May: Mother to Be

In which Bridge. The baby. Is bawlin'. Its 'ead off.

Having your tastes genuinely change is a bizarre and subtle experience; our tastes ARE US to such a huge extent, right? Except, they do change, and sometimes it takes forever to notice that it’s happening. I’m not saying I no longer love BJD (that would be a terrible thing to realize with 8 chapters/installments of this newsletter left to go.) But I am enjoying it … differently … this time around. “Actually, it seems like you aren’t enjoying it that much at all,” a friend told me this weekend (this friend is very smart and funny and talented and always gives me something to turn over in my brain for a few days every time we see each other). “Well it’s the diet stuff,” I said. “Maybe you should write about that!” she said. Ugh, no.

Ugh, yes, I will wade into this morass. The past three years have been the first time in my previously blessedly ignorant life that I’ve experienced what life is like in a body shape and size you don’t like being. When I got pregnant with Ilya I was already on the high end of what I normally weigh, and then I spent the next nine months eating bacon and ice cream every day, whoops. My first pregnancy had happened hot on the heels of a chainsmoking, long-walks-to-burn-off-anger-and-anxiety summer, and then I spent the first three months of it only wanting to eat sour gummy worms and gingerale, so that had been a totally different story. I was not prepared for what my postpartum body felt and looked like. I felt not only alien to myself, I was in pain. My knees hurt all the time. I didn’t fit into any of my non-maternity clothes. I didn’t wear jeans again until I was more than a year postpartum. I also had a fairly large diastasis, which is the thing where your abdominal muscles separate and then don’t re-connect. Physical therapy and bodywork helped, but mostly it just took time for my body to knit itself back together again. Even so, I still look slightly pregnant and probably always will unless I get a tummy tuck. People stand up for me on the train and yoga teachers caution me about poses that could hurt the baby they assume I am still carrying. I had always flattered myself that I had a healthy self-image that didn’t rely on being perceived as conventionally attractive and/or thin, but I was a total dodo-bird. Turns out, I only thought that because until 2015, I had always been both of those things! Even when I had a mullet in 2003 and cystic acne in 2008! You don’t know what you got til it’s gone, etc.

The one thing that’s become clear to me during this fucked up time in my body’s life is that there really is no such thing as having a “healthy” relationship with diet and weight loss, for me. I am either at war with my impulses or not thinking about it at all and eating what I want to because I’m hungry, and there isn’t a lot of middle ground. Luckily and happily I am currently too preoccupied with my 1000 other areas of neurotic fixation to spend much time thinking about my weight, and I’m also getting more exercise and my joints no longer hurt. But I finally understand that the daily weigh-ins in this book aren’t funny. At all.

What is funny, though, in this chapter:

*When Bridget’s mom tries to get her to go to Color Me Beautiful (which was such a thing — I remember my mom doing it, and having a lot of purplish lipstick afterward): “Nobody wants a girlfriend who wanders around looking like something from Auschwitz, darling.”

*Bridget’s competing fantasies of parenthood with Daniel, both equally unrealistic: the one in which they are "pink and glowing in the bath” or “in manner of Calvin Klein ad” versus the one where she and Daniel are always drunk and yelling in sudden working class accents: “Daniel. I am avin’ ay fag.”

Not enjoying, besides weigh-ins:

*The whole Magda plotline — she’s a sad SAHM with a cheating husband who consoles herself by buying clothes that Bridget can’t afford, they both feel the grass is greener, blah blah, it’s dumb, sorry. All the non-Sharon non-Jude friends of Bridget are caricatures. Helen Fielding might have made these aspects stronger if she’d known this book would be xeroxed millions of times, getting more and more diluted.

Up next: JUNE: Hah! Boyfriend