Butt…

Sometimes Mondays can be so bad that you actually know they’re bad before 6:00 AM. This was just such a Monday. The alarm went off around 5:30 AM and the snooze button was hit almost instantly. When it went off about seven minutes later, my husband and I actually started to move and stretch. Like any other Monday we exchanged early morning pleasantries and asked how the other slept.

Then things went terribly awry. Teasingly, I told my husband he had stolen the covers.
“I’ve got the same amount of covers I always have.” He replied.
“Then why do I feel a breeze on my butt?” I giggled back.
“Because you’ve got a big butt.”
“What??”
“Because your butt is big… Where are you going? What’s wrong?”
“I need to get dressed and cover up my big, fat, ugly butt!”
“You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say that all of you is bigger because you’re six and a half months pregnant, and I like the changes. Of course your butt is big.” He finished in a very lame attempt to recover from his desperate error in judgment and tact.

I’d heard enough. I was ready to crawl under my rock and hide for a while, but I was pretty sure my big, fat butt was not going to fit. I just needed to escape. I grabbed my clothes and ran for the bathroom, barely keeping the tears back.

After taking me 2 years to loose the excess weight I had gained while pregnant with my son, I had sworn never to be so overweight again. I had even gone the other way and gotten down to 98 pounds before settling on a healthy 110 – 115 for my athletic 5”0” frame. For the past 6 years of my life I had lived on a very strict diet to counter my lack of metabolism. The one target of my total, undying hatred? My butt!

My butt is not horrible when covered in nice jeans or shorts. While wearing a bathing suit, I have always kept a short sarong wrapped around my hips to disguise the cellulite. This cellulite was passed down from generation to generation, from my grandmother to my mother to me, just like the Steinway & Son’s grand piano that’s been in our family for over a hundred years. Though the piano is worth quite a bit today, the cellulite is not. No matter how much weight I’ve lost in the past and no matter how many miles I have gone on my in-line-skates, that cellulite has followed me like a bad acquaintance who’s always saying, “I’ve got your back!”

That morning I made it to the bathroom before bursting into a volley of tears. It wasn’t just my day that was ruined. My month was ruined, my year was ruined. Everything was ruined until I could get rid of my big, fat butt!

The worst part of all was the knowledge that it would never go away unless I somehow saved the money to have it surgically removed. I knew after my pregnancy, I might go down to about 105 pounds with hard work and dieting, but that huge butt would still be back there. Even if it got back down to a size 2 again, it would still have that ugly, bumpy quality to it. With my luck I’d finally have liposuction one day, only to have it sag like ancient, deflated breasts. Ancient, LUMPY, deflated breasts. Yuck!

Are we women too sensitive about what people say and think about our bodies? HELL YES, we are! It was great when Sir Mixalot came out with the infamous rap, Baby Got Back. It gave some of us hope that there were men out there who like women with a bit of junk in the trunk. The question still stands; do they mind the hail damage on the trunk lid?

Twenty-five-thousand apologies followed that morning’s unfortunate event, but none could ever undo the damage to my self esteem. Sometimes I’m known to carry on a running dialog with myself inside my head. That morning it consisted of, “Jake’s ready. Ok, now get him in the car. Buckle up his car seat. I hope nobody in the neighborhood sees my fat butt hanging out of the car. They might think a hippo has escaped from the zoo and gotten its head stuck in my car. Ok, now sit your fat butt in the seat. Am I doing damage to the springs? Will this lower the resale value of my car? Drop him off at school, and off I go to my work. Park the car. Open the door and squeeze giant, fat butt out the door.

My poor, bemused husband even went so far as to back out of going to a basketball game with some of his buddies that night so he could come home and console me and my fat butt. I truly wished he hadn’t as I had already made plans to go get a haircut (to draw more attention to my face and away from my giant a$$) and to pout. I’m sure he would have enjoyed watching those stick-thin, twenty-year-old, non-pregnant cheerleaders shaking their tiny, little bootys around all evening instead of coming home to kiss my big, fat one. Pity.

As for me, at the beauty salon I had an opportunity to berate myself further while looking at all the tight-butted models in Cosmo and Glamour and afterward I went home to watch TV shows starring a multitude of anorexic actresses. I was just pampering myself! (Speaking of pampers, I wondered if they made adult diapers this big?).

Was I obsessed? Yes. Would I diet even though I was pregnant? Let’s put it this way. If I hadn’t gained another pound in the last 13 weeks of that pregnancy, I would still have gained more than enough. My baby would have been just fine, feeding off the stores of my great, big, fat, butt! I figured she would probably be a little porker, in fact. No, I didn’t diet. I just did not eat as much. I ate healthy food. And vitamin pills. And I swore I would never look in the mirror again. When they made me step on a scale at the doctor’s office, I turned around so I couldn’t see it (then I promptly weighed myself as soon as I got home because curiosity was killing me). And above all, I always wore clothes that covered up my big, fat, huge, nasty, lumpy, gross butt!

Ever have one of those days?