My Life in Sweatpants

Clothes shopping has always been painful for me.  School shopping with my naturally thin sister, Jennie, was excruciating.  I stood by while she slipped effortlessly into any style she desired.  She was a department store mannequin, not an ounce of fat needing camouflage.  Dressing me was more like an exercise in optical illusion.  It required two to three people, plenty of elastic, and at least two years of calculus under your belt.  My curves were too much for any junior-sized clothing, and  Misses clothes were not exactly cool back then.
In the end, the ride home always ended the same: my mother pissed off, and me crying with a bag full of unwanted Misses clothes bouncing up and down on the seat next to me.

Then, I was an adult.  A fat adult, and clothes shopping became something else, just another chore on my “to do” list.  Stop at post office, get milk from market, buy jeans.  You try like hell to find clothes to hide what’s happening underneath, but eventually you give up and resign yourself to sweatpants.

I lived in sweatpants for three years.  I wore holes in the bottoms, collected stains like an artist’s apron.  I was a two-hundred and sixty-five pound woman with three chins living in a pair of sweatpants, yet it still caught me by surprise when my ex-husband cheated on me.