I'm not Fat. I'm Fluffy

Ok, so the years have stored themselves in my body's cells, swelling with memories and every calorie that I have consumed since I was like seventeen.

Someone recently asked me when was I the most fit in my life. I said, "Kindergarten."

I used to try to fool myself that I really had gained all this middle-girth weight. I told myself, "It's because I had children. This baby weight will drop off as soon as I get back to normal."

That was more than ten years ago.

So then I tried working out. I went to the gym, huffed and puffed and then got so hungry from huffing and puffing that I'd head straight to the drive-thru for a number three combo on my way home. That wasn't exactly working out for me. So I stopped. Going to the gym that is.

I thought I had plateaued with my weight. Nope. I got wider. I discovered this as I suddenly was knocking things - and small children - over with my derrier when I would try to squeeze past. I couldn't understand how I'd become so clumsy, knocking over store displays. Or turning towards someone only to have them reel across the room from a hip bump from me. It was bewildering.

I once knocked something to the floor at a small boutique when I swiveled around and a knick-knack broke with a loud crash. I was so irritated with the shopkeeper for having so foolishly placed his inventory precariously near the edge of the shelving. The audacity to expect me to pay for it.

A moment of clarity came when I was cooking the kitchen. My daughter wandered in to see what was for dinner. I bent over to put something into the dishwasher when my backside catapulted her across the kitchen and out the backdoor. She never had a chance. I was finally forced to confront the awful truth about myself: I was no longer a woman in a body of size 8 like in high school, but was in fact a fluffy middle-aged mother with the rear-end power of a deployed airbag.

I reached over the dinner table last night. I misjudged the size of my arm and it swung right into my son Jeremy's face, knocking him backwards right onto the floor. "God, mom, " he shouted, "be careful with that thing. You could kill someone!"

My bosom has become one of the most curvy features of my maturing body. I recently purchased a new bust-projection-minimizing bra at Wal-Mart. It's a roll of duct tape. That's the only way I can keep my balance. Otherwise, it's like trying to walk around with an armload of watermelons.

It's not all bad. My curvacious endowment once saved my life. I was caught in an undercurrent on a swift river, but then my Big Girls caught onto a log, like a couple of anchor weights, and saved me from washing downstream. The buoyancy helped, too. If I had been a skinny-b-cup- little thing I surely would have drowned.

I'm not fat. I'm just fluffy. Like a great,big pillow that is about to smash you in the face.