Michele in Puccini with spillage
Not too long ago I rang my friend Esther, the only person I know sorta my age and sorta my size, but smaller than I am. I reckon she’s a size 4, which I used to be. I wanted to give her all my small clothing.
I was having a wardrobe clear out not because I was getting all organised and Marie Kondo, but because I was getting fatter. Not fat, fat, but fat for me. But Esther and I have the same taste more or less and she was getting smaller, due to a series of illnesses, and I was getting bigger, due to, various newspapers told me, one of two short bursts of rapid molecular ageing. The first is in your mid 40s, and it didn’t happen then, and the second is in your early 60s, it says here, though the spillage of new flesh through my bra, my undies, and a marked increase in the circumference of my thighs occurred for me last year, when I was 64.
Most of my slinky, tiny, bodycon maxis, minis and everything in-between now looked different on me, a little pouch or pocket of something in the midriff area, spilling out (with me muttering, “What fresh hell is THIS”) and a need to lie down and suck in when I was putting on tight jeans. I had never had to do this in my life, the sucking in, the hooking the zip into a bent wire hanger to do them up, the overspill of flesh from my previously 22 inch waist. Yes, even after two kids. This was a novelty for me and I was not sure I liked it, even though by BMI and other measures, I was in no way, technically fat. I was just bigger, and not toned, and all that ageing stuff that happened to OTHER people, was now happening to me. And I didn’t like it, but to say so seemed petty, stupid, non-feminist and truth be told, a bit body dysmorphia-ish. It really wasn’t something I could bitch about. “I was really thin, and now I am not.” Who fucking cares?
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And for perspective, for I must be frank, it was small potatoes compared to some other really bad body problems - and a problem is different from an ‘issue’ - some of my friends were having. One has no legs beyond the knee, a double amputee, whose illness might lead to further amputation. One has lost the power of her lower body, for now, after falling down some stairs. Another had a spinal abscess and lost use of her legs. A friend in America has incurable pancreatic cancer. A friend in Thailand has had cancer twice, and they keep cutting bits of him out. And my very best friend, a guy, had a stroke a few years ago and it affected his mobility, mainly on one side, but he just got on with it and did physio and can do tons of things, but also can’t do what he used to be able to do, like cycle, or drive, or use his left hand. And all of these friends have coped with these things and made adjustments and embraced life in the new circumstances, because what other option is there? And so WHY bitch about putting on a stone, compared to all these worse things? I can’t tell you. I know it’s not right, but it bugs me.
My previous very thin-ness was not a byproduct of dieting, or an eating disorder, or anything that was clinically significant to my mind. And I have a busy mind that thinks about these things. I believe it was a result of a lifelong very bad appetite, sluggish digestion, mainly due to chronic anxiety and a then little known about phobia of vomiting, which I still have.
For guys, I suppose I was a very cheap date. For gals, those I didn’t know very well, I was immediately diagnosed with an eating disorder. In fact, a real shrink, a former friend of mine, said on social media in response to a photo post of me in a very slinky green dress, posted, “When are you going to deal with your eating disorder?” And it got me thinking;
“Oh shit, have I got that AS WELL as all my other stuff?” But I sort of knew the answer. I was deep in grief at the time, and the small appetite I did have disappeared totally in a weird chemical cloud of Valium, vodka, and antidepressants. I knew I was fucked but I stopped caring about how to fix it. My weight, or lack of it, was the very least of my life problems.
Thin Michele in red
And I have to say, being very thin never stopped me having boyfriends or husbands. And yes, I know this is not supposed to be the benchmark of being attractive, but it was who I was. The skinny chick. A bit messed up but fun to go with to a gig. For a supposedly deep person, I was incredibly shallow, valuing my attractiveness to boys or men and being able to do, post 50, the whole mutton dressed as lamb thing for a long, long time. I could go into any shop except Primark and Marks, which run to big sizes, and find something that would cling to me in what I felt was a flattering way. I do remember a quote from Anthony Burgess, who wrote, “Going to bed with a skinny woman is like going to bed with a bicycle” and I laughed but recognised the truth in it. In my very skinniest time, when I was ill and deep into addiction, I did entertain an on again, off again boyfriend who, after a fractured and shitty liaison, called me Boney Maroney. He was not wrong. I was all hard edges and painful angles. How could that be fun, in bed?
Now I am bigger, I have no desire for boyfriends or the sex that comes with them. I feel this is down to hormonal changes and, according to a consultant I saw for a rather large ovarian cyst - which pressed on my bladder giving me frequent UTIs which are a total pain in the arse, so to speak - and all my bits are in a state of deterioration. Sex, if I had it, would probably be quite painful. Without a Boots-ful of some weird lubricant. And if I keep it at home, it feels presumptuous. Like, I know you want to shag me and I am prepared. Most nights, wait, who am I kidding, all nights, I go to bed listening to BBC iplayer, with my obligatory two post-menopausal-crazy-cat-lady-cats sitting on my chest.
I feel deep down this is the natural order of things. I can’t have what I don’t want, anyway. I love the memory of it, but I never thought of sex, at the time I was having it, was “making memories.” That’s a whole other kettle of fish gone off, and if I were to ever have it again, which I very much may not, it might not be all I previously thought, and knew, it was cracked up to be.
But I still love tiny dresses which no longer fit me. In the large scheme of things - and large works on several levels here - it really doesn’t matter. This is not even a first world problem but whatever comes BEFORE the first world problem. It totally does not matter to anybody but me.
And yet I feel, somehow, formerly thin women who are no longer as thin as they were, will relate. Or regular sized women who have gone up a size or two. You have to have a wardrobe clear-out, and this is like having a total flat clear, in my case. I remember the time my mum hit about 80, going to her flat and taking out about 20 pairs of stonewashed denim bell bottom jeans she wore in the 70s and early 80s. I told her, “These jeans suck now, and they did then as well, and they no longer fit you” and she said that one day, they would fit again, and she resented me telling her that they were crap, and that I was to put them all back in her wardrobe.
It was a wakeup call, and I duly put them back (after trying on a few pairs and deciding they were disgusting) in the cockroach ridden wardrobe, with all her old bags, shoes, and files of old taxes and school reports. I had a change of mind. Who was I to tell her what to save and what not to save? She was a good mum, raising her children in the best way she could, in light of very early widowhood and desperate and longstanding grief.
Now I am as old as she was, at some point, I can see that stuff that didn’t matter to her, also barely matters to me, though clearly it matters enough to write about it. My writing hero Nora Ephron wrote a wonderful book called, I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK and my mum pushed it onto me, saying how relatable it was, how funny it was. And she was right on both counts. I laughed out loud, in recognition, reading it, that familiar self-loathing, that pointless self-loathing. For another, opposite cultural reference, in the film of the book (which I despised at the time) Eat, Pray, Love, there was a scene where Julia Roberts - says to her friend not eating pizza because she felt fat - something along the lines of what man ever turned you down, naked? He’s hit the jackpot.
I laughed so hard at this, recognising the truth of the pizza naysayer. Guys, or I suspect any sexual partners of any identity, really don’t give a shit about how much you weigh, if indeed they are good people. If they are bad people, why are you sleeping with them anyway?
OK, end of story. I don’t much like the way I look right now. But also, I don’t much care about the way I Iook right now. Because attractiveness to another person has stopped being a priority. I love my children, my grandson and my rellies and friends. And they love me back.
As I was donating my teeny dresses to Esther, another friend (to be fair, I asked her) donated clothing to me that she had either got sick of or perhaps felt they just were not right for her anymore, and as such I got a fabulous wardrobe of beautiful dresses. I go to work every day feeling like a catwalk model. Life is good and this shit doesn’t matter, but IF it FEELS like it does (and it will, sometimes) But you have to tell yourself this does not matter. You will always have friends and if you want to, get laid.
