So after my good friend Desmond and I proceeded to work our ageing booties in front of sweaty palm marked mirrors I began to gain back a bit of body confidence. In a couple of months I had those carthorse legs back and abs you could grate cotton wool on. Things were looking up! I bagged myself a toyboy eight years my junior and started partying again but this time it was far more refined because I was too obsessed with looking after the body beautiful. But it had it's expiry date and after ten years the relationship started to show cracks (with the gym, that is...not the toyboy. I had set him free a long time before that!). We tired of each other and trying to organise our busy lives around each other melted into a vat of tedium and despair. I had passing flings with a few other sweat boxes, some wanky, some swanky, but all of them filled with the same predictable banter, muscle-bound machismo's and young girls wedged so far up their own arses you never knew whether they were singing or farting. I have mastered both simultaneously but that's a blog for another time.
With all the dicking around that ensued, the body was started to pay the price, and so was I. I started analysing what it was I actually did in the gym that I was paying so much for three times a week. I did twenty minutes on the treadmill, twenty minutes on another cardio machine of my choosing that worked the same muscle groups but just broke up the monotony a bit, some floor work (sit-ups, crunches, trying to pass off my flatulence as the girl's next to me etc, etc) and some resistance machines. The rest of the time was spent chatting to pretentious dickheads with dwarf like testicles and showering. What was I paying for that I could do for free? Of course......running!! So I spent about 2 years getting back into my running regime which I never really got very good at even though I was long distance champ at school (and ran barefoot which is why I have feet like the bottom a coral reef now) but I enjoyed it nonetheless. But then the old footie injuries started playing up, the shrapnel started shifting and my lungs were under constant attack from my ample bust so the enjoyment started to slowly ebb away. And then the unthinkable happened........I got pregnant!
As soon as I knew I stopped exercising. I couldn't see the point. I spent most of my time with my head stuck inside the toilet bowl and my breasts screamed in pain if anyone so much as breathed near them and I would have had to stop eventually anyway so I thought I would save all the separation anxiety by going cold turkey. When I see women running with great big straps across their tummy when they are eight months pregnant it makes me shudder and almost jealous that I couldn't even manage it at eight weeks!
I doubt it would have made any difference anyway. My stomach muscles were commended at many a late antenatal appointment and I managed to avoid the dreaded stretch marks that every woman fears and dreads before she decides to conceive. Let me tell you now......it's the least of your worries. Due to the surgeon having to tears a dirty great hole in my tummy to yank out that steadfast child of mine, I have been left with a sagging, protruding, shelf-like flap of skin to remind me of the twenty nine agonising hours of excruciating pain I went through before they decided to take a scimitar to my battered body and relieve me of seven and half pounds of mammal.
I tend to avoid mirrors now, namely when I'm starkers which doesn't happen very often as I do not wish to subject my daughter to such a disturbing image and scar her fragile, developing mind for life. My once sensuous and firm(ish) dirty pillows have been replaced with functional udders and my cesarean scar stares back at me, it's ragged stitchline contorted into an evil, knowing grin. When I went for my post natal check up at the doctors he said to me, "Have you thought about contraception at all as you know you can get pregnant whilst you're breast feeding?" I snorted petulantly and said, "With saddle bags like these I'd be hard pushed to get a root in a barrack full of bromide starved soldiers!" He left it there.
Anyway, I'm off to stuff my face with some designer lettuce.
