How Things Have Changedby Tanis of Attack of the Redneck Mommy

I wasn’t a cute child. My hair was too blonde and stringy, my eyes were too big and my knees were too knobby. To compound matters, I was one of those horribly obnoxious children who thought they smarter than everyone else and my mouth was constantly open, flapping my opinions.

This likely explains why no boys ever asked me out and my parents were loath to admit I belonged to them.

Some things never change. As an adult, my hair is still too blonde and stringy, my eyes still bug out and my knees are still knobby. My feet are so often stuck in my mouth I’ve acquired a taste for toe jam.

It’s a small miracle I managed to land a husband and retain him for more than a decade. (Thankfully I was bendy at one point and as easy as a drunken hooker standing in front of a church.)

One thing has changed in the now 35 years I’ve walked the planet. And that would be the size of my arse.

For years my identity was defined by the size of my waist and the numbers on the tags in my clothes. I may not have been the cutest child or the prettiest woman but I was always one of the thinnest.

Then my youngest son died. And after immediately dropping 25 pounds due to grief and having people coil in disgust at my skeletal frame, I started gaining weight. Anti-depressants, a sudden back injury and a general sense of laziness all contributed to my gaining back the 25 pounds I lost after I buried my son and added another fifty pounds to my frame.

I’m now a solid ten.

In my pants, that is. If a group of college boys were to score me as I walked by I’d likely be back to a two.

If my identity now was defined by the size of clothes I wear or how other people think I look, I’d never leave my house while walking around in a sackcloth.

The upside to sporting a few extra bars of butter on my frame is suddenly I now have breasts. Scratch that, I have gazongas. Hooters. Melons. For the first time ever I don’t have to pad my bra.

I can easily distract people from looking at the size of my arse with a low cut shirt. Trashiness has its merits.

After years of being feather light I finally find myself comfortable in my own skin. I feel beautiful. Of course it helps that for the first time in my life, my ribs don’t stick out and people aren’t worried I’m a crack addict because I’m too thin. It also helps that my husband tells me having sex with me no longer feels like he’s poking a bag of bones.

I want to be fit once again, but I’m no longer confusing that with thin.

I want my children to know that when they piss me off I won’t just threaten to chase them down and sit on them, but I will actually be able to do it instead of getting winded ten meters into the sprint, calling it quits and waving a stick while yelling at them from our front deck.

Parenting is much easier when one doesn’t issue hollow threats due to an unfit ass.

But most importantly, I don’t want to waste any moments of my life wishing I looked different. I look in the mirror and know for the first time in my grown up life I feel healthy. And I want my kids to see me and know that how I look is real and I want them to see the beauty in that.

That’s my goal for this year, my 35th year on this planet: To teach my children that a woman who feels beautiful is beautiful whether she’s a zero or a ten. Oh, and I’m going to be working towards being able to once again put my feet behind my ears. Because that is a life skill no person should be without.

My priorities and identity are no longer defined by how I look. Instead, it’s all about how I feel.

And I feel pretty darn good.

Which is the best gift I can give my children and myself on my birthday.

Tanis is our Ms. August.  When not posing nude, she spends her time writing the blog Attack of the Redneck Mommy and tweeting inappropriately about her boob whiskers.

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