Yes it does. I realize this is not news, but it is news to anyone who is experiencing it for the first time, like me. You take youth for granted for so long that this getting old trick kind of sneaks up on you. One day things aren't wrinkled and don't sag, the next, you find fine lines on your hands and saggy parts that weren't there before (I swear). I had a baby last year and I feel like I've been catapulted into the old-age category overnight, never to return.
When aging dawns on you, two paths diverge. One, keep fighting it with diet and exercise; two, give in and use age as your excuse to let yourself go to hell. I was at a sales meeting this week, and as is typical at these things, I saw a good many people in the latter category. Women with quivering bags of flesh for arms, who nonetheless wear sleeveless, tight shirts that fit them like sausage casings, men with moobs unabashedly stuffing their faces with meat and candy like they're still 17, sad, saggy women and men wandering around in complete denial of the reality of their shape. I desperately don't want to be like these people, so I continue to fight the good fight, exercising regularly and watching what I eat from time to time. But if their bodies betrayed them so completely, who is to say that mine won't, too, despite efforts to the contrary?
Thanks to pregnancy and a c-section I now have this weird fold on my lower abdomen where the scar is, not to mention stretch marks, and though I'm losing weight, this thing just doesn't want to leave. Ever. It makes my clothes not fit quite right, and overall makes me feel hideously deformed, at least in my mind. It is a daily reminder that I am no longer young, and that no matter what I do, my body will not go back to its former tautness. And I never had a six-pack but I wish now I could go back and revise my pre-pregnancy self-loathing, bc I was certainly closer to perfect then than I am now.
This is horrible of course, but it's also life. You can't give birth and have it not affect your body. There is a part of me that thinks my stomach is hideous and gross, but there is another, stubborn part that thinks it is beautiful and nothing to be ashamed of. I know that sounds very Lilith-fair of me, but a part of me refuses to see this as anything other than proof that I did something amazing, society be damned. I wish more women felt this way. Instead, it's just another reason to hate our bodies more than before, because we have completely internalized the male gaze and keep failing to live up to the flawless figure we think it demands of us. I see why people give up after kids--beauty is for the young, but wasted on the young, and attempts to hold onto youth can seem pathetic and sad.
I was carded just now buying liquor at an airport kiosk. I haven't been carded in quite sometime, so I chose to be flattered by it. I understand midlife crises now in a way I couldn't before. Let me have just one more go at youth before it leaves me completely, that must be the driving force. I get it. Thank goodness we all get old, sooner or later, or there would be riots.
