I’ve been kind of quiet over here because I’ve been disorganized and unmotivated and also chickenshit about grabbing brass rings. There is a brass ring that I want REALLY BADLY and I almost grabbed it yesterday, but I did the equivalent of falling off the carousel, scraping my chin, and having my dress fly up over my head, so I am still recovering from that. Is it better to try things and have life say NO, YOU SUCK, or is it better to not try and then go home and flagellate yourself? I guess it’s case by case, but I’m sure if I pulled up my shirt my belly would be yellow. Being pathetic is EXHAUSTING and embarrassing. I need a nap and a boot to the head, in either order. Mostly the boot.

So, when I feel like this, a good first step is to try to do a little writing. One thing I haven’t gotten the hang of is writing for other companies on here, because you know I just write whatever pukes out of my head that day. But to write with a Theme and On Time is another matter. On the other hand, if people ask me what I’m doing right now, I get to say “I get paid in sex toys.” HUR.

This story goes back to the amazing year 1998, when I was in college. Actually, it goes further back than that, probably back to the awful time when I started sprouting boobs in grade school and the words “mosquito bites” started getting tossed around. I was in denial about this, because I was convinced there had been some horrible mistake and it would be revealed that I was a boy after all. In my neighborhood, the boys did the fun things, like kickball, spitting, and fist fighting, while the two girls who lived nearby practiced for when they were going to get on the pompon squad, combed Barbie hairs, and gossiped. No, I didn’t want to hear about the time you saw the “thingie” of the girl on the next block and it was like four inches long. WHAT?

One day teeny bras appeared on my bed. I ignored them. A few days later I was threatened. “You may not leave the house until you put a bra on.” JESUS GOD NO. Like that won’t be noticeable as I was rounding the bases. I had seen the poor, poor super-early bloomers, the girls who had lady-sized racks in the third grade. I had run interference for some of them as the boys attempted to corner them in the coat room and snap the boinginess out of their bras. I saw one of these friends in tears as she asked the teacher for a safety pin to fix a broken strap. Wearing a bra separated you, not just from the boys, but from the other girls. Suddenly you were all different, like a Bodhisattva or Zombie Jesus, with your purse full of mysterious and embarrassing items, and bra lines under your shirt.

Then I outgrew my dirtbike and was denied a larger one, and was instead given a ten speed which I hated and only used later, when I was grounded off my car. My petition for a basketball hoop was denied on the grounds that “no boys live in this house.”

What I learned from this was that being an older girl was bad, bad, and lame. I began to hate my body and see it as a prison that made me different and kept me away from the life that I loved. If I wore any shirt that clung to my body, older boys (and sometimes creepy men) began to notice me and talk to me. I didn’t want to be talked to like this. I wanted to play with my friends.

I knew, of course, that my body was going to ignore what I wanted and turn me into a woman whether I liked it or not. After a couple of years I accepted what I looked liked and even got a little girly. I thought, well, this isn’t so bad. Then college came, and my hips followed.

Stretchmarks ripped across my hips and upper thighs. My clothes didn’t fit right, and I had no idea how to dress myself in any way that even approached looking attractive. Phoenix was so hot, I didn’t even care, really. I threw on a pair of shorts and a baggy band shirt, and went on my way. Since the shirts were so loose, they obscured my waist, making my fashion statement, “I am a cube.”

I got lazy in the heat, choosing to hide out in the air-conditioned libraries, and gained twenty pounds. My mother was going through her cyberchondriac phase, and diagnosed me out of the blue with polycystic ovary syndrome. “WHAT?!” I said. “Well,” she reasoned. “You have irregular periods (not true), you have acne (give me a break! I was twenty and lived on the surface of the sun), and you’re obese (hey, let’s leave my college chub out of this, please). You should go see a doctor about this.” Lucky for me, I had the sense to ignore her.

Then I had my first child. Well, it’s all downhill from here, I thought to myself cheerfully. But it wasn’t. Is it bad that feeling like a deformed freak for most of my life was actually helpful after I had kids? When I was younger I read a lot of old Hollywood stars’ biographies, and the beginning of Liz Taylor’s always stuck with me. One of Liz’s earliest memories is of knowing that her mother blamed her for “ruining” her figure and her “perfect waist.” I had never worn a bikini. Until I was twenty-five, I had never worn a tank top. I had no perfect image of myself to ruin.

It was all up from there. I survived spawning, and found out that I was a good mom, most of the time. I got more interested in how I looked, initially because I realized that how I dressed would effect how others treated me and perceived me. I was out of college and I didn’t want to scuff around looking like a teenage boy anymore, with my sneakers and Husker Du shirts. Then I realized that I liked looking nice for its own sake. For myself. HEY! I even had a waist, even if it wasn’t as small as it was ten years before.

I know a lot of these kinds of “witness my special self of steam transformation” stories often end with “and I learned to love my body again, even though my boobnibblers had done horrifying things to it.” I guess what I am trying to say, is that becoming a mom made me care in a good way about my appearance, and care less about if I looked weird or bad or large butt syndrome. I learned to love my body for the first time. FUCK IT. I are conquering queen, behold my subjects that I have shot out of my own body. Being proud of yourself and what you have done can go a long way towards making you feel confident and attractive, and yes, even the “s” word. SEXAY.