Stuck In The Middle It’s Not A Particularly Happy Feeling When Your Waistline Is Keeping Pace With Your Age
I’m turning 45 next month. Halfway to 90 is middle-aged by just about anyone’s measure, but I don’t find that prospect all that depressing. I’ve grown used to the creeping indignities that come with the territory of “nearing 50”: the dentist who tells me my gums are in good shape “for a man of your age,” or the young female hairstylist who describes my thinning crop of more-salt-and-less-pepper hair as “like, all distinguished.” I’ve even come to terms with the accumulating physical misfires, the hamstring strained while scooping up the morning paper off the lawn, say, or the back spasm brought on by flossing my teeth.
At peace though I may be with the misadventures of my 45-year-old body, there’s one milestone I’m about to reach that still bothers me: my waistline’s turning 40.
It’s not all that much of a change, mind you. I’ve always been a large guy the gawky kid in the back row in class photos, the last one in line to make First Communion or to get out of the school building in a fire drill. My head is large enough to have required a specially-made football helmet and has been described as “the old bowling ball” by an acupuncturist who works on my aching back from time to time. My neck is in proportion to my head, which is to say that I strangled on shirt collar button-extenders throughout my Catholic school days.
I’ve never been too “slim” in the pants-picking sense, either never had a 32-inch waist in my life. (Well, that’s not technically correct, but I was the only kid in my kindergarten class that could claim one.) From the “baby fat” age of 12 through my semi-hunky mid-30s, my waistline was a constant 36 inches. I wore the same brown leather belt in my jeans for more than 10 years, until it finally broke in half and sank to the ocean bottom while I was swimming in Hawaii. So, as middle-age spread goes, I guess 40 inches isn’t all that bad. It’s just that it sounds so … chubby.
It was babies that wrecked my figure for good. I know, I know … I didn’t actually give birth to them myself, but when the love of your life, the woman with whom you’ve shared a decade of fine, childless meals sets out to gain 30 pounds in the relative blink of an eye, it’s difficult not to join right in on the culinary fun. We both got rounder and slower as our pregnancy wore on. She bought maternity clothes. I bought “relaxed-fit” jeans. We’ll shed the extra pounds chasing the kid around the house, we vowed between mouthfuls of chocolate cheesecake.
Our solemn pact was shattered on the day my daughter was born. My wife lost 15 pounds in less than 24 hours, then breastfed the rest away in two months, despite eating more than enough food to stuff a busload of starving teenagers.
Me, I was left to go it alone, staring at my irreducible 38-inch belly and a closetful of pants I knew I’d never wear again.
It’s taken more than six years and another baby to add the final two inches to this “diary of a waistline,” but it took only one trip to my local men’s clothiers to give me the motivation to do something about it.
Anyone with a 30-something middle can walk into a Macy’s or Nordstrom today and stride back out in snappy, stylish-to-the-minute duds, dolled up like a washboard-bellied Calvin Klein model.
But cross over fashion’s invisible “40-inch line” and it’s like 1965 in Evansville, Ind., all over again I’m back in the “Husky Lads” section at J.C. Penney with my mother, trying to choose between the black and olive-drab circus tents that passed for chubby-kid pants in those days.
Today’s fashion gods have drawn a similar beltline in the sand.
If you’re that big around, they reason, you might just as well waddle over to Mr. Big and Wide and be done with it.
Fortunately, the notches on my belt, unlike the numbers on my birth certificate, are potentially reversible. With a little more dietary restraint and a lot of situps (not to mention scrupulous attention to birth control), I hope to see my abdominal expansion level off, maybe even contract a bit. Just like Jack Benny’s old joke about his age, I aim to be 39 (inches) and holding … forever.
MEMO: Mark Sloan is a free-lance writer who lives in Santa Rosa, Calif.