I’m beginning to wonder how a person can go through life never projecting who they really are, warts and all. I want to say what I feel and be done with it, but I know that I can’t always do that because, unlike my mother, I care what people think of me to a point, if only because it makes life easier to care sometimes in some ways. But I will do it here, and with any luck it will carry over at least a little bit to the rest of my life. After all, if people can’t accept the real you, why have them around?

Aside from my own frivolity, I find parties like this to be completely stupid and pointless, and the only reason I go is because my husband is high enough in the company hierarchy that he feels we need to be there, for some completely mysterious reason that I, not having a management degree, don’t understand. Every year, he calls me from the office in mid-November and says “Do you want to go to the Christmas party?” and I say “Why are you asking me this?” Since he feels we need to be there, it’s pretty silly to ask me if I want to go, especially when he knows the answer is a resounding “no!”

What’s wrong with parties like this? Here comes my soapbox recitation: Firstly, every one that I’ve ever been to is “buffet style.” Yuck! Just…YUCK! Even if the food is marginally good, by the time you stand around in the buffet line at least once and haul your plate(s) full of food back to your table it’s more than likely cold, and really, is the food ever better than “marginally good” to begin with? And if the food isn’t marginally good at serving temperature, it’s going to be downright awful cold. And then there’s the issue of touching the same serving utensils that 100 other people have touched whilst filling your plate, and then sitting down to eat your food. Sure, you could head for the restroom to wash your hands between filling your plate and sitting down to eat, but that provides even more time for the food on your plate to chill.

Secondly, assuming you’re lucky enough to be seated with people who have anything interesting to say, the tables at parties of this nature are too large for comfortable conversation with your tablemates, since the tables tend to be round and seat 10-12 people. Even with everyone rubbing elbows like they usually are when cutting their meat, a round table that seats 10-12 in any comfort at all is large enough that talking to anyone not sitting right next to you is a chore, and usually requires raising your voice or even (dare I say) shouting to be heard.

Need I go on? Well, yes I believe I do. Usually the music and the noise level in the room are things only a DJ could love. What ever happened to background music during dinner? As if it isn’t difficult enough to converse during dinner at a table for 12, there has to be dance music blaring at such a level that you can’t hear yourself think, much less other people near you talking at a normal level. So everyone in the room is shouting in between bites of food, and sometimes with food in their mouths, and it just gets louder and louder until it’s just an unintelligible cacophony of useless noise. Some party, eh?

To add to all of this loveliness, there’s always the ubiquitous misbehavior of some of the party goers. People will drink too much and make others uncomfortable as well as make complete asses of themselves. When the alcohol is flowing freely and the food is less than good, and everyone is feeling obliged to be merry because they’re supposed to be having fun, it’s just a natural outcome. People seem to think that it’s okay to be mannerless and let their hair down at functions like these. Well, maybe there are some who have no manners to begin with, but others just have no self control.

In general, dinner parties aren’t what they used to be. Gone are the days when seating arrangements were carefully considered t encourage stimulating conversation, and the environment was conducive and the tables small enough to encourage such conversation. I realize that company parties aren’t exactly easy, since the guest list is comprised of those who “have to be there” and anyone else in the company who wants to show up for whatever reason, but there are things that could be done to reintroduce some style and grace into the evening.

The reintroduction of style and class needs to start with the hotel, and whoever is planning or hosting the event. Smaller tables would be a huge help, as would a seated dinner that is served to diners by wait staff. Hors d’oeuvres served during the cocktail hour are great, and can be helpful in slowing the consumption of alcohol before dinner. Within the company, a person from each department needs to be part of the planning committee to help with seating arrangements. The committee should, as much as possible, try to arrange seating so that people sitting together have a common ground for interesting conversation, that doesn’t have much to do with the work environment. Try to think about people’s outside interests, as well as any potential problems that may exist between employees or their spouses when filling the tables.

When planning the entertainment, instruct the DJ or musicians to provide background music at a reasonable level during the cocktail hour and dinner, so as not to drown out the conversation you’ve so carefully planned for. And while there’s not much you can do about those folks who are bound to drink too much, if the party is elevated to a higher level of class and style through planning and presentation, perhaps fewer people would feel the need to behave inappropriately. If the conversation and food is good and people are having fun, instead of making excuses to run out the door as soon as the dessert table is empty, they’ll stay longer and it will be a company party to remember.

//off soapbox

1. Getting married. Don’t get me wrong. Getting married is fine, but once is enough. To get married again I’d have to do the “big D” and if I do that, I sure won’t get married again anyway, so there you have it!
2. Having kids. Again, don’t get me wrong here, but two is enough! If I manage to survive the two I have with my sanity intact, I’ll be doing well.
3. Joining a group of women to do anything. Think quilt or craft guilds, reading groups, PTAs, whatever. Women in groups of more than two are a PITA.
4. Buying a couch that doesn’t have the back cushions attached. I HATE the couch and loveseat in my living room. The back cushions are just pillows, and it never looks neat after someone sits on them. No one in the house but me can figure out how to arrange them properly either, so I either have to blow it off and deal with it looking like crap or fix it myself constantly. Grrrr.
5. Working outside the home in a “real job.” So yeah, I’m spoiled. With any luck I’ll continue to be spoiled so that I don’t have to put up with all the politics and social jockeying that goes along with working in an office or something like that. With a little more luck, I won’t have to be “spoiled” too much longer because the work I do at home will start buying more than Starbucks daily…
6. Buying vampire books by Anne Rice. I liked them until the fourth or fifth one, and then she just got toooo weird. I’m not even sure I can stomach reading the first ones anymore. Isn’t it funny how our taste changes as we get older?

7. Moving to a country that doesn’t speak English. Okay, I’m stuck in Germany right now, but I hope to never have to do it again. It’s not that I’m not good at languages; I guess I could be if I wanted to spend the time to learn properly, but I just don’t want to spend my time that way. Not speaking the local language does have it’s drawbacks though, especially when there is a problem with the phone or the power or something else fairly critical like that.
8. Purchasing a pure bred cat. One of the more expensive mistakes I’ve made recently was to purchase a kitten from a breeder. This cat is far and away the worst one we’ve ever had. Mannerless, dumb, ill-behaved, and just an all around PITA. It may have something to do with having the same mommy kitties on both sides of the family tree (as in, too much inbreeding) and/or a poor breeder, but why take a chance on getting another one just as bad? I’ll stick with the strays that show up at your door or in the paper when you’re not expecting them, thanks.
9. Reading books about Pern that are not by Anne McCaffrey. I’m a Pern snob, and I’m sorry, but having anyone else write Pern stories, even her son Todd McCaffrey, just doesn’t make it. The “voice” is all wrong. It’s really okay to let the world of Pern live on in it’s present form, as complete as it will ever be since Anne is getting on in years, without trying to keep the money coming in by letting someone else write the stories. Make up your own world Todd, and find your own voice.
10. Teaching quilting at a small quilt shop. It’s just not really any fun anymore. Maybe this is because the shop where I live is kind of lame, but even when I’ve been teaching elsewhere locally, it’s still not exactly fun. I realize it’s not all fun and it’s a job, but if you don’t enjoy what you do, why do it?
11. Buying loads of wine to have at home. We just don’t drink it anymore, and we have 100+ bottles in the basement as it is which are probably only good for vinegar at this point. I’m a girl who likes a sure thing, and a bottle of wine is not a sure thing. You open a bottle and maybe it’ll be good, but maybe it won’t, and maybe it’ll go well with the food or maybe not. A Cosmopolitan goes with everything (IMO) and I know it’ll be good 95 times out of 100, because I make it myself and the only way to seriously muck it up is to put a bad lime in it.
12. Spending any time at all in a bathing suit in public. I want a private pool/sauna/jacuzzi in my house/yard, thank you very much. I used to spend a lot of time swimming (when I was much younger) and I would still enjoy it if I could do it privately. I’m just not into the whole “sharing a pool with people you don’t know” thing. Ick.
13. Flying in coach class. Well, we can all dream, can’t we? I hate flying anyway, but coach is just the worst. Oh, to be able to afford business class on a regular basis!

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I remember feeling like I wasn’t pretty when I was younger, and I had really poor self esteem from the time I was a teenager until I was in my early thirties. I have to say that I think the media and magazines contributed to the problem. Looking at all those perpetually beautiful people in magazines and movies and on TV, I thought I’d never measure up. My mother never understood what the problem was, and never tried to as far as I could tell then or now.

I don’t remember ever having the kind of conversations with my mother that I have with my own daughter about why the magazines and movies and TV aren’t real, and how those people don’t really look like that off the camera, because the photos are all airbrushed and Photoshopped to make perfection seem real. Frankly, I think my mother was jealous of me because I was thin and she wasn’t, and she never wanted to have children anyway (so she’s repeatedly told me), so maybe that was part of the reason for her attitude.

I never thought I was fat when I was younger though, not even when I looked at all the models in the magazines. I was at least sensible enough to realize that “fat” just wasn’t anything close to what I was. In fact, I wished for more curves, because “sexy” to me was a Victoria’s Secret model, and I had bones, not curves and no breasts to speak of at all. I was a stick until I had kids, and I didn’t have any breasts until I could afford to fix that problem with a trip to the plastic surgeon when I was 30.

I may never know exactly what it was that helped me get past most of the self esteem issues, but somehow I just got over it. Part of it was learning more about myself, about what I like and don’t like and learning to live with it. Part of it, I’ll admit, was having breast augmentation surgery (I really just wanted my top to look like it belonged with my bottom, size-wise), and learning to apply makeup perfectly and professionally so that I look my best and am happy with the look. I learned to trust my own sense of style and color when I dress and do my hair.

There are still things I wish I could change (in a perfect world), like the mole under my eye or the fact that I still have a tendency to look pear shaped, since extra weight settles on my hips. But overall, I accept the way I look, I’ve fixed the part I really couldn’t live with, and I am who I am. I don’t look at models with envy wishing I could look like they do, because I’ve learned how to look my best, and if you look your best and project self confidence, you can stand with the models no matter your size or looks.

These are all things my mother never taught me, even though I needed to know and asked her when I was a teen. She didn’t know, I guess, and wasn’t ever willing to help me figure it out. I think I could have been a happier teen if I had felt less gawky and nerdy. I remember envying the pretty girls who always had perfect hair and makeup and clothes, because no matter how I tried I couldn’t look like that. I didn’t know how and there was no one to teach me. It’s hard to project a self confidence you don’t feel, and if you don’t know how to make yourself look like you want to look, self confidence might be hard to obtain. There were other deeper self esteem issues, I know, but maybe those would have been easier to figure out if the (possibly) simpler external things could have been taken care of earlier.

I try to pass these things on to my daughters, but it’s not easy. I tell my oldest daughter how lucky she is that I can share these types of things, because my mother never could. She’s a gorgeous girl, and knowing how to do her hair and makeup so she feels good just makes her even more beautiful. Unfortunately, she still has poor self esteem, and she thinks she’s fat. I don’t see how she can look at some of those models in the fashion magazines she devours and call herself fat in any way. She’s on the edge of being underweight (by the charts anyway), she’s smaller than all of her friends, and still she insists she’s fat and eats like a bird.

Even if she was thinner than she is now, she’ll never look like either those models or like I looked when I was her age, because she has bigger bones. She weighs more than I do now (by all of 3 pounds or something); she’s thinner in places like her hips because she has a teen’s figure, but her wrists and ankles are bigger because her bones are just bigger than mine. So somehow she looks at me and thinks she’s the fat one. Please. Obviously there are deeper issues with her as well, and I’m sure some therapist will eventually tell her that it’s all my fault, just like a couple of them have tried to tell me over the years that it was my mother’s fault. I don’t think they’re completely right, but maybe not completely wrong either. We all do the best we can, and we all try to do at least one thing better than our parents did when they raised us. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

The makeup and hair and clothing tips and knowledge I can share, but the deeper self image issues are much harder. I talk to my daughter all the time about how unhealthy and half-starved some of these models look, but it doesn’t seem to sink in. The media is going to continue to feed us these “perfectly beautiful” waifs who never let a cream puff past their lips and our children are going to keep being affected by it. Whether it’s a girl feeling inadequate because she doesn’t think she’ll ever be as pretty as the models or thinking she’s fat because her ribs aren’t visible in a bikini, it’s not good.

I can give you one major reason: because some people out there think it’s okay to treat volunteers like dirt on their shoes, to be walked on and wiped off at the first opportunity. I’m all for doing your absolute best when you say you’ll do something, whether you’re getting paid for it or not. That being said, everyone makes mistakes, and there is usually more that needs to be done than anyone has time for, but the people who are not volunteering to help in any way at all have very little right to criticize anything, and no right to any non-constructive criticism.

Most importantly, if you have constructive criticism that you think will help the organization or the process, presenting it to the volunteer privately is the best way to go; sending your complaints out in a mass email to everyone in the organization is sure to alienate people, and will probably make you look the fool in the long run. Part of the issue may be the fact that it’s far easier to go off on someone in an email than it is in person. In an email, you can say what you want, and the fear of how they’ll respond is diminished, if it was ever there at all.

Volunteers aren’t always asking for gushing praise and thanks, though that never hurts either. But if you’re not willing to pitch in and help out, don’t tell the volunteer how to do the job (that they’re doing for free, remember), and especially don’t do it in such a way as to be obvious about the fact that you are trying to make that volunteer look stupid. It’s put up or shut up time, folks.

Example 1: She’s been begging (okay, most of the time it’s more like demanding) for us to take her skiing for ages. My husband finally caves in, and makes arrangements for a ski week, including lessons for everyone (except me; I don’t ski and don’t want lessons either). She said she wanted to learn to snowboard, and my husband needs more skiing lessons and my youngest hasn’t ever skied at all. After the plans are firmly in place, the announcement is made, but the teenager isn’t happy because the trip is not taking her to Switzerland! So fine, she won’t go. She can stay home with me and eat frozen food. Whatever.

Example 2: She dropped her digital camera, which she’s never kept in a case despite the fact that we made sure that she got to pick out the “perfect” case for it when it was new. After dropping it (and probably due in part to all the prior abuse), it didn’t work anymore, and she expected us to just lay down the credit card to buy her a new one, post haste. “But what am I supposed to do without a camera?” she says. WTF?

This kid has a serious problem understanding the difference between rights and privileges. “Rights” in this family are: a place to live, food to eat, clothing to wear. This does not mean that I have to buy special food, like applesauce in single serving tubs (because she’s too lazy to open a jar and put the applesauce into a dish) or special protein water, or buy her fancy designer clothing that she likes and just “has to have.” The food and clothing just have to fuel and cover her body, respectively. If we’re nice enough (or can afford) to buy her special food and clothing, that’s a privilege.

Going skiing anywhere is a privilege, which is clearly not understood either. I soooo appreciate the school she went to in 8th grade that decided skiing was “team building” and made it a required part of the curriculum to send my child on the class trip to Switzerland that year. I listened to her moan and groan and piss and complain about going for months before the trip. She absolutely didn’t want to go. We spent a huge amount of money outfitting her just in clothing and ski wear for the trip. She called home in tears two days into the week long ordeal, because she was so sore and tired and miserable.

Then she came home after the ski week, exclaiming over how much fun skiing was, and she’s been demanding that we take her skiing every winter since then. “When do I get my ski trip?” she says. Um, what? “My” ski trip? Thank you school, for prodding my daughter into attempting to make my life hell over yet another entitlement issue. I really appreciate that. And now, Garmish at the American resort hotel isn’t good enough for her, nothing but Switzerland will do.

These are just two of the medium to large issues that I deal with from this kid. There are about a billion small-ish ones of the same type, where she displays this “entitlement” attitude. I hear that this generation of teens is just like this, though I have no real proof or other examples of it. Perhaps that’s just my mother trying to make me feel better about it all (though that would be a bit of a shock coming from her; that’s not her normal modus operandi, by any means). My mother does tell me that I wasn’t anything like this. My other daughter, just coming up on 11 years old, doesn’t display these issues at all; she’s not a teen yet, but daughter #1 was like this even when she was eight, and it’s only gotten worse as the years go by.

So I’m back to wondering what we did wrong with the first one, or whether we really did anything “wrong” at all. The second child seems fine, and we’ve done nothing different with her, so can this even be blamed on bad parenting? Or is it something inside this kid that’s just screwed up? Sometimes, the only thing to do is keep in mind that she will grow up and move out, and life will bite her in the ass like it does with people like her, and try to keep my temper until that “move out” time arrives. I fully expect that she’ll be moving out (and expecting me to be mad about it, yeah, right) when she turns 18. *sigh* Only 891 more days…

I can always think of something else to do besides clean house, and it really takes no effort whatsoever to get on with something else entirely when faced with cleaning the bathroom. Add to that the fact that it takes about 30 seconds for the rest of the people in this house to dirty it up again, and there’s just no hope of ever turning me into my grandmother. My wonderful grandmother, may she rest in peace, LOVED to clean. Okay, maybe she didn’t love it (though she sure did it a lot), but maybe that was just because it gave her something else to be a martyr about. However it truly was with her, her house was always clean, and she was well and truly over set when she got to the point where she keep the house to her satisfaction any longer, because she was just too old.

Well, I’m not THAT old, not even close, but there are some cleaning tasks that my hands, arms and back just don’t handle well anymore. My hands and forearms are weak due to chronic tenosynovitis, and any really strenuous or repetitive action (think scrubbing sinks and bathtubs to remove lime deposits or stovetops to remove whatever’s been baked on) and then my hands hurt and I can’t do the things I LIKE to do. Ha, sorry, not going to go there. As for the back, well, vacuuming is okay, but bending over scrubbing bathtubs and/or floors doesn’t make it either.

There you have it, in a nutshell: why I don’t go out of my way to clean. But then there’s the guilt. I don’t work outside the home, though I DO work, and most days it’s more than a solid eight hours, between web design, quilting, kids and regular house stuff like laundry and shopping and meals. But I still feel bad (a little) that I don’t keep the house cleaner and shinier. So then I hire someone else to do it, and I feel guilty about paying someone else to do what I could be doing.

Then again, I pay someone else to change the oil in my car, though I (or more likely my husband) could very well do it. The mechanic is just better at it, has the right tools, and does it all day long so he’s faster at it too. The same could be said for the cleaning person. She’s better at it, has the right tools, and does it all day long. And let me tell you how much faster she is than I am: in three hours, she was like Wonder Woman in my house. It was amazing. It would have taken me six hours, minimum, to do what she did in three.

After she left, I washed a few of my windows, which she doesn’t like doing, and that’s one of the things I don’t mind. Yes, there are a few tasks I don’t mind doing, like windows or vacuuming, or…well, like windows or vacuuming. Can’t think of many others right now, but they may come to me in time. But it was easier for me to have a go at the windows, because the bathrooms and the kitchen weren’t crying out for cleaning attention anymore. And when I know she’s going to show up on Tuesday mornings, Monday night sees the whole family decluttering the house, and putting things away where they belong, so that she CAN clean. The house stays cleaner all around, and there’s less clutter that’s just THERE forever, until I have a clutter overload and get mad at everyone and make them pick up all their junk.

I’m just going to have to get over the guilt at this point and move on. C’est la vie. If I’m a bad person because I HATE to clean, I’m a bad person. Meh.

And no, I was not anorexic, as doctors used to worry with pointed looks at my mom during those yearly checkups during childhood. Okay, maybe I was technically anorexic based on my height and weight, but I didn’t throw up my food voluntarily to stay thin. That’s just gross. But I couldn’t gain weight. It was physically difficult, if not impossible. I actually tried to gain weight once, because I thought the Army sounded like a good idea and they wouldn’t let me enlist if I didn’t weigh 120 pounds or something. I ate and ate, and still was 1.5 pounds shy of the minimum, and I finally gave up trying to get in and considered it their loss (thank goodness I came to my senses, I decided later, olive drab not being my color and all). I lost that “extra” weight that I put on for the Army in short order with no effort beside just eating normally, and when I got married at 22, I carried only 94 pounds on my 5′8″ frame. Can you say “skin and bones?”

Yup, that was too thin. I was often sick, since I guess my immune system was not up to snuff because I was sooo thin. I wonder what my husband saw in that stick, sometimes. Cooking dinner every night added ten pounds to my body in about a year though, and having babies completed the transformation from “stick” to “pear.” Then I had hips, but no boobs. I was definitely not blessed in that department, and while my breasts were a bit closer to a nice size (but still not the perfect size, truthfully) while I was pregnant or nursing, that little bonus left with the extra baby fat after delivery of the little bundle of joy.

My mother is a definitive pear shaped woman, so I come by that fairly honestly, but she at least has breasts, though her hips are proportionately larger and she has that relatively small waist which is where the pear part comes in. Okay, she has way too much in the breasts department, so I’m not at all sure why I was left out, but there it is. Just so you have the full picture here, a little trip to the plastic surgeon fixed that problem in my early thirties, and I have no regrets on that score. Now at least I am balanced, breasts to hips, and I feel more feminine instead of like an adolescent boy.

These days, I like a lot of foods that I wouldn’t have touched in my youth, and it’s correspondingly harder to stay thin. Granted, I’m not sick as often anymore, and I generally feel better overall (and there aren’t so many bony parts sticking out!), but there’s no way I’m going to watch the numbers on the scale climb any higher than they already have, thank you very much. Size 4 is just the right size.

I turned 40 earlier this year, and while the years have been good to my shape I know it won’t last without some intervention on my part. I’ll say it again, I HATE exercise. Blech. It’s not fun, and no matter how much I tell myself it should be, can be, will be fun and good for me, I still HATE it. Yes, that four letter word, HATE, will always be capitalized when it’s attached to the word “exercise.” Get used to it. BUT (and that’s a big “BUT,” which is also something I don’t like!), I like clothes. Specifically, I like having LOTS of clothes to choose from, so I can wear what fits my mood any particular day, or go without doing laundry for a couple of weeks. Yeah, I hate laundry too, but note the lack of capitalization on that one. Laundry doesn’t produce the same level of angst as exercise does, for sure.

The problem with the clothing is that if your weight goes up, your clothes don’t fit right. Jeans aren’t comfortable if they’re cutting into the fat on your hips (aside from being even more uncomfortable in more sensitive regions), and they don’t look good if they’re so tight that you’ve got muffin tops above the waistband. That muffin tops vision is courtesy of my daughter’s sixth grade Australian English teacher. She was a hoot, and she told her students that one day, that they shouldn’t wear jeans that were so tight that they caused muffin tops to show!

So what to do if your jeans are too tight? Buy more in a bigger size? No, no, no my friend. Never do that. If you do that, there’s no incentive to lose those muffin tops now is there? And why would you want to spend part of your precious clothing budget on the same kinds of clothes that you already have in your closet but can’t wear at the moment but for a little self control? If you start buying clothes in a bigger size, then you get into that whole “fat clothes, skinny clothes” thing, where your closet is separated by the Great Divide between what fits and what doesn’t and there’s no going back.

Then you get into that guilt thing, because you have all these too-small clothes that you can’t wear that are just taking up room, and maybe you start to feel like you’ve wasted money on them or you feel guilty that you haven’t lost the weight. That guilt will make it even harder to lose weight, and meanwhile you might even gain more, and have to go buy clothes in an even bigger size. The vicious cycle rolls on.

So I am conscious of (note that I did not say “obsessed with”) my weight. I am not willing to buy more clothes in a bigger size; I have a hard enough time finding clothes I like as it is in the size I am now, but that’s another issue altogether. And yes, being conscious of my weight means that I sometimes think I need to lose a few pounds, which gets harder and harder as the years go by. As my “over 40″ body starts to crawl up toward 120 pounds, I’ve realized that metabolism isn’t my friend anymore, and now I have to confront that big HATE-ing exercise issue head on. I will do it though, because I’m just not going to go down that Great Divide road. Nope, not going to go there.

You know, this has nothing do do with whether I love them or not, because everyone can use a break now and then without feeling guilty about not missing someone because they’re not around. I thoroughly enjoyed their weekend absence for various reasons. Let’s see, the kids weren’t arguing because only one of them was here, I didn’t have to fix big meals because he wasn’t here, I had the bed to myself sans the oh-so-soothing symphony of his snoring, and I had a break from teenager attitude and demands. What’s not to enjoy?

We go through this every time one of us is out of the house overnight which is just ludicrous. It’s not that I don’t like being around my husband and family, but I certainly don’t pine away for them when they’re not around, even if it’s for a couple of weeks. Maybe if I could ship the kids off to grandma for the entire summer, or if my husband would take a job in Singapore for a year I might get to the missing point, but probably not too quickly. I mean, you miss people when they’re gone, like moved away or dead or something like that, not when they go on a jaunt for a weekend.

Sometimes I feel like he must have married the wrong girl, because I am sooo not dependent enough to suit him. I like being alone, thinking my own thoughts, and I don’t get much of that alone thing these days. My creativity levels were soaring this weekend, and still are for that matter, though I wonder how long it’ll last now that life is “back to normal.” And of course, if he decides that I’m irritated because he’s acted like a sap because I said that I didn’t miss them, then he’ll just say he knows how I am, and it doesn’t bug him, it’s no big deal and all that. But we both know which is the real lie here, don’t we?

**P.S. I had planned a different post for today, but then this irritation came up and the whole post was running screaming through my head, so I finally let it find its way to the screen. I’ll get to that whole “Size 4″ thing later…