Since we’re talking about my body anyway
I just came back from a run. I feel great, and my ponytail is dripping with sweat, and I feel like a badass.
I am feeling good about the path I’m on. Of getting healthy, and challenging myself, and losing weight. At the rate I’m going, in another four or five months I will have lost the weight I want to lose. But I don’t know how close I’ll be to looking the way I want to look. The way my body is structured I don’t have room to carry a baby up and down so I carried my babies way out in front, and it stretched my stomach skin out horribly. I have enormous, deep stretch marks, but I also have a ton of loose skin.
I’ve been dry-brushing, and that’s softened that skin a ton, but it’s still there. And I don’t think there’s anything natural I can do to make it go away.
So I may resort to the unnatural. Ali Wentworth posted a piece yesterday about getting cosmetic surgery for her deep-set eyes, and my first reaction was “Hell, yeah!” I have always been in favor of cosmetic surgery for other people who want it. (Sometimes it’s too much, of course, but I firmly believe that it’s better to change your nose than hate your whole face because you don’t like your nose.)
This idea that *I* could get cosmetic surgery, though, is new. I started thinking about it a few years ago, when I was in the process of a divorce and realized that if I was lucky, I’d be naked in front of someone else at some point in the future. Even though I was still on the Scarlett O’Hara plan with exercise and eating well, I knew I’d someday gather my wits and start making positive changes. But that extra skin was probably more than I could ever deal with on my own.
Then one of my friends got her extra skin removed and raved about it. (The recovery, no, but the results after recovery.) And, just like the Little Engine That Could, I knew I could, I knew I could, too. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
Do I worry that by getting corrective abdominal surgery (most people call it a tummy tuck but I prefer “corrective abdominal surgery”) I’m giving in to some ideal? No. I want to look the way I want to look. And I don’t worry that I’m sending any message to my kids about how people should look or what cosmetic surgery means. If I get surgery, it’ll be yet another example of showing them how they can change things in their lives that they don’t like. First, by working hard to do as much as possible with exercise and eating well, then with surgery. I really want my kids to know that they’re not victims of circumstance, and that they can create the lives they want. Whether it’s where they live, what they do, who they love, or how much extra skin they have hanging around.
So, yeah. I’ll keep working hard. Then save up the money and have it done. And wait eagerly to recover so I can start running again.
Magda Pecsenye writes about parenting at AskMoxie.org and about co-parenting after divorce with her ex-husband at When The Flames Go Up.
Follow her on Twitter at @AskMoxie and join the AskMoxie Facebook page.
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Yes, do what you want, enjoy, and don’t think I don’t feel the temptation. Etc, etc.
(See me re: My jowels)
But there is this thing that niggles at the back of my mind about women changing themselves to look at certain way, that sort of hit me after I saw Sec. Katherine Sebelius on the Daily Show with her kabouki mask face on. And it made me sad that even she, how had all that power and surely nothing to prove, had to do it too. I don’t know how to properly articulate it. Something about how there just weren’t any choices for women anymore, old ladies need not apply.
Of course, the guys are doing it too now. So what do I know.