Eat the Damn Cake

So remember how Bear got that new job? He’s been working really, really hard since then. Sometimes he’s at the office until 11:30. Sometimes he’s working until 4 am. I don’t know how anyone can work for that long. Actually, I don’t know how anyone can do anything for that long. I don’t think I’d be able to watch TV for that many hours in a row. There’s a slight chance I might be able to cuddle with Bear for that long. But that’s about it.

Anyway, tonight I’m meeting his team.  And I’m really nervous.

(us, before the last work event I attended, when I went so far as to straighten my hair)

Tonight is not really about me meeting his team. It’s about everyone getting together for office solidarity, or something along those lines. Bear set it up. He said, “Are you free Wednesday?”

I was surprised.

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I just sat here and wrote an entire post that was so bad I can’t bring myself to publish it. I’m trying to figure out what I actually want to say.

I think it’s more like this:

I was sitting at this same table three days ago, writing, as usual, and I looked down and hated my stomach passionately. I hated it for existing. For the physical weight of it. For its soft curve. The way I can’t ever completely suck it in. It was, in that moment, an alien parasite, attached to my body. Something that could never belong.

Poor stomach. It didn’t do anything wrong.

I want to go back in time and pinpoint the instant when this thing started. When I irreversibly decided that this was bad.

I remember standing in the hall with my mom, when I was seven or so, and there was a party going on in the living room and kitchen. I looked up at her and thought she was incredibly beautiful. I reached out and touched her gorgeous belly, which swelled out slightly, and I said, “You look like you’re pregnant.”

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Last night, my brother and I were standing at the checkout counter at the CVS, buying batteries for our dad’s insulin pump, and a row of magazines was staring me in the face. They were almost at face-height, really, and some airbrushed movie star or model’s perfectly flat stomach was flashing me tauntingly.

Without thinking, I read aloud the first words I saw:

“What Do Guys Lust After in July?” I laughed and said, “Enlighten me,” sarcastically to the closest magazine.

The guy behind the counter, a young Indian man, said something so quietly I didn’t catch it the first time.

“What?” I said, embarrassed and thinking I might have handed him the wrong amount.

“Ice cream?” he said again, louder. “We lust after ice cream?”

Everyone started laughing.

“Makes a lot of sense,” agreed my brother, another man who would soon face the scorching month in question.

Actually, we’d gotten ice cream just minutes before, at a nearby Thomas Sweet.

But the point is, if you’d like to know what a man wants, maybe you should just ask him.

*  *  *

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in a bikini. I know I hated it a couple weeks ago, but yesterday I put one on, and it looked great. Depends on my mind.

P.S. New post at Skipping School, in response to a NY Times piece about homeschoolers.

Here are the mirrors I look in every day:

Bathroom

Full-length, on the door

Subway window, while it’s underground

(ok, didn’t quite capture a window there, but you get the idea)

Compact that I keep in my purse

Except for the subway, which is a wildcard, I know my mirrors pretty well. And I don’t like strange mirrors coming into my life and trying to tell me things about myself.

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So here’s a problem: you like this guy who you keep running into at the poetry open mic that the bar down the street does every other week. You were both a little drunk last time, and you exchanged numbers, but then he didn’t text, and now you really want to text him, but you don’t want to look desperate. What do you do?

I get asked to solve this problem a lot.

And you know what I’m really tired of? The word “desperate.” You know which other words I hate? “Clingy” and “needy.”

“Do you think I’ll look desperate?” my friend was asking me yesterday.

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This guest post makes me want to stand up and cheer. Which looks awkward when you’re alone in your apartment. But is worth it anyway. Thank you so much, Anna!

Hello, everyone!  My name is Anna.  I’m a post-liberal arts degree part-time pregnant nanny.  Normally I blog over at www.icyviolets.com, where I usually restrict my writing to the beautiful processes of making and consuming food.  But my interests run from food to fashion to body image to women’s issues…and of course when all of these things come together, as on Kate’s blog, I am hooked!

So I was delighted when she asked me to do a guest post on our society’s ideas of what constitutes a “normal” body.  To put it into context, her invite was prompted by this comment I left on her post of a week or two ago, Bikinis Hate Food:

“The other day I was reading about women’s struggles with their post-partum figure, and read some statistic that said that 86% of women don’t return to a ‘normal’ figure within a year of birth. And all I could think was, shouldn’t that stat, that huge majority, make a NEW normal?? why do we consider adolescent bodies the norm for adult women?”

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