This morning I did something that I have been dreading for weeks.

Ever since I spoke to my Mom a few weeks ago and was informed that my first shift back to work would be Friday, March 28 from five to nine, I have been thinking about a box and a clear garbage bag hidden away in the basement.

I see that box and that bag every time I take a load of laundry down to the basement laundry room (which is at least once a day…). And I see that box and that bag every time I go down the stairs to put the wet clothes into the dryer. And I see that box and that bag once more each and every day when I head down to the dingy laundry room to fetch the basket of clean clothes and bring them upstairs to be folded and put away.

The box was full of old pants and skirts.

The bag was full of Capri pants and tops.

And I have avoided both up until today.

For weeks now, ever since that conversation with Barb, I have known that I need to haul both the box and the bag up the stairs. I have known that I need to look through the contents of each to determine what still fits and what doesn’t. What can be used for another year and what needs to be tossed out. What is still stylish and what went out with…well, what went out.

But for weeks now, I’ve avoided the chore. The truth is that I’ve been terrified of trying on the contents of the box. Nothing scared me more than all of the pants and skirts no longer fitting, my “mummy tummy” more pronounced now, after three children, than it ever has been. I was equally scared of each and every tank top and t-shirt not fitting over my boobs or worse…hugging the mummy tummy that I couldn’t fit into the pants.

Here’s a bit of background.

A long time ago, I mentioned that I used to be fatter than I am right now.

I can remember weighing myself at my mother in law’s house. She has one of those fancy schmancy scales and because I didn’t have a scale at all in those days, I used to weigh myself whenever we would visit her. It was after Kate was born…she was maybe a year or two old…and we were visiting for some kind of holiday. I went into the bathroom with Emma to pee and she wanted to weigh herself on the fancy schmancy scale. I let her and then I stepped on myself. I remember looking down at the number and being horrified. I had no idea that I had reached anything close to that weight. In fact, it was about thirty pounds heavier than the weight I thought I was…the weight that I said I was.


I could have cried.

But at the same time, I really didn’t know what to do about it. I sort of tabled it for a while until….

I got super, super sick.

It was late Spring and I contracted some kind of gastro intestinal thing that wreaked havoc on my insides. I was so unbelievably sick and I was in such pain it was close to torture. For about two weeks, I subsisted on Gatorade and ginger ale. Every now and then, hunger would get the better of me and I would try to eat plain pasta or a few plain potato chips or a little bit of white rice. And I would quickly regret the decision.

Obviously, not eating for about two weeks and flushing out my system made me lose some weight. Not a ton of it, but enough that a skirt I had purchased at Value Village a few months earlier purely because I couldn’t stand for anyone else to have it (it was far too tight) actually fit.

And it felt good.

That experience kick started me. I didn’t want to put the weight back on. I liked being a bit slimmer. I liked having clothes fit me a bit better. And I decided that I would try to maintain it, at the very least.

I started to become much more careful about what I ate. I made a real effort and you know what? The weight kept coming off, slowly but surely.

By the time a year had passed, I was the thinnest I had been in years. I had lost nearly sixty pounds by August of 2006. I was wearing a size I had worn in high school. A size I never for one second thought I’d be able to get back into. And for the first time in years and years, I wasn’t always looking for the biggest size while I was shopping. I didn’t have to grab the XL…in fact, I was actually wearing a medium some of the time.

And then I got pregnant.

I know that I’ve lost most of the baby weight, especially given that the little fart was born early and I hadn’t put much weight on. But a woman’s shape changes with every baby she births and I know that I’m not as small as I was that summer before he was conceived. I have weighed myself a few times and I’m about ten pounds away from the lowest I had been.

But that’s still almost fifty pounds lighter than I was the day I weighed myself in my mother in law’s bathroom and wanted to cry.

I guess I just need to keep my perspective, eh?

Regardless, I’ve still been too scared to bring that box and that bag up the stairs and into the light of my bedroom and the glare of my full length mirror.

Until this morning.

I took the plunge and when Michael finally fell asleep after being pestered to no end by his older sister, Kate, I opened up the box and started trying on the pants and skirts.

Then I opened up the bag and started trying on Capri pants and tops.

And I remarked on two things:

I used to be a lot cuter.

These are my old work clothes. The kinds of outfits I actually put some effort into. Cute skirts and cute tank tops. “Nice” beige and black pants and “nice” sweaters. I don’t dress like that anymore, not only because I haven’t been going out to work, but also because I’ve re-discovered my inner style…my punk rock, who gives a flying fuck edge. I’m not sure that I’ll really go back to the old work Janet entirely. I just don’t have the patience that I used to. But it would be a lie to say that those old work clothes are cute.

Cuter than I am right now.

The second thing that I remarked on was that I’m not as fat as I think I am.

Everything fit. Some of it I didn’t like any more and some of it fit differently and some of it is just plain too old to use for another season. But nothing made me want to cry. Nothing was a struggle to get done up. And let me tell you, THAT was the biggest relief of all.

I even found a pair of jeans that I absolutely loved but that were too tight to really be worn. “Crotch rot” kind of tight, if you know what I mean. I’m not usually the type to save clothes…if it doesn’t fit, I usually give it away to the Sally Anne or to the Diabetes Foundation, but these jeans….well, I really loved them.

I was especially scared of trying them on.

But get this…

Not only could I get them up and fastened, but they were actually * bigger * than I remembered. Totally wearable.

And let me tell you, THAT made my day.