“I didn’t do a single thing. The more I nursed the weight just fell right off, and now I’m smaller than I was pre-pregnancy!”
I wish they’d die. I was only able to nurse my first two, Jude and Wyatt, for a short period of time, on account of getting pregnant again and having low milk supply. Therefore, I took full advantage of nursing my third child, Gigi, for eleven months, and I put on thirty pounds doing it. I attribute this to the fact that breastfeeding made me ravenously hungry and all my waking hours were spent sitting on my ass nursing my baby. I don’t recall even standing upright until she had her first sippy cup of whole milk.
Hemorrhoids
Go big or go home! That was my mental response to childbirth. You want me to push? Okay, awesome. I’m going to push so hard that I not only eject this baby from me, but I’m also going to turn my butthole inside out. When I explained the issue to my OB, she insisted hemorrhoids were totally normal, and if they didn’t go away, I could get a quick surgery to correct them, a suggestion that I met with a resounding “Nope!” I had already spent a month in elementary school sitting on a blowup pillow, and I’m not pulling my pants down as an adult to have surgery in my butt. So, here I am, five years out from my last birth and sitting in my chair a quarter of an inch taller.
IS MOTHERHOOD SEXY?
I was not in a good place physically, with my body, and mentally things were just as bad. I was having trouble rectifying my mom self with my woman self, which is insane because what’s not womanly about walking around carrying a baby while you pee yourself and bleed from the ass?
My woman self spent a lot of time telling me that I should get dressed; put on a bra with an underwire and jeans without an elastic maternity panel. My mom self reminded me that none of those things were practical, and that it was self-indulgent of me to worry about them when I had kids to raise. Beauty, sex, my marriage, myself . . . I pushed it all down hoping it would still be there by the time my kids moved out and I could afford liposuction and vaginal rejuvenation. I thought ignoring those things would make me a better mom. But the truth was, I was a mediocre mom at best. Obviously, my kids would disagree and tell you I’m fucking brilliant, but from where I stood, I was miserable and insecure with myself, and that was projecting onto everything I did.
I stopped being in pictures with my kids. If you were to flip through our family albums, you’d assume Andy was a single father. I hid behind the lens, pretending it was a fascination with my new camera, but really, it was fear of being photographed. The fastest you will ever see me run is after getting a notification I’ve been tagged in a photo on Facebook.
I stopped spending money on myself. As a mom, that is something we can all relate to. I’d do without and show up at a school event looking like a hobo if it meant my child looked stylish and adorable. I sidelined my own self-care to focus on my kids because I didn’t look good in anything, anyway. A low point for me was when I opened my underwear drawer to realize I didn’t own any underwear that wasn’t maternity underwear, and my youngest was three.
And I stopped having sex with my husband. Not only because I felt unattractive, but because sexiness was a womanly characteristic and I was too busy being a mom to be a woman. I wasn’t able to balance the two, and I wasn’t sure I was supposed to.
Then, the other day I received an email asking me if I thought motherhood was sexy. I laughed wondering if my kids would describe me as sexy to their friends.
“Hey, Wyatt, which mom is your mom?”
“Oh the tall drink of water over there with the messy red bedroom hair and giant tits.”
The email ended up being an ad for a local pole dancing class, which I deleted because it combined two things that I hated: taking my clothes off in front of others and lifting my own body weight. But it did make me think. Of all the instances in life I was supposed to be sexy, I had assumed this whole time that motherhood would be one of the times I could tap out. To me, motherhood felt practical, like I was built for efficiency and snuggles and that’s it.
They don’t teach you in parenting books how to sensually fish a booger out of your daughter’s nose with your pinkie. It wasn’t erotic when the giant vein bulged out of my forehead as I whispered death threats to my tantruming children in the checkout line at Target. I don’t even think the alluring scent of my pheromones made a dent in the thick layer of sticky foreign body fluid that coated my skin each day. I felt like the people who find motherhood sexy shouldn’t be near children, or within one hundred feet of schools.
Looking back, I never thought of my mom as sexy. I thought of her as soft and familiar and low maintenance. I never looked at the other moms at my kids’ school in their matching cardigans and thought, Yeah, I’d fuck them. When I did see a stereotypical “sexy mom” it was in movies like American Pie or on episodes of Cops wearing tank tops that said “MILF.” Good moms weren’t sexy moms. Good moms had snacks in their car and carried Vera Bradley bags covered in buttons with their kids’ sport photos on them.
This is a burden of responsibility and martyrdom that is placed solely on the shoulders of mothers. Pardon my feminism, but was Andy getting emails with tips for how to make fatherhood look sexier? Probably not. Romantic comedies and yogurt ads dictate that we swoon over men who are good with children and pets. Even if they are just doing the exact shit we women do every single day, but for some reason, when we do it, it’s invisible, and when they do it, it’s a Hallmark commercial.
“Did you see how excited your husband was to watch Gigi dance in her tap recital? It was so cute!”
“I did, actually, and it was way sexier than the way I sat in the waiting room of the un-air-conditioned dance studio twice a week with thirty other moms shimmying four-year-olds in and out of full-body leotards to go to the bathroom.”
As moms, the odds are not in our favor. Just look at all the lame stigmas attached to things with the word mom in it.
1 MOM HAIRCUT. After my second son, Wyatt, was born, I cut off my hair. It had hung down below my shoulders, and as an act of motherhood compliance, I cut it off in the name of ease and convenience.
“You’ll be so glad you did it,” my mom assured me. “You’ll wish you’d done it sooner.”
Short hair and the removal of my dangling boho earrings and favorite perfumes and body sprays were just some in a long list of body modifications I made in an effort to be a more efficient model. I was subtracting things that made me feel beautiful and feminine in order to be a mother. Andy gave up dairy once, but that was because it was making him feel gassy, and it only lasted about a month. I cried every day until my hair grew out, and I haven’t cut it since.
2 MOM JEANS. When President Obama threw out the first pitch at the Major League All-Star Game wearing smart light washed jeans that sat comfortably above the hips, he was endlessly mocked for leading the free world in a dowdy pair of mom jeans. Because for some reason, jeans with a rise that hit above your belly button are considered matronly and mom-ish. I say, bring it. The higher I can yank the waist, the more the jeans act as a second pair of Spanx. You’re probably thinking, Whoa, Brittany, what about camel toe? Relax, guys, the maxi-pad I wear every day to catch the pee that shoots out when I laugh or sneeze eliminates that problem altogether.
3 MOM VANS. The drop off and pickup line at my kids’ elementary school reads like an anthropological study on motherhood. There are the twelve-passenger vans, you know, typical Catholics. There are the SUVs driven by moms who insist they are still trendy and pretend that it’s totally not hard to cram three car seats onto a single bench, or, you know, what I drive. And then there are the mom vans. Mom vans are minivans often as identical as the homes on a cul-de-sac, distinguishable only by the variations of stick-figure families on the back window and the blinking of lights from the keyless entry. These vans are loaded with DVD players and amazing features like sliding doors that open automatically and a tailgate that lifts when you wink at it; everything you need to make your life as a mom effortless and
enjoyable. Except that driving one comes with the stereotype that you’re old and enjoy missionary sex through the open zipper of your Ann Taylor LOFT capris.
4 SOCCER MOM. If you were to pop my trunk right now, you would find, admittedly, fast-food wrappers, half-empty bottles of water, and lots of clothes. But intermixed with all of that, you’d also find two soccer balls, a bag of football cleats, a couple of packages of emergency juice boxes, and two collapsible lawn chairs. If we were driving in a remote area, and our car broke down leaving us stranded, we could survive for days on the sustenance contained in the back of my SUV. We once drove Andy’s car to a soccer game, and I watched him put two left shoes on our kid and deliver an after-game snack of unfinished Mentos. Soccer moms are the pack mules of parenthood. It’s why they keep trying to make us drive vans.
Maybe finding the balance between sexiness and motherhood was hard for me because I wasn’t confident with the sexy part to begin with, and the line between the two was often blurred between the screaming children and endless homework.
“Do you think I’m sexy?” I asked Andy as we sat in a booth during a rare date night at our favorite sushi restaurant, Kyoto Ka.
“Of course,” he answered, not taking his eyes from the giant hockey game happening behind my head.
“Do you think I’m sexy when I’m being a mom?” I pushed again.
“Well, when aren’t you being a mom?”
And that, friends, is a bit of truth right there. I was always being a mom. Andy had defined roles in his life. He was an engineer when he left the house each morning to go to work. He was a partner every Tuesday evening at his golf league. Andy was a dad when he came home from work and a husband when I needed him to kill a spider, and I mean that all in the best of terms. Andy was really good at compartmentalizing his life. I was not. I work from home, so the separation between writer and mother is blurred by the open door of my office, which ensures motherhood is a hat I can never take off. Even as I sat there on a date, I was gathering the stray straw wrappers into a pile and pouring soy sauce into our dishes. I was momming Andy out of familiarity and exhaustion, and as a result, I didn’t feel like Andy’s sexy wife or a strong, empowered woman. I felt like Nana from Peter Pan.
“I need to feel sexy in a nonparent capacity,” I admitted, lowering the zipper of my hoodie and exposing more of my cleavage.
“I agree,” Andy said, suddenly interested in the conversation. “It’s a little emasculating when you cut my meat for me.”
“Well, I like when you call me mama, but only when you make it sound telenovela exotic and not Dora exotic.” I laughed.
“I don’t like when you spell out sex words,” he countered. “Or when you finish first and you cheer me on in the same voice we use to get Gigi to go in the big potty.”
“Yeah, that’s messed up.” I exhaled into my beer. “Also, I know the wet spot in our bed is probably just apple juice, but for a second, I’d like to pretend it’s not.”
Can motherhood be sexy? Yes. Did I feel sexy? Not yet. But my lack of sexiness was not mutually exclusive to motherhood. I had forgotten how to be an actual woman who puts on makeup, cleans her vibrators, and deserves to like herself separately from the success and failures of those she cares for each day.
12
DAUGHTERS: THE ULTIMATE MIND FUCK
I THINK MOTHERS have an innate response to protect their daughters from low self-esteem. The problem is that they don’t always have the tools or wherewithal to do it. Sometime after my father’s accident, my mother went through this thing where she cut off all her hair, bought lots of knee-length cargo shorts from the men’s department, and started breeding cocker spaniels. Or as it’s called today, going butch. It was like she knew her life had changed and she was going to be suddenly carrying the roles of both father and mother. She took an equally masculine approach to my body image and tackled most of my concerns with an “eh, fuck ’em” attitude. Today at thirty, I can nod my head in agreement and put my fist in the air and yell, Yes, fuck them all! But as a teenager, reading YM magazine, watching MTV, and putting up with kids making farm animal sounds at me in the hallway, that fuck-’em attitude was a little harder to come by.
Realizing she was ill-equipped to handle the task, my mother decided to outsource my self-esteem issues by enrolling me in the prestigious Margaret O’Brien’s International Modeling Agency. I would also like to add that Katie Holmes attended this exact same elite school before becoming famous for making Tom Cruise look creepier.
Margaret O’Brien’s International Modeling Agency was in a run-down business park in South Toledo between a Kinko’s and an office rented out for AA meetings. The only thing international about the place was the Hyundai parked out front and the fact that the lobby smelled like body odor.
Margaret O’Brien was an old woman with short dyed auburn hair, fake eyelashes, and long earlobes that drooped under the weight of her giant gold costume earrings. For more than forty years, Mrs. O’Brien had been running what was originally billed as “An Etiquette and Manners School for Fine Young Women,” but now focused on launching the careers of future catalog models and wannabe Disney stars. She welcomed my mother and me into her office, and clicked her tongue as she went over my admission forms.
“It doesn’t have your weight on here?” She looked up from the stacks of paperwork now spread across her desk.
“Oh, I haven’t been to the doctor in a while, so I wasn’t sure what it was,” I lied.
“No matter.” She stood up from her desk and walked around to my seat, reaching her hand out to me. “Give me your wrist. I can tell you everything you need to know about your body from your wrist.”
I hesitantly put my wrist into her open palm.
“Do you see this?” she asked, showing me the tips of her cold, bony fingers wrapped around my wrist like a bracelet. “My fingers can’t touch each other, that is how big your bones are, you will always be this big; nothing will change that, so you might as well get used to it,” she said dismissively. This should have been a reassuring concept. I wasn’t fat because I ate too much and wasn’t active enough; I was big because my bones were big, and that is something you just can’t control. But, because I was a teenager lacking the logic to understand that not every use of the word big in relation to my body was a bad thing, I took my large bones to be yet another personal failure.
Mrs. O’Brien was not in the business of turning people away, no matter how unsellable they were, so despite my giant bones, I was placed into the beginner’s course for Confident Modeling, an exclusive course open only to people willing to pay the fee to attend. It was a rigorous six week program that culminated in a “professional” modeling photo shoot and fashion show in front of family and friends. Classes were focused on such topics as how to walk, how to behave in public, and basic hygiene. It was like going to school to learn how to be a well-mannered toddler, and many of the other girls in my class weren’t far from that demographic. My classmates ranged in ages from seven to thirty-five; our only shared connections were excessive social awkwardness and ungroomed eyebrows. None of us was what I would consider to be star material. We fumbled through posing lessons and overcompensated for our insecurities with loud, exaggerated horse clomps during runway practice. I wanted to tell my mom that I’d been shoved in the ugly class so that they could still take our money while pretending to make us feel pretty, but she’d spent so much, I felt horrible bringing it up at all.
Every Wednesday night I’d meet my mother in the parking lot after class, defeated and sore after the thirty-minute cheekbone-contouring marathon and having to squeeze my size 10 feet into size 8 heels.
“Do you feel prettier?” she’d ask, hopefully. As if that had been the point all along; if I felt pretty, I’d feel confident.
“I do,” I lied, rubbing the balls of my feet and turning up the radio.
The night of the fashion show, I walked the runway in a purple beaded mother-of-the-bride dress with the matching r
uched bolero jacket my mom bought for me on clearance at JCPenney. My parents clapped and when I got to the end of the runway, I silently mouthed the word way, just as my instructor encouraged us, so that our lips would be slightly parted and sexy in pictures. After the show, my mom and dad were waiting for me at the door with a bouquet of pink carnations and the envelope of “professional” head shots taken earlier that month.
“Now you can tell people at your school you’re a real model!” my mom said excitedly from the front seat as we drove home.
“I’m not a real model, Mom. You paid an old lady money to take Polaroids of me in front of an oscillating fan.”
I understand what my mom was trying to do. She didn’t understand my confidence issues, because she didn’t struggle with them herself. At least she didn’t appear to. It wasn’t that she walked around feeling gorgeous and untouchable, but rather, those weren’t things that mattered to her, and she didn’t understand why beauty and self-esteem had been things I was so hung up on. My mom had great intentions, but sending me to modeling class to feel good about myself was like enrolling someone who doesn’t have any legs in figure-skating lessons; it just made me feel worse.
THE GIRL WHO SAVED MY LIFE
“She’s a mini you!” they say, gushing over her big brown eyes and long thick hair as she spins in circles in the grass or sings complicated melodies of nonsense while dancing around the aisle in the supermarket.
And they are right. She has my eyes, and my wavy rebellious hair. She also has my thighs, feet, and lips. Gigi is witty and smart and curious and beautiful and I’ve spent five whole years nodding along with every relative, friend, and stranger on the street who told me she is exactly like me, even though I thought exactly none of those things about myself.
Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It Page 13
