Raw Drip

In the mail yesterday amongst all the weekly ad circulars, I spied a new catalog I hadn’t noticed before – “Living XL”.

As I’ve mentioned before, Dick and I are not exactly “nomal” sized people. With Dick at 6′ 6″ and me at 6′ we’ve been living XL for quite a while now. But later, as I sat leafing through the new catalog, I was surprised to see that it’s not just an assortment of big & tall menswear, but rather an entire lifestyle catalog, not unlike the Pottery Barn catalog.

In addition to clothing, some of the products featured in the catalog’s table of contents include bathroom scales, dining room chairs, and bath sponges. Perhaps I’m stupid, but my initial thought was, “Why would me being tall require a special dining room chair?” Upon closer examination, I realized that the dining room chairs were built to withstand over 1,000 pounds. The bathroom scales were designed to register well over the traditional 300 lb maximum of most scales and the bath sponges were designed with extra long handles for cleaning those hard-to-reach areas, like feet. Suddenly it hit me. This was a catalog for the REALLY XL large person.

I am now convinced that my recent enrollment in Weight Watchers at Work combined with my recent request for the latest copy of the Rochester Big & Tall catalog for Dick must’ve dumped my name & address into some cross-referencing algorithm in a super computer, which ultimately pegged me as grossly obese. I know that many obese people may appreciate a catalog of such considerately designed items, but I can’t help feeling somewhat put-off at the implication that I should join their ranks because I’m overweight and tall. While I am still 40 lbs from my goal weight (and that’s 60 lbs from where I started my latest weight loss journey), I can’t help but feel that I am really NOT the target audience for this publication, hence my annoyance at ending up on the mailing list. I mean, isn’t it a pretty big leap to assume that anyone subscribing to a big & tall men’s clothing catalog or enrolling in Weight Watchers is seriously obese? Aren’t the obese stereotyped enough as it is? Besides, isn’t making that kind of a “big” leap, also wasting a lot of paper? It strikes me as being as much of longshot as sending the AARP enrollment kit to anyone buying gold lame shoes.

Of course my perspective (from waaaay up here…) is that this is just another insult in a lifetime of insults and assumptions. For instance, Dick has a major beef with most car makers. His favorite automobile lust object, the sexy little BMW Z3, is a relatively affordable option on the used car market and Dick can even get into it…if he moves his legs behind his ears. But driving it while sitting upright is an impossibility and, as you would suspect, the jaws of life and a tub of Crisco are required to get him out of the vehicle. It tends to be this way for him in most cars that offer bucket seats. He can fit into the Oldsmobuicks of the world with their roomy bench seating, no problem. But anything smaller and it’s going to be a life-threateningly tight fit.

For me, the bane of my existence is shoe makers and retailers who seem to ignore those of us with oil tankers for feet, stopping their size offerrings at 10. This makes my size 11 feet (I swear they were size 10 before I had children) nearly impossible to fit easily, cheaply or comfortably. And, note to you shoe maker people out there: please just assume that if I’m wearing a size 11, I probably don’t want 6 inch heels on my pumps. I don’t mind being the tallest girl in the room, but my husband doesn’t like it when I tower over him. I’ve found the only place those shoes seem to work for us is in bed, with my heels pointed at the ceiling.

Unfortunately for my supersized kids, several height calculators are predicting a lifetime of assumptions & insults for them, as well. In fact it’s already started. At barely 4, Adam is in the 110th percentile in height for his age group and towers over the other children in his Pre-K class at school. Tabitha, too, is in the 105th percentile in height for her age and routinely gets mistaken for a 4 year old, despite that fact that she’s barely 2 1/2. Unfortunately, the human brain seems to be conditioned to meter our responses to children based on a split-second assessment of their maturity soley based on their appearance. This often means strange looks in the grocery store when Tabitha uses her baby talk to stumble through a sentence. It also means school teachers who, despite their training and awareness, often treat my son as if he’s a 1st grade delinquent flunky, rather than the fidgety almost 4-year old he really is. Poor kids. I feel their pain.

Of course being really tall does have its advantages. I rarely need a step stool to reach anything in my kitchen. I can carry at least 30 lbs more weight than my shorter girlfriends and still look trim – although, admittedly, it’s been awhile since I’ve been able to exploit that phenomenon. I also find that I can command attention in a room just by standing up; I’ve got stage presense that makes Obama look like an ass clown. I find this ability is particularly helpful if, like me, you’re in a career focusing on education. Even adult learners will silence their talking if you stand over them and give them the “teacher stare” that implicitly says, “Would you like to share your ideas with the rest of the class?” I doubt I’d be quite as effective employing this technique if it weren’t for the intimidation factor of my height.

I guess livin’ large isn’t all bad. I just wish there was TiVo for catalogs so I could order a petites catalog and somehow trick the algorithm into assuming I’m somewhere between extremes – maybe even something a bit closer to normal.

I had a little epiphany this morning as I was searching for my car keys in my handbag. That’s right, I said handbag – NOT purse. Note to any guy drips out there: a purse is the highly pragmatic but indistinct accessory that your mom used to carry; a handbag is a chic accessory chosen for a degree of praticality but largely selected for its relationship to an entire cohesive ensemble. Anyway, I digress…

Searching for my keys in the bottomless pit that is my handbag, I suddenly realized that I’ve made a serious error in judgment somewhere along my life’s path. Did it start with meeting Dick in high school? Or was it a more recent event? The birth of one of the children, perhaps, that signaled my demise? I think it probably started when I got sucked into the trend of the gigantic handbag.

As the big bag trend was on the rise in fashion magazines, I hesitated to embrace it. Those poor Olsen twins always looked as if carrying their 15 pound Hermés Birkin bags was really putting a strain on their little arms. Every photo of them toting their gigantic bags around NYC had them looking so delicately chic, I was worried a bag of that size would be grossly out of scale for me, too. But alas, my zaftig proportions came to my rescue ensuring that I’m able to pull off the look quite readily – and without stirring public concern about my waifishness.

The biggest blessing of the big handbag is also the biggest curse – that is, you end up carrying your stuff and everyone else’s personal belongings around with you, as well. Dick’s initial mockery of my latest fashion decision has reluctantly given way to respect for my handbag’s abundant capacity. No longer does Dick have to schlep his book under his arm when we go to the mall (because, God forbid he actually shop with me…). Now, he gleefully shoves his book, sunglasses & water bottle into my handbag for me to schlep. See? Problem. Solution. Dick is nothing if not a problem-solver.

The children have also caught onto my handbag’s handiness. They routinely shove toys, food, and drinks into its roomy compartments. Fishing them out of my bag’s hidden nooks & crannies provides countless minutes of entertainment for my fidgety pair in restaurants.

As you can see from the tone of my writing, the big bag is starting to lose its luster with me. The final straw was when I reached my hand into it this morning and began removing the contents in a desperate search for my keys. Looking at the pile of “stuff” on the chair next to mine, I realized my cherished black leather Tracy Reese handbag with fuchsia silk lining had somehow turned into a time capsule/garbage dump. Some of the things I found include:

There was more, but you get the point. My handbag has somehow morphed into a living, breathing “Me” exhibit featuring detritus representing all the pieces of my life, both present and recent past. On top of being a bizarre tour of artifacts of the life of a working mom, it’s also a peek into my confused self. How “together” can I really be when I’m carrying around this baggage day in and day out? And, what does it say about me that I carry around so many other people’s things? Is that really who I am? Am I a schleper, destined to carry everyone else’s burdens + my own? Or am I a poseur – pretending to be well-groomed and organized person on the outside, while I’m actually a big ole’ mess on the inside?

I think my error in judgement was opening myself and my bag up for invasion by others. Certainly with small children around, it’s impossible to remain an impenetrable fortress. Inevitably, you end up carrying around all of their literal and metaphorical baggage, as well as your own. But my mistake was that I didn’t make time to purge. Rather, I allowed my handbag and myself to be treated as the physical and emotional dumping ground for my entire family.

This morning’s purge of my bag’s contents was a long-overdue exercise for me. “Edit” is the word of the day now; it’s time to simplify. I’m going to edit my belongings, edit out some chaos, reduce my bag size to something more manageable, eliminate those things that distract me from my goals (and my keys) and encourage my bossy posse to carry their own darn crap around. Hopefully, in doing so, I can claim a very minor victory for burdened women everywhere.

Farewell, dear gigantopithicus accessorizus. Your abundant exterior charm was only outdone by your abundant storage capacity. I will miss you. But I’m bigger than you now and I need to move onto smaller and better things.

Between work schedules, school events, social gatherings, and miscellaneous household responsibilities it’s extremely difficult to find the time to sleep, let alone enjoy some intimacy with my Dick. And, as is the case of many working couples, we’ve found that our sexual appetites often fall out of synch, with his night owl tendencies clashing with my early riser tendencies. This means we end up being just another item on each other’s “To Do” list – with sex coming between us rather than uniting us as a couple.

Whether by design or circumstance, Dick and I seem to have developed a rather naughty workaround for this situation. We maximize the time we have together by embracing the more mundane moments of parenting to indulge in some sexually charged banter. Although in the presence of two chatty children, it’s often more fourplay, than foreplay.

Case in point: a recent bath time with the kids turned into one great big, long and hard (hard to follow, that is) stretch of loaded statements and knowing glances culminating in Tabitha proudly pointing at her naked father and saying, “You have a penis, daddy and I have a wagina.” To which Dick replied, “That’s right sweetie, but my penis really belongs to mommy and she can do with it whatever she wants…” Insert wink & nudge here.

Another example: I recently observed that our regular early morning cuddle with Tabitha in our bed may be the closest Dick will ever get to having two chicks in bed at once. “Don’t say I never arranged that manage au trois for you. It looks like you’re the big piece of meat in our little love sandwich.” To which Dick replied, “Don’t let the other chick fool ‘ya. My meat is all for you, baby.”

Talk about triggering my gag reflex…it’s just awful, I know. It’s really rather embarassing to admit that we’ve so completely surrendered to our PG-13 rated lives. The only comfort I have is knowing that we’re probably not alone in our use of pornographic puns and dirty double entendres to keep the fires burning. I bet there are a lot of you out there who use a little fourplay (and hopefully some foreplay, too) to get by from date night to date night.

In theory, all of this contrived banter should turn me off. But, I guess what they say is true, absence really does make the heart grow fonder. All I know is that a day full of fourplay really gets me in the mood for an evening of foreplay for two.