My husband took a picture of me this weekend with the kids. This was significant for two reasons:
- There are not a lot of pictures of me with my kids and he took it without me asking.
- I hadn’t seen a picture of myself in a while and I was pretty horrified at what I saw.
Guys, I am no longer just adorable and fat, I now qualify as stout. Jeez. (And I am trying to use “fat” and “stout” as neutral terms here. I did not say I was a bad or unworthy or ugly person. So I don’t want to receive any emails or comments being like “But you aren’t fat!” because that will just piss me off.)
But I don’t feel stout! Sure my clothes all fit the same, I definitely haven’t lost weight, but I’ve been hitting the gym hard and I’ve been working on my sugar consumption and vegetable consumption. My arms are jiggly, my belly is jiggly, but I run up and down the stairs in my house with laundry baskets and vacuums all day and don’t feel out of breath. If someone asked me if I was in good shape, I would say yes, right now I am in pretty good shape.
And yet this picture shows a stout, middle-aged lady!
I’m not surprised about the middle-aged part. I’ve heard this is a thing: people look in the mirror and are astounded to see an old person looking back at them. This hasn’t happened to me quite yet although I suppose it will eventually. Although I don’t tend to feel younger than I am; forty feels about right.
Anyway, it’s weird how the way a person feels and the way a person looks can be such a mismatch. I suppose it happens the other way too: someone can look amazing on the outside but feel like absolute shit on the inside. I’m glad that’s not me for now!
But at least now I can brace myself for when our professional family photos come back in a couple weeks.