My Formerly Hot Life (15 page)

(Still with me? Just think: shoes, shoes … supercute shoes.)

I do not have a lot of money, but I have a lot of shoes. Shoe shopping is the main thing I do to deny death—which,
I would argue to my husband, who daily reminds me that we are On A Budget, is a much less odious manifestation of this phenomenon than starting wars and killing people who don’t agree with me, and safer than jumping out of airplanes to prove that I’m not old. It’s like,
Take that, death! I have more shoes than I could ever wear out, thus ensuring that they will continue on the journey long after you retire my mortal coil
. And there’s nothing like a pair of platform clogs to make you feel closer to God.

Still, it kind of sucks sometimes to not have quite the fashion freedom I had before I was a Formerly. If I wore some funkified getup one day just because I felt like it, people thought,
Ah, youth
, not
Crazy bag lady
or, arguably worse,
Midlife crisis
. I figure, if I can express myself with a wild or at least diverse collection of shoes, what’s the harm? I find it’s a great way to add a bit of fun to an outfit—ooh, orange suede!—without totally going off the rails on the crazy train. It would be very hard to get up and out of bed and do all the stupid things I have to do each day (like rinse the recycling and go sit in a cubicle and unsubscribe from email lists and find the other pink plate so my daughters quit arguing over the only one I can locate) if I were sitting there pondering my own mortality and how none of it really matters, anyway, right?

F
or years I’ve been watching those Heritage ads, the ones that urge you to buy insurance to pay for your “final expenses,” so your family doesn’t get left holding the urn. They begin, “If you were born between 1899 and 1950, you are eligible …” or some such.

Tonight I was, as usual, listening to Chris Matthews rudely interrupt his female guests, when the commercial comes on: “If you were born between the years 1925 and 1968, you are eligible …” Nineteen sixty-eight? Wait a sec, I was born in 1967! The screen then goes blue and flashes the years of eligibility in large, distinct white letters (because if you are between the ages of 40 and 85, you probably can’t hear the TV, and your eyesight is no doubt headed south, along with your boobs).

In the space of 11 seconds, the ad made me angry, depressed and then cynical: Being included in the ad’s target demographic is classic sales strategy—the younger they hook you, the more money they make. It’s kind of like the
way tobacco companies used to market to children—if they got you as a teenager, they had you for life. I’ll bet the Heritage people and the tobacco people would really hit it off at a mixer.

Then I swung back to being angry. Along with all the responsibilities Formerlies shoulder, with all the stress I have, I’m supposed to worry—right now—about helping my kids pay for the disposal of my corporal remains? They’re six; I can’t rely on them to dispose of their grilled cheese crusts in the kitchen garbage.

I have a will; we got it after we had children. But to so specifically plan for your own interment? Maybe,
maybe
, when I’m 65. Maybe. Life expectancy for women in this country is around 81. Odds are you’ve got almost as long as you’ve been alive again ahead of you to weigh the benefits of cremation versus having your head cryogenically frozen. Sorry, it’s not time yet. I resent that anyone thinks people my age consider their longevity that tenuous.

Right now, women are spending their extra money (if they have any after their daughters’ passion for American Girl dolls has been satisfied) on Juvéderm, infertility treatments and Spanx. Men are dropping their wads on flashy two-seater cars, $4,000 prostitutes and Wii Fits. Okay, that’s mean—some of them are spending them on American Girl dolls, and big diamonds for their wives to show their appreciation for the stress of all those infertility treatments. Many people my age have yet to start saving for retirement, let alone decide between mahogany or plain old plywood.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a lot of living to do, even if it takes more than it used to in order to keep myself healthy and feeling good. And if, God forbid, I get hit by a bus on the way to Yogalates tomorrow, I hereby give my daughters and husband permission to cremate me, stick me in a shoe box and drop me down the garbage chute, like we did with the mouse we caught in the kitchen. I fully support their spending their money on pink sparkly shoes for their American Girl dolls and $4,000 prostitutes, just as they did when I was alive. Obviously, I’m not planning on dying any time soon. My new old body, with its brigade of doctors waiting to charge, and its newly noisy quirks and embarrassing leaks, works fine, for the most part.

I’m even getting over The Big Metabolic Fuck You, and am somewhat relieved that hard-core self-improvement is pretty much off the table. My new mandate—that I might gently strive to stem the tide of my inevitable decrepitude, rather than staying on the thinner/buffer/faster path toward some arbitrary standard of perfection that I’d followed all these years—feels like something I can live with, and live with peacefully, now that I’m a Formerly. There was a time when I felt like nothing more than the composite of other people’s opinions of me. Now I’m more aware of my value than I’ve ever been. Sure, one could always be thinner, buffer and get there faster, and I’m no exception, but my as-is is good to go, thank you! I’m just about done with the idea that personal fulfillment is always five more laps, five more lunges, five more pounds away. Physical self-improvement,
the drumbeat I marched to in my teens, 20s and 30s, is no longer banging away quite so loudly in the background. For me, that was a losing proposition from the start, and it took me this long to realize it.

As often happens when the rare epiphany shines through the chaos of everyday life, all of a sudden I was tripping over evidence supporting my new way of looking at things. One night at a party, I was chatting with a therapist who treats women with food issues. I wondered aloud if some lucky ducks were simply spared TBMFU. She thought not, that it happens to the best of us, and said that in her experience, Formerly-aged women who are as thin as they were when they were in their 20s are generally very restrictive with their eating. “Apparently it’s worth it to them to not eat much,” she said with a shrug.

It was an offhanded comment made at a party, and a self-evident one at that. But to me, at that moment it struck me as genius in its simplicity. I could not recall, in decades of wanting to be thinner, ever once asking myself if it was worth the sacrifices it would entail in order for me to actually
be
thinner. The answer may well have been yes when I was younger, but now that I was an adult—a Formerly, no less—with much to think about aside from how many calories were in a single Twizzlers, I wasn’t so sure. It takes effort to not eat when you’re hungry, to constantly be figuring what you can and cannot put in your mouth based on whether or not you think it’ll make you fat or what you may or may not want to eat later. Doing so takes up buckets of
mental energy, which can be in short supply when you’re already overextended, stressed out and multitasking.

So I asked myself,
Self, is it worth it to completely forgo pretty much all the foodstuffs that bring you enormous joy, such as Nutella and pasta with pesto, in order to be thinner? Moreover, is it worth the thinking and tabulating and calculating and suffering through the guilty feelings you’ll experience if you are unable to eat the way you truly must in order to be thin, now that you’re a Formerly?

The answer was a big fat NO. Ha! No, it’s not. It’s really not.

Before that therapist made her comment, I’d simply viewed my inability to be at a lower weight than what’s natural for me as my failing. Now I see it as something not worth expending my limited resources on.

Call it a gigantic cop-out, and I won’t argue with you. But that perspective—I’ve made a reasoned decision not to invest in being as thin as I can possibly be because the tradeoff isn’t worth it to me—has made me feel better about doing exactly the same thing I have been doing for years: specifically, eating Nutella and pasta with pesto (in reasonable quantities) and feeling like a big loser of a woman without a will. Now I’m eating Nutella and pasta with pesto (in reasonable quantities) and feeling fine about it.
^*

I’m not going to be truly thin, as in high school yearbook
thin, but I wasn’t anyway; desire is not enough to make it so—decades of wanting it really bad and yet not doing what it takes have certainly proved that—and besides, I was bulimic in high school. That was not good. If I’m going to eat what I want and be a few pounds more than I’ve arbitrarily decided I should be anyway, I may as well feel OK about it.

Lest you think I’m saying to hell with it, your being-fit-and-healthy days are over so you may as well position your open mouth under the soft-serve machine and pull the lever, I’m not. I’m just saying I’ve found it helpful to quit kidding myself. Yes, my metabolism let me down when I hit Formerly. But more to the point, my life changed, so it’s OK if my expectations change, too. The things you used to do to keep your metabolism firing on all cylinders may simply not be as appealing to you as they used to be. And that’s fine! You might just not
feel
like running around like a lunatic every night, and stacking your dates (work late, drinks, dinner, club) like you did when you were younger. That used to be fun; it’s not anymore. If you’ve got a partner, you’re no longer burning the calories it takes to forage for a partner. There’s too much relaxing and clinking of glasses to be done with friends or family in one soft cushy spot now that we’re Formerlies. So you’re 10 pounds heavier. Find some other way to exercise, eat reasonably and enjoy your life.

O
ne morning, as I stood in front of the closet in my undies, obsessing about what to wear, and my children got later and later for school, something dawned on me. I am not sure why this critical truth took so many years to sink into my thick skull. (Perhaps it was all the fabulous hair I used to have. Did I mention I’m losing my hair?) Still, I’m so glad to finally be possessed of this knowledge and simply must share it with you, just in case you haven’t heard the gospel. Here it is. Are you ready? Sit down. This is big.

What’s more, this has always been so, and no one saw fit to tell me, even as I spent a disproportionate amount of my mental capital trying to figure out how to make myself smaller. Yes, of course I was aware that clothes came in various sizes, which implied that some variation in body size
was acceptable, normative, even. Yet like many young women, I operated under the mistaken belief that I had a designated numerical size, which was usually around two sizes smaller than my actual body, and it was my full-time job to try to make my body fit into “my” size. You don’t even want to know what I did to try to achieve this goal.

And all the while, I could have simply bought bigger clothes. Sure, OK, I wouldn’t look as thin in bigger clothes as I would if I were, in fact, “my” fantasy size that I never really am, anyway. But since I am
a
size, and I can’t go around naked, don’t I get to wear the nicest clothes I can find that fit my actual body?

The answer, of course, is yes, now that I’m a Formerly and not laboring under this truly cruel misconception. I no longer buy clothes that I hope or plan to one day fit into. The day is today. The time is now. I have been thin and unhappy, and heavier and happy. I have proven to myself time and again that one thing has little to do with the other, despite all the “I lost weight and now my husband loves me and my life is perfect” ads you see to sell you diet products. I’m wearing clothes that fit, damn it. And it feels, well, like I can breathe again.

I
am pro sex. That’s my official stance, and since I started having it in my teens, I have never wavered. I think sex, when everyone involved is happy to be involved, is one of the delightful perks of being human. In theory, I enjoy it very much.

In practice, things are a bit more complicated. Not only must I be relaxed, well fed, but not bloated, and not pissy with my husband about one of the half-dozen petty misunderstandings that take place in a day, but the children must be in deep REM sleep, there must be no laundry, bills or naked Barbies on the bed on which I am to have sex and all computers, cell phones and pagers must be turned off and stowed properly. I’d prefer not to be within a week of the start of my period, be on deadline or feel fat, although I can work around these. The national terror threat-level alert must be yellow or below. Oh, and I also have to be awake, which, after work and kids and everything else, is unlikely after 10:00
PM
. And this doesn’t take into account whether
Mad Men
is on TV, or any of my husband’s possible impediments, which, thankfully, are many fewer than mine or we’d never do it at all.

When it does happen, I invariably catch my breath, look over at Paul and say something like, “That was awesome! We should do it more often.”

Libido-snuffing lifestyle notwithstanding, I do indeed like sex, even as I have less and less time and energy for it. Years of repetition have made me pretty darn adept and, even with my brand-new body image issues, more comfortable asking for or, failing that, simply taking what I want in bed. By this time, I’m less concerned with whether I’m doing it “right”—there is no right—and what the guy (in my case, my husband) is “secretly” thinking (which, given the relative rarity of the event, is probably
FINALLY!)
.