Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It

by Brittany Gibbons

  Con: The questions

  First of all, the question you should never get is “are you pregnant,” because by the time this book comes out, I assume some form of civil rights legislation will have passed making asking a woman that question a hate crime. But you might still get other absolutely ridiculous questions and comments that you will have to be prepared to answer while pregnant, so I’ve decided to help.

  Q. You are so big, are you having twins?”

  A. “No, it’s just one boy, but his penis is huge.”

  Q. “Are you going to breastfeed?”

  A. “You know, I’ve tried it, and I’m just not that into it, but my mom has huge areoles, so it may just be a texture thing. I won’t rule it out if I’m drunk, though.”

  Q. “Wow, you’re really eating for two.”

  A. “Actually, I’m eating for ten. I have a tapeworm and I’m infested with botflies.”

  Q. “If it makes you feel better, you don’t look pregnant at all from behind.”

  A. “That actually doesn’t make me feel better, because babies don’t come out of your anus, and it’s unsettling to me that you think they do.”

  Q. “You’re still pregnant? It seems like it’s been forever!”

  A. “I’ve decided not to have this baby until gay people can get married in every state.”

  Con: The labor

  Prior to giving birth, especially in the final few weeks, you experience a desperate need to eject the baby from your body. You are swollen, your back hurts, your labia lips ache, and every time you take ten steps, you put your hands between your legs fully expecting to find a leg dangling there. You yearn for labor as a means of relief, and in your head and those marathon episodes of A Baby Story on TLC, labor is going to be a magical event where your cervix becomes the embodiment of the soul of Mother Nature, your insides twisting and turning to release this new force of life into the world.

  The reality is that labor is pretty fucking terrible for about 90 percent of the population; the other 10 percent are either high or lying to themselves. In the old days, men used to drop the women off at the door, and then go chill in a cocktail lounge somewhere while their wives were put under using ether and then woken up after the baby was all cleaned up and their hair was freshly curled. What happened to that brand of medical chivalry? Now, due to advanced science and iPhone cameras, we’re awake and present enough to experience everything. There are a few ways you can make the experience more bearable, like breathing exercises and epidurals, but I didn’t go to any childbirth classes and it turns out, after my throat closed up and I began projectile vomiting, I’m allergic to epidurals.

  Natural childbirth is a little bit like going down in an airplane: you have absolutely no choice, there is nothing you can do, your course has been set. Unless you are a pilot or a magician, the plane will crash and the baby will come out of you, one way or another. All you can do is lie there on your double-sided puppy pad and pray you are able to come out of it alive. You might scream at your husband, shit on the table, and hear your vagina skin tear in the process, but with God, your OB, the hospital maintenance guy in there fixing the television static, and the gaggle of interns as my witness, you will.

  Pro: The baby(s)

  At the end of everything, they give you a baby. It doesn’t make you forget all the crappy stuff, that is just bullshit other parents feed you because they are desperate for company, but it’s a fair enough prize. I liken it to getting a tattoo. It’s scary and it hurts really bad, but when it’s over, you are high on euphoria and desperate for another.

  AFTER BIRTH

  Andy and I went on to live through childbirth three times, and by the time we’d brought our third baby home, we pretty much had the whole newborn life down. On a physical level, nothing is the same after you give birth. I walked around like a slowly deflating balloon wearing mesh panties stuffed with adult incontinence pads in an effort to contain the endless blood that was gushing out of me. Everything was sore. My vagina looked as if I’d given birth to an adult bald eagle, feetfirst. I couldn’t even wipe myself, but rather squirted my gentiles with warm water from a squeeze bottle after peeing.

  In fact, you aren’t even supposed to have sex until you are six weeks postpartum, but we ignored that the first time around, and by we I mean Andy, who took advantage of my weakened postpregnancy alcohol tolerance and assured me he’d googled that if you were breastfeeding, getting pregnant was impossible. Long story short, I went to my six-week postpartum doctor’s appointment two weeks pregnant. I had Wyatt almost eleven months to the day after I had Jude. Lesson learned: respect the six weeks. Gigi came two years later.

  On a mental level, life begins to resemble a minimum security prison once kids come along. There are curfews, the food is questionable, and there are strict rules in place to prevent relations as well as emotional outbursts, both between Andy and me, and the three screamy, full-diapered midgets we now cohabitated with. We’ve gone on to witness many of our friends’ marriages break down over the stress and emotional turmoil of new parenthood, and we’d successfully avoided that by spending the six weeks post-baby living like a couple of dudes. I just pushed a baby out of my vagina. A whole baby. Followed by an entourage of umbilical cord, cottage cheese stuff, blood, and a placenta the size of a roast. I was unable to sit without crying, pee without screaming, or poop without biting down on a leather strap. And I don’t want to discount the post-traumatic issues Andy dealt with having witnessed a baby climb out of me a few times. He once asked me to sit with him while he threw up rum in a hotel in Cancún. I told him I couldn’t because if I saw him puke, I wouldn’t be able to kiss him on the mouth the rest of the trip. He’s clearly a better person than I.

  The six weeks of doctor-ordered celibacy was a time to focus on keeping the children alive, fed, and clean. After the first time around, we learned the last thing we needed was another baby in the mix, so we kept our pants zipped and didn’t worry about squeezing in sex to meet a quota or even looking attractive for each other. In fact, aside from the occasional fist bump or bro-hug, we barely touched. This meant I never felt bad about dressing like an asexual high school softball coach, and Andy was kept at enough of a distance that he never rubbed up against the embarrassingly high elastic waistband of my granny panties.

  You don’t need frivolous things like sex or romance clouding up your already frayed judgment during the newborn phase. I have very vivid memories, or as veterans call them, flashbacks, about sticking a pillow over my face and screaming into it as I lay in bed, awoken again by the cries of the baby in the bassinet beside me. And if you thought having friends before kids was hard, once the baby arrives, your ratio of friends is directly proportionate to the number of unstained nursing shirts in your drawer. None. I had none friends. At least none that weren’t reliant on me for survival. It’s actually hard to be best friends with an infant; aside from them looking kind of like you and being able to put your nipple in their mouths, you have nothing in common. And it’s mostly a one-sided relationship. You give them everything, they give you, occasionally, a smile that was probably just a prelude to shooting shit out of the back of their diaper. Yes, yes, there is the sense of completion and wholeness, but they don’t get your jokes, they don’t want to watch America’s Next Top Model with you, and they don’t care about the fight you just had with your husband.

  At the end of six weeks I made my way back to the doctor for a full check, some oohing and aahing over baby photos, and a formal declaration that I was once again open for business. News I cautiously brought home to my awaiting husband who sat desperately on my bed and watched as I packed up my maternity underwear, perineum bottle, and witch hazel pads one final time.

  RHYMES WITH BAHSECTOMY

  “I love having children with you. It’s just that I’d like to not do that anymore,” I explained to him in the booth of an Outback Steakhouse at the halfway point of our eighteen-hour road trip to visit his parents in Florida.

 
It’s a tricky thing, you see. Telling the person you love that you no longer want to clone them in any fashion, ever again, because you’ve simply reached your limit of versions of their existence.

  “I love you,” I assured him, “but I’m finished.”

  Relief spread across his face, and we smiled together in the warm and affordable knowledge that never again would we be making another baby. Shortly after that, an infant cried from across the restaurant and my breasts started to leak. Yes. We were finished.

  What followed was an aggressive game of “not it.” Due to my fear of hormone medication and his distaste for latex and jerking off into socks, we decided to take a surgical approach to birth control. I was initially confused about his fear and the stereotypes surrounding vasectomies. I get that any instance in which his balls are handled in a nonsexual context is unpleasant, but I get my junk handled all the time, sometimes by doctors, sometimes by clumsy medical students, and sometimes by nosy dogs on the street. Getting my tubes tied is invasive and would leave Andy as the sole caregiver to three very small and demanding children if something happened to me. I’d like to think he thought about the consequences of each option thoughtfully, but honestly, I think he was just afraid to be alone with our children. Andy was getting a vasectomy.

  Love had brought us to the outpatient surgical center at 7 A.M. on a Tuesday. It was love that helped me check him in with a three-month-old baby on my hip, and sit in the pre-op room with Andy as his eyes grew heavy and the small old nurse sat between his bare legs in stirrups, gently shaving his testicles. It was love, and probably the general anesthesia, that made Andy not run screaming half naked and bare-balled out of that building that day.

  It was also love that I felt as I sat teary-eyed in the waiting room, surrounded by an odd influx of Mennonite people there, for what I assume was a very different reason. In a few short moments, having babies would be done for me. No more peeing on sticks, or baby kicks, or picking out names. I felt old and menopausal at twenty-eight, an age by which many women aren’t even married or procreating.

  “Mrs. Gibbons?” the woman in scrubs called from the far hallway.

  I looked up, briefly fearful that my mother-in-law had shown at his vasectomy. No, wait, she meant me. Andy was out of surgery, and they had wiped away our fertility faster than it took me to peel the sticky glue from the back of a gift card. As I walked down the hallway to the recovery room, my ovaries played taps.

  We had made this decision together, but I hadn’t expected the sense of finality to it all. Being a mom was going to be my greatest accomplishment and my definition of success in this world. I had found someone to love me despite my garish physical flaws and I had gotten married and I had produced three children better than myself. That alone could be my livelihood. While I may never go on to do anything greater than Jude, Wyatt, and Gigi, I would still go on to do great things because of them.

  11

  THE FOURTH TRIMESTER (THE WORST TRIMESTER)

  “I’M SORRY, I just can’t do this right now.”

  “We’ve done it while you cried before; remember on the couch after War Horse?” he asked.

  “No, it’s not War Horse tears. I’m crying because I feel gross.”

  “I think you look hot,” Andy assured me as he ran his hand down my back. I quickly pulled away, afraid he’d feel the line where the shapewear dug into my back fat. I’d been spending entire days in spandex tubes engineered to suck things in and push things down. I hadn’t felt the natural skin of my stomach since having Gigi, not to mention that I was probably poisoning myself internally with carbon monoxide because I hadn’t fully exhaled in months.

  “I don’t, I just feel disgusting right now, like my whole body,” I sobbed.

  “Well, don’t I get a say in this?” he pleaded.

  Gosh, I don’t know. My initial reaction was to scream, You sure don’t, asshole! But he wasn’t trying to be a selfish jerk; he just didn’t understand. Sure, I could just suck it up and have sex, but I’d be checked out and too consumed with worrying about what was jiggling, slapping, and drooping. My husband could tell me I’m beautiful until he was blue in the face, and it wouldn’t make a difference because I didn’t believe it myself. Hell, I barely believed it before kids, and I especially didn’t believe it after.

  Many women don’t like pregnancy, but I enjoyed it all three times. I am curvy by nature, so the curves and swells exaggerated by pregnancy felt authentic and earned. Instead of walking around in public feeling unwelcome and judged, there was relaxed ease in my step. I could stand in the book aisle and place a hand on my stomach and instantly assure everyone I wasn’t just big, I was pregnant. Someone thought I was wonderful enough to procreate with; how amazing is that, everyone?

  Unfortunately, my postpregnancy body was like making a chubby woman out of silly putty, sticking your finger into the bottom of her throat, and pulling straight down. My body hung on me like an oversize padded jacket. Everything drooped and pooled into my dimpled thighs; I wore my stomach around my hips like a skirt, and my boobs pointed south. I had somewhat gotten used to the large body I had been carrying the first two decades of my life. I didn’t like it, but I understood it. Postpregnancy, everything had moved around and redistributed to new fat areas, and I struggled dressing and accepting a new body. On top of the exterior issues, there were some added interior flaws as well.

  My vagina was like an empty grocery bag

  I peed all the time: when I laughed, when I sneezed, when I ran. I once threw up so violently during a bout of food poisoning that my tampon shot out of me like a Nerf bullet. My vagina had the muscular makeup of those two hand-puppet Martians from Sesame Street. Out of necessity and lack of unlimited access to dry underwear, I began wearing panty liners full-time. Kegel exercises felt weird and unnatural to me, and every time I tried to do them, my right eye reflexively closed, my lips went numb, and I got a headache. My gynecologist insisted that I must be doing them wrong, and mentioned surgery to tighten my vaginal wall. Needle-shy, I opted to give the third option she mentioned, Ben Wa balls, a try.

  Ben Wa balls are small metal balls you insert into your vagina in the hopes that the mere act of keeping them up there will tighten the muscles, making you better able to control your bladder and feel tighter during sex.

  “Just put them in and go about your normal day,” my doctor said with a smile after repeatedly assuring me that they wouldn’t get lost inside my body and float up to my brain. She was looking at me like I was crazy, but she apparently has never had to fish out a lost tampon string while squatting over her grandfather’s toilet.

  I ordered a set online from a sex toy website and when they arrived I followed the instructions to coat them with lube, slip then in, and then proceed with life as they effortlessly strengthened my pelvic floor. I folded laundry as Andy napped on the bed, and I was careful to not move too quickly or cough them out. As I stepped to the side to grab more hangers from the closet, the balls slipped right out of me onto the floor. Thinking that perhaps I hadn’t had them in far enough, I picked them back up, picked off the cat hair, pushed them back in as far as they could go, and penguin-walked back to the basket of clothes on the bed. See, they worked perfectly fine as long as I didn’t move my legs apart.

  “What are you doing, why are you walking like that?” Andy sat up from the bed as I was wobbling my way back from the closet.

  “Nothing, go back to sleep.”

  “Seriously, what are you doing, you look ridiculous?”

  “Nothing. Jesus, stop stalking me,” I snapped.

  “Just move your legs apart,” he insisted.

  I stood glaring at him from the entrance to our walk-in closet and slowly moved my thighs apart. There was a series of weird puckering sounds, and with a light thud, the balls once again dropped to the floor.

  “Did you just shit on the carpet?” he screamed.

  “No, God! They are exercise balls for my vagina; do we have no boundaries anymore?�
�� I cried.

  These things are either total vagina snake oil, or I’ve given my pelvic floor way too much credit. For now, I’ll stick to Always with wings.

  I can’t feel my nipples

  I don’t know if it’s because I let three babies gnaw on them for a few years, or what, but I could get a nipple piercing right now and not bat an eye. Which is unfortunate because Andy rather likes to play with my nipples, and letting him do so often requires an Oscar-level performance on my part to keep his ego in check.

  “Oh yes, baby, my nipples are getting so hard,” I moan, with no actual knowledge of what is happening below my second chin.

  My breasts sit lower, in general. Going braless is no longer an enjoyable act. Gone are the days of getting in my car after work and taking my bra off through my shirt sleeves to drive home braless with the windows down. Now when I stand in my closet and release the hooks of my bra, my boobs fall like gym socks full of quarters. Leaving them loose is hot and hurts my back, so I look for support not only around the house, but even when I sleep.

  I can’t remember anything

  There is a kitschy term for this on parenting websites: it’s called Momnesia. In short, I forget all the shit: appointments, meetings, that I’m walking around in public with depilatory cream on my upper lip, everything. And it doesn’t go away as your kids age; the things you forget just get more important. Like what time school ends, where I parked my car at the airport, my wedding anniversary, or how the self-checkout line at the grocery store works.

  Weight gain

  Well if this isn’t the ultimate fuck-you. First I gain weight while growing the actual baby, and now that it’s over, I keep putting it on. You know those women who brag they lose weight during breastfeeding?