There are two reasons your jeans slide down your butt and need to be hiked up as you walk your children up the stairs to their classrooms.

The first is that you’ve seamlessly integrated a healthy regimen of yoga, meditation and mindful kale-eating into your daily life that the pounds have melted off without your noticing, so focused are you on what’s truly important in your oneness with the world.

The other is that, in the insanity of modern life–in my case, divorcing, moving, refurnishing, refurbishing, earning a living, caring for two kinetically energetic 8-year-olds and standing under the smoke alarm waving a piece of cardboard every time I try to cook in my new apartment–you’ve had a few too many what-the-hell moments. The pants are sliding down not because they are so roomy but because your belly is more comfortable sitting atop the waistband, rather than being painfully bisected by it. They bag a bit in the butt, because the butt part of the jeans is now closer to your upper thighs, but no belt is going to help you now.

Second category over here.

Photo by The Giant Vermin CC

You can’t barge into the bathroom when I’m getting ready to take a shower–my first 10 minutes to myself in 18 hours–and then scream, “Eeew, big, white naked mommy!!!!” at the top of your lungs.

You can barge in, and keep your pie hole shut. Or you can stay out of the bathroom and shriek your adorable observations about my body, the naked whiteness of which you will have been mercifully spared. You can’t do both.

I mean, you can, but I really wish you wouldn’t.

Third option entails me getting rich enough to afford my own bathroom, but that’s a long term long shot. And the fourth…I can’t go into that but it involves duct tape and quite possibly my local child welfare agency.

I’m having a yogurt. It calms me down.

Photo CC brianandjacklyn

My hair is long, but I noticed this morning in the shower that the ends were nowhere near my nipples. That was the gauge I used when I was younger to know if I needed a haircut: If my hair hit or went past my nipples in the shower, it was probably time for a trim.

Yes, well. My hair is just as long as it normally is when I am due for a haircut. I had no choice but to conclude (and not for the first time) that my nipples must be lower. Yes, well.

And so I laughed, as I have learned to do at such silliness, and decided that perhaps if I grow my hair even longer, maybe I’d create an optical illusion and my breasts would look as if they were riding higher. (more…)

Flipping through the Boston Proper catalog this morning, I saw that they’re featuring Not Your Daughter’s Jeans (little trademark symbol I don’t know how to make).

The above are my daughters’ actual jeans. They are seven years old. I would not want to try and wear their jeans, considering I can barely get my arm into one of the legs to turn them right side out when I need to wash them.

Of course I get what the brand is trying to do–appeal to Formerlies who, if they wore their teenage daughters’ jeans, would see their floppy postpartum belly skin splooge out over the top, their butts flattened into nothingness, and enjoy that oh-so-flattering piano leg thing that happens when women with actual thighs and hips wear pegged jeans. (See much-loved post on jeans.) (more…)

One of the examples of how life changes when you dip your toe into Formerly territory that really resonates with people is how when you’re in your 20s, bonehead guys fall all over themselves to drool obscene things about your body and make vile sucking noises as you walk by. Now, by contrast, all you hear is that sitcom sound of crickets chirping to indicate abject nothingness.

The joke, of course, is that while you found catcalls annoying (when you were in a rush) or hatefully objectifying and anti-woman (when you were hungry or hormonal), now when they occasionally happen, you feel vaguely relieved…before you feel annoyed or like giving them a crash course in feminist theory right there on the construction site. (more…)

Stephanie Dolgoff

In the car–and, sadly, nowhere else–I am Mixmistress Steph, DJ extraordinaire, and as such, I give my husband and kids an unparalleled musical education for which I know they are deeply grateful, even if they don’t show it. The sound track to every car ride that’s long enough for me to find my iPod in the bottom of my gigantic mom purse consists of random hits from the AM radio days of my youth, the few current uberpopular songs (mostly by Lady Gaga) that even I, a harried 43-year-old working mother of twins couldn’t help but absorb, and, of course, ’80s music.

The ’80s were when I was in high school and college, when, like every raw and angsty adolescent, I felt on some level that Simon LeBon and Natalie Merchant and even Ozzy Osbourne were living inside my head, shouting out all the raw and angsty things I wish I could express, and would have if I had talent and a recording contract. READ THE REST AT HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

This is Carla Birnberg, one of the incredibly together women I’ve met in doing this blog and trying to get the word out about the book.

A few months back, I did a podcast with her and her friend Shauna (they comprise Two Fit Chicks). It was over the phone–Carla is in Austin and Shauna is in Scotland–but was so taken by their BREATHTAKINGLY SANE attitude about fitness and body image and just plain enjoying your life without making yourself crazy that I sat there nodding like a bobble head, as if anyone could see me, and breathing “yeah!” into the phone. Do yourself a favor and check them out, as well as Carla’s blog, Mizfitonline.com.

In any case, Carla says in her video that she didn’t consider herself a Formerly–she is her best self now, at 41, and doesn’t think of herself as Formerly anything. I can understand that. I, too, feel I’m my best self at 43, although I do get a kick out of sifting through the past, what I’ve learned and that which I am no longer. It’s all what you choose to do with your allotted 24 daily hours. Carla, obviously, uses more of that time for bicep curls than I do, while I prefer gazing at my navel. When I can find it within the folds of my mom belly.

Whatevs. Carla is a “Finally,” which it turns out you can be without considering yourself a “Formerly.” Labels only matter if they’re meaningful, and “Finally” works for me.

Pretty cool and pretty nice of my friend Karen to mention FH! Go nuts with the tweeting!

I managed to ditch the crap body image at check-in. After all these years, I don’t understand how it can hover above like a dark cloud, drenching me in tepid acid rain, making me want to chow through the entirety of my kids’ Halloween candy and consider applying for one of those credit cards that are intended exclusively to finance liposuction. (more…)

I’m going out to Los Angeles tomorrow to visit my best friend since freshman year of high school. We met in algebra and bonded over being able to apply eyeshadow (a Maybelline lavender trio) during class without getting caught, and we’ve been partaking in such inanity ever since. (more…)