Huge panties

I have never been consistently Fergie Ferg- and by that I mean “up in the gym working on my fitness.” I was a normal skinny kid growing up with normal sized undies all the way through middle school. Puberty hit as I was going into high school and my body definitely started changing. More hips and ass in a family of cutie tangerines with twig legs, but still normal sized panties. Growing up in the 90s the preferred body type was waif- and I was never going to be that. I was able to stay smaller through high school by being somewhat active, having a grandma that constantly scrutinized my size and living in the 90s;  a decade of constant diet culture and fat-free mania. Who remembers snackwells? I swear I thought I was really doing myself a favor with a lean cuisine and a snackwell fudge cookie. I was probably around 13 when I figured out I could get by on 1-2 meals. It was normal at an all-girls high school to live on a bagel and a frappucino or water and funfetti cake.  PE consisted of dancing to the Bee-Gees and playing table tennis. I know we had health class but honestly don’t remember anything about how to fuel my body or actually be aware of my body from an intuitive standpoint. In college I gained the freshman 15 (thanks taco shop and Tijuana). We sweated our butts off every weekend at Xcape or Safari (but that sweat was almost entirely midori sour or malibu and pineapple) and that mostly maintained my weight. I didn't look awful but I definitely wasn't the same as every skinny blonde girl that I went to college with. It's also funny to me how now when I look back at pictures I think- “man what was I thinking? I looked great. Meanwhile I thought I was Gilbert Grape’s mom.” If my black, Express pants got a little too tight I jogged for a bit and maybe skipped taco shop for a few days to keep it under control. By my mid 20s I was definitely more boob and bootylicious and I finally started wearing a thong (that’s really neither here nor there). My friends and I rode our bikes to the beach and the bars, met up with friends and hung out on football Sundays. Life was good- although occasionally I got called a "fat bitch" for one reason or another (probably cause I was a little of both). I transitioned into my 30s still yo-yo-dieting but with an added dose of reverse body dysmorphia. Now body dysmorphia is a real mental illness that involves an obsessive focus on appearance or perceived flaws in one's appearance usually at it relates to weight, I don't want to make light of it. But I use the phrase because I don't know how else to explain that in my mind and based on photos taken by a small Canon, digital powershot camera, I thought I looked great but also felt badly about myself.  I was still in a continuous, but off and on quest to be slightly smaller.  A family member once told me I “wasn't fat, I was chubby cute,” which I thought was funny- because I never said I wasn't cute. For a good long while I was doing yoga regularly and I felt like as long as I could move this body and be flexible things weren't too bad. And then 35 hit with a loving spouse who didn't really care about my size, fertility drugs, a busy career and a house. And I did a little less yoga, a little more dining out and my panties got a little tighter. In actuality, everything got a little tighter. 

I eventually made a decision to do something drastic- a medical fast, monitored by a hospital to get myself back in shape. The fast itself was not too hard. The group therapy classes where I had to talk about how I got here and all those habits above were more difficult. It also coincided with starting one on one therapy because I was really struggling with our fertility journey. And let me tell you- being vulnerable with strangers (not you guys) but like literal strangers was hard and made me want to eat even more. Kevin was diagnosed with brain cancer the week I started the fast. I made a conscious decision not to quit just because we had been dealt this blow. When your husband is dying it’s easy to focus less on food. I lost 20 pounds over 4 months and was mostly back to feeling better in this body just as Kevin's body was deteriorating more and more. And the absolute ironic part (ironic as in Alanis Morrissette's hit Isn't it Ironic- where mostly it's just about things that suck and aren't really that ironic) is that my body was about to change more than I ever could have imagined. I sometimes wonder if I would be alive if I hadn't lost the weight and found that tumor in my still big, but now slightly smaller right boob. I spent a lot of time wondering if gaining all that weight and yo-yo dieting had caused my cancer. And I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would take much better care of my body if my body could just get me through the cancer. But turns out I'm a bit of a self-gaslighter and a liar. And also my body is a fat bitch. I mean that in the most loving way. 

Cancer changes you- and I don't just mean your outlook on life. I mean that at age 39 when I finished all my treatments, my body was cellularly the age of a 50 year old. And as anyone who has gone through menopause can tell you, your body just doesn't do things in the same way; metabolism, flexibility, sleep- it's all different. On top of that, I am taking two different meds to keep the cancer away that have the lovely added side effects of arthritis and extreme fatigue. So here I am at 39 doing worse than most, with a body that is all kinds of messed up after surgery, weight loss and weight gain. Throw in some periodic frozen shoulder, lymphodema, instacart and a pandemic and you have a recipe for absolute disaster. And now my kid comes into my life and I think about all the things I was told about my body at her age. All the things I need to unlearn. All the things I want to do with this body. The discipline that I just can't seem to find and I just feel like a failure. And worst of all I feel really, really uncomfortable, because my underwear are always pinching me. So I made the tough decision to address the easiest part of this all, I bought some huge panties. They really are quite ridiculous in size, pretty close to grandma undies, but they are extremely comfortable and do the job of holding it all together under my athleisure wear while I am messily trying to hold this life together. There are days when I really just miss my smaller panties and maybe they will come back in the future- I don't know. For now I'm just trying to figure out what I want from this body. Trying to learn through therapy and meditation and journaling how to be thankful for carrying me through these hardest of days. Thankful that I can pull on a pair of huge panties and carry on with life. 

Photo by Emile Guillemot on Unsplash