I am worth being selective about who I let into my life, and so are you. What you weigh in no way equates to how people are allowed to treat you.
Stop treating yourself like the unwanted person you assume you are. No one deserves to be treated badly, and one of the best ways to combat that is to show people how they should be treating you. Model it for them to take the work out of it because heaven knows people are lazy. Empathy and humanity are harder to feel than quick judgment and disgust. Confidence (even the shaky kind), sexiness, value, happiness . . . people can smell it and it’s contagious. I wear my confidence like one of those creepy cats in heat with their asses in the air. It’s obnoxious and forward, but it shows people there is only one way to treat me . . . awesome.
Show yourself kindness and happiness, even when it feels fake. While you are busy demanding it from everyone else, make yourself accountable as well. Body image is a lifelong journey, so enjoy it and don’t save all the fun and rewards for the end, because then you’ll never get there. Miserable journeys are the worst, like driving a thousand miles from Ohio to Florida. I do it twice a year, and if I didn’t stop on the way for fried pies, Popeye’s chicken, and fresh orange juice, I’d never get there. I’d just stop my car and lie on the road until someone moved me or ran me over. Stop lying on the road and enjoy yourself.
Buy yourself clothes that fit. They may not be the size you think you should be, but who cares? I’ll tell you who doesn’t care: everyone you know.
Get your hair cut and practice good hygiene. Listen, I don’t care if you shave, but wash your body and take care of your skin. It’s way easier to convince yourself that you are a good person who deserves to be treated well when you don’t smell like a Garbage Pail Kid.
Also have sex, with someone or yourself, I don’t care, just do it. Orgasms are deserved, not bones tossed at you by shallow people. Go on adventures. It’s scary out there, I know. People are mean and the world isn’t always accommodating to all sizes of people, but that is no excuse to lose any more time to the liars in your head. Have your bad days, and then bounce back in time to live your life laughing with friends in bars and exploring foreign countries and screaming your head off at theme parks and pools. It’s what humans do, and that is exactly what you are. Human.
And there’s your pep talk. I hope this book goes on to help you feel, at best, empowered, and at worst, normal. Because when you spend a good portion of your day feeling inconsequential and unworthy of love and respect, normal is a pretty amazing thing to be.
CHAPTER 8
On This Episode of Jeans Hoarders
“Here’s the thing,” I explain. “I could keep coming to therapy every week, or you could just come look in my jeans closet and fix my entire life.”
Tom, my mustache-fidgeting therapist of six years, stares silently at me from his green plaid armchair. We’ve been seeing each other in a doctor-patient capacity to treat my generalized anxiety disorder.
To the average person, his office looks old and decidedly dated. Dark green papered walls, plaid furniture, faded framed photos, and a collection of vintage typewriters on the shelves behind his mahogany desk. However, fully aware that he rode his bike to work this morning and is likely hiding a jar of home-brewed kombucha somewhere in his desk, I know otherwise. Tom is eccentric on purpose. What’s a stronger word than “hipster”? That word is “Tom.”
“My parents are hoarders, I’m the antihoarder!” I exclaim, exasperated at his nonverbal judgment.
I have had this conversation with him close to one hundred and seventy-two times.
Even now, I can’t go to visit my parents without secretly purging piles of knickknacks and junk from their counters and tossing them into the trash. When I was growing up, it was boxes of archaic technology: VHS tapes, VCR cleaning tools, laminating supplies, and Rolodexes of customers left behind from their turbulent years owning a video rental store.
In terms of hoarding, it could be worse, like garbage or cats. All of my parents’ junk is clean, just overpowering in its mass; every usable space in their house was covered in boxes or stacks of paper.
As a result, I keep nothing. If papers accumulate on Andy and my kitchen counters or dressers, I toss them in panic, leaving Andy to ask things like, “Where’s that check that was on the counter,” or “Why are they shutting our water off, did they send a bill?”
“Right, except for jeans,” Tom counters, shifting in his chair and adjusting his brown suspenders.
“I don’t ‘air-quote’ hoard ‘air-quote’ jeans, Tom.”
I feel the need to explain here that Tom is not my therapist’s first name; rather it’s a nickname he offered for his extra-long Greek surname that he must have gotten tired of me mispronouncing. I was raised to always call people by their formal titles, but didn’t even realize my parents had names and identities outside of “mom” and “dad” until much later than normal. It was like finding out that Bob Saget wasn’t actually all-American dad Danny Tanner, but, rather, this tall guy who told dirty dick jokes in seedy comedy clubs.
“How many pairs do you own?” Tom asks.
“Who really knows?” I sigh, leaning back into the couch and covering my tummy with the jacket I’d brought along, not because it was cold that day, but because I was feeling self-conscious about my arms.
“Where do you keep them all?” Tom asks.
“The denim closet.”
“The Gap has a denim closet, Brittany; normal people don’t have denim closets.”
When Candy Spelling dedicated a whole room to wrapping paper, it was a magazine-worthy design innovation, but when I create a denim closet, it’s on the same level as Jeffrey Dahmer storing human arms in his freezer.
Okay, truth time. I own fifty-eight pairs of jeans; of those fifty-eight pairs, I cycle through the same three pairs until I eventually wear the inner thighs thin, mourn them as they lie in state on the floor of my closet, and eventually throw them away in the kitchen garbage can, prompting Andy to ask me, “Hey, did you mean to throw these jeans in here?” a million times, endlessly throwing salt into my wound.
“You should really go through that closet” is a phrase that I often hear. I hear it from Tom and Andy, and I hear it from my mom, who, after being suddenly laid off from the medical office she helped run for almost two decades, came to run Andy and my home so I could get some damn work done. Originally, she was just supposed to watch the kids, and intervene so I wasn’t opening Go-Gurt tubes every five minutes when I was trying to write, but her responsibilities evolved to total house care and management after she, ironically, got tired of me not keeping it tidy enough.
“One day you’re going to find my body under two hundred pounds of denim, Brittany.” What a silly complaint.
I don’t want to sound trite here, but mine is not just an obnoxious closet filled with denim. It’s a chamber of possibility. When I stand inside it, it’s like that scene when Willy Wonka (the Gene Wilder version, not the creepy Johnny Depp one) first introduces the golden ticket holders to his edible magic factory.
“Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination . . .”
Within those shelves, you’ll find my favorite jeans from junior high school, the American Eagle flare. These jeans are a size 14 and were produced before jeans were filled with stretch and spandex, which probably means that they are now the equivalent of a child’s 5T. Jeans without stretch are almost impossible to find these days, making my American Eagle flares Smithsonian-worthy.
I tried to put them on once and they only got to the middle part of my shins, where the grocery cart hits if you’re not paying attention and looking up drink recipes on your phone while you shop. I will never be able to wear these jeans again, and yet I will never get rid of them.
Tom was right. I may not hoard cats or sports memorabilia, but I hoard emotions, dreams, and memories, and I store them in jeans that don’t fit me anymore. If I was Voldemort, I’d turn my jean overalls from high school into a ho
rcrux.
Why yes, I do have jeans in that closet ranging from sizes 14 to 22, and no, it has nothing to do with my inability to understand basic measurement, and everything to do with the fact that I’m a woman, and brands lack the courtesy to give you an accurate standard of sizing. At Old Navy, I wear a size 14. At American Eagle, I’m now a 16. Gap requires I wear an 18. At Torrid, I’m a 20. And at Anthropologie, I’m whatever size Oliver Twist was as he longingly pressed his little orphan face against the window from the sidewalk because nothing in that store fit him or me.
I know that if I go jeans shopping for my husband, he’s a size 32x32. Everywhere, he’s a size 32x32. He doesn’t even have to try anything on, he just walks up to a pile of pants, grabs a pair, and then pays for them. He even takes the tags off them before trying them on once he gets home; that is the level of fit confidence we are talking about here, guys. Thanks to brands playing loosey-goosey only with women’s sizing, my husband lives a life I will never know.
By this same moronic sizing phenomenon, I also have identical pairs of jeans in my closet in a variety of sizes. This is called bracketing, and it’s commonly done when you are ordering clothes online and unsure of your size, which is often the case for plus-size women, because we generally don’t really get to shop in brick-and-mortar stores like everyone else. Instead we are stuck ordering a haul online, and returning whatever doesn’t work. Except I don’t return the jeans, not because I’m lazy (which I am), but because I like having access to my favorite style of jeans no matter what my body is shaped like that day. Spoiler alert: It’s often guinea-pig shaped.
“Anything you want to, do it . . .”
Everyone has a dream outfit. A lot of times it’s a fancy dress or a sexy bathing suit, but for me, it’s basically every candid photo ever taken of a British royal: button-up shirt, skinny jeans, and tall riding boots. I want to look like I just finished my bird-hunting trip and now I have to go back to my country home to cuddle my menagerie of dogs and text with J. K. Rowling.
The key to this entire outfit is the skinny jeans. Tall boots with any other type of pant simply do not work. No matter how you fold them, you still walk around looking like Napoleon and not like you just spent a chilly morning picking out fresh French bread at the farmers’ market while sipping coffee from an earth-friendly thermos made from all the recycled plastic bottles that were otherwise murdering dolphins and polar bears.
The biggest obstacle to my achieving this outfit goal, aside from the button-up shirt, which is a legitimate big-boobed hate crime across the board, is overcoming the term “skinny jeans.” I’ve never been skinny anything, and since all my weight is in my thighs, skinny jeans have always terrified me. How could jeans that cling to my body be flattering and/or fit me?
It turns out that buying a great pair of dark wash skinny jeans makes even the chubbiest of legs, like mine, look longer and leaner by getting rid of all that extra fabric flopping around and giving you a nice straight line. Skinny jeans are a fat girl’s best friend. In fact, they’re everyone’s best friend. Of the fifty-eight pairs of denim in my closet, I’d say roughly two dozen fall into this category.
Then there are the high-rise varieties stuffed in there. I used to equate a high rise with being old and out of style. Like the people who were four years ahead of you in high school that at one time you thought were the epitome of badass. But then you run into them at a bar somewhere ten years later and they’re still wearing those classic-cut light wash jeans, a braided brown belt, and a faded hypercolor T-shirt with DAMN GINA! across the front. They don’t look cool anymore; they look like losers. Or your parents.
And you think, How does this happen? Do they not have access to the Internet? Or People magazine?
The answer is that they do . . . they’re just further along in the process than you! They’ve already realized that low-rise jeans are for male country stars or regular people with well-maintained pubic hair who own small-size underwear and don’t mind pulling their pants up every time they sit down, stand up, or bend over. Low-rise jeans don’t even have real pockets—just tiny slits that you can fit one, maybe two, Starbursts in. That’s blasphemy as far as I’m concerned.
The last time I wore low-rise jeans was to my friend Laura’s bachelorette party, and all night long, in every single bar, I had to stand. Sitting on a barstool meant everyone behind me was going to see my love handles, tramp stamp, and butt crack. These are three sexy details of my body I typically reserve for my super-lucky husband. All night long, I perched in my really uncomfortable heels. No jeans are worth that. But, you know, that pair is still stuffed in that closet, too.
So high-rise jeans are now my happy place, showcasing everything I love about my body: my hips and my thigh curves. These are the parts of me that my husband likes to grab on to when he kisses me in the kitchen, the parts of me that sway when I walk, and that look good hidden and uncovered.
I read an article once that listed various female trends that men hated; among the most mentioned were fake nails, heavy makeup, and high-waisted jeans because they looked like “mom jeans.” First of all, are we also making a list for men? Because I’d like to have a conversation about the open-sided tank tops, Oakley sunglasses, and cargo shorts, ’kay?
Second, suspending the reality that men have absolutely any say in what we wear, what’s wrong with mom jeans? Mom jeans mean two things: (1) Somewhere along the line, someone is getting laid. And (2) In the words of Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, bitches get shit done, and we’re far too busy running the world to pull our pants back up every ten minutes. Hence, after the skinny jeans, these are the most popular variety featured in my denim chamber of secrets.
Button fly, zipper, elastic waist, maternity panel, skinny, flair, bootleg, all of these many varieties can be found in my denim closet. I see the pros and cons of all of them (except for the bootlegs. Those just look bad on me. My thighs are too thick for the cut to look right. They just look like baggy pants).
I generally prefer an elastic waist to a zipper/button combo as the latter tends to handicap my ability to function at my desired level of food consumption. When I am on my period, I would love to eat a size 22 amount of french fries, but the dictatorship of society’s zipper and button constraints only allow me a size 6 portion.
American Eagle recently started releasing button-fly jeans again, like in the nineties. Who exactly is the demographic for these pants? Certainly not people who have to use the bathroom in a hurry, so I hope they come with a catheter. I guess that’s why American Eagle’s primary shopper is a fifteen-year-old girl who hasn’t pushed a watermelon out of her vagina yet. Hopefully.
Then there are the jeggings. Jeggings are the sister pant to skinny jeans, as in the sister who always asks you for money and gets tattoos she regrets. They are what would happen if your comfy period underwear and a full-body pair of Spanx had a baby, which sounds amazing, and it is, as long as the fabric is thick enough. If the jegging denim is thin, they show all of my thigh dimples and creases.
They are great for large holiday meals, or riding the mechanical bulls at the bar your friends drag you to because they think the bartender is interested in them. I make all my best worst decisions wearing jeggings.
And last but not least are the maternity jeans I keep among all the other types of denim. Why do I keep them, you ask, when my youngest is eight years old? Because I made the decision that it is still okay to wear them once in a while. And what’s not to like about this decision? You can eat forever in these pants, they are really easy to slip off when you are having sex on the basement steps while your kids watch Dora the Explorer, and they virtually eradicate the muffin top.
My maternity jeans have become a Thanksgiving and Christmas tradition, something Andy originally scoffed at until he realized it meant I wouldn’t be unbuttoning my pants at his grandmother’s table anymore.
There is nothing lazy about comfort, and if stretchy maternity jeans make you happy, you should wear them. Maybe Ma
rtin Shkreli would have been a better person if his pants were elastic.
I doubt it.
There was a time in my life when I gave up jeans altogether. I had gotten to a point where I was so uncomfortable in restrictive clothing that I stopped buying jeans and just lived in leggings seven days a week.
My return to denim was a sign of confidence and body love. I finally felt comfortable leaving the house. I finally felt comfortable spending money on myself. I finally felt comfortable wearing real pants. So what if they didn’t always have zippers?
But even now it can be a defeating process. The original title of this book was Drinking in My Closet, because I still spend a lot of my time doing just that. I have the type of body that has trouble shopping off the rack, that will have a fitting room success rate in the low teens, and that gets easily frustrated when I’m trying on piles of online orders and none of them are fitting me like they did on the fake plus-size model on the website.
And jeans are the biggest offender. Next is hats, I have a seriously large head. Someone make me stop ordering them, they never fit. But I keep trying. And I always will.
So maybe I am a denim hoarder. I’m okay with it.
CHAPTER 9
Fat and Pregnant
If I could go back in time to before I had my first baby, I would erase everything on my Babies“R”Us registry and make only one request: twenty pairs of mesh hospital underwear.
Everything else you can figure out; people had babies just fine without wipe warmers and baby jeans. Babies don’t need to wear jeans. Babies don’t even need pockets; they have no money or iPhones.
There is something magical in that mesh underwear. If you are not familiar, it can best be described as a boy short made of a stretchy fishnet material, and it’s the first piece of clothing they put on you after you have a child.
The whole childbirth experience is very surreal. You do nothing for yourself in the moments after except stare into the eyes of the beautiful new mushy being in your arms, totally unaware of the bustle unfolding around you. There’s a doctor seated between your legs sewing up the aftermath, and a nurse next to your bed, looking up from her paperwork every few minutes to smile at your new family before returning to her notes. A second nurse buzzes about, pulling the bloodied hospital gown from your body and replacing it with a clean one, and then, as if she was caring for her own child or elderly parent, she rips the backing from a giant maxi pad, sticks it to the inside of the mesh underwear, and slides them up your legs and up around your butt, all things you can’t do yourself because you’re still numb from the waist down.
The Clothes Make the Girl Page 11
