today was my 10th wedding anniversary. i’ve been with my husband for 17 years. all i asked for was time. i didn’t want stuff. i didn’t want a fancy dinner. i just wanted some of his time. and he got drunk and passed out.

i’ve had a love/hate thing going with my body forever. once i discovered the fat acceptance movement, i pretty much declared a truce with it. i’ve always been overweight or obese. even when we were living on a diet of a hot pocket each for dinner – and that was often all i had to eat in a day – i was still overweight. (clinically.) it irritates me that i grew up hating my body so much. i’m not going to go into all of that, because i’m pretty sure i have before, and it always leads to feeling angry with my mum, and i just… don’t.

anyway, i’ve been in a weird place, body-wise, since i had little bear. my pre-pregnancy weight was 217. i gained 20 pounds whilst pregnant, and didn’t stress over it much. (at one point, after the gestational diabetes diagnosis and subsequent dietary changes, i was seriously freaking out because i lost a bunch of weight really fast. thankfully, i was able to figure out what my baby and i needed, and set things right myself. stupid doctors.) after he was born, i think i was below my pre-pregnancy weight by the first postpartum doctor appointment. i was kind of startled by that, but it was hardly surprising, considering i was pumping milk every couple hours and barely eating anything.

what really surprised me was how much i disliked my new body. it weighed less, but the fat was in all the wrong places. i used to carry all my weight in my hips, butt, and thighs. i always had. (as i went from overweight to obese, i started carrying more in my my stomach and breasts as well, but was still pretty much a pear.) now my breasts were huge. i appreciated that nature was doing its thing to feed my baby, but having f-sized boobs is awful. then there was my stomach which, even when fat, had a kind of firmness that at least kept it from spilling over everywhere. now i had less of a gut than i had pre-pregnancy, but it was crepey with stretch marks old and new, and it drooped. but worst of all? my ass was gone. it had been huge, but it had also been round and made me look more proportionate. my lowest post-partum weight was 185, but i was very unhappy with the lack of curves and overabundance of tit.

it’s been 2 1/2 years since i had little bear, and my body is starting to even out a little bit. since weaning six months ago, my weight started to climb again, and i’m now generally around 205. my butt has returned, and my bust is shrinking. but i’m still having problems with clothes that i never had before. buying jeans has always been a nightmare, because i have a very high waist, long legs, hips and butt disproportionate with the rest of me, and a height that puts me squarely between petite and regular. but jeans are mainly what i wear. when my old jeans were falling off of me before, i understood it, because i’d lost a lot of weight. but when the weight came back and my pants were still falling off, i was a little confused. as fat as i was, my pants always stayed up, and i’d never had to deal with muffin top. now? i can either wear pants that don’t cause my fat to spill over them and have to pull them up all the time, or wear pants that i don’t have to hold up with one hand, but make me look like 10 lbs of crap in a 5 lb bag. high-waisted jeans might help, but they would be right up under my boobs, so no. i’m wondering if jeans are just out of the question now… and while my boobs aren’t as huge as they were, they still don’t fit in a swimsuit properly.

i’m sure some of this is age-related, and some is pregnancy-related. but it seems unfair that just when i’d become used to being fat and okay with the whole thing, now i have to get used to a new body. and try to find clothes that look decent on it.

i started writing again recently. not as much as i’d like… whenever i feel like it, it turns out little bear doesn’t feel like napping or wants to sleep in my room. or, the minute i sit down to start, after putting little bear down, big bear comes home and demands i make him a sandwich or dinner. then complains about how i haven’t been doing enough housework, work work, etc. still, i managed to do some editing on that story i started five years ago, and just today started adding new stuff to it. i am tentatively hoping to self-publish online (first chapter free, $1/chapter thereafter or something similar), but even if it doesn’t turn into a paying gig, i’ll be happy to just freaking finish something for once. i haven’t done anything creative since before riblet was born. no changes to my website, no painting/drawing, no writing. i’ve loved staying home with him, but the lack of creative outlet (among other things) was leaving me feeling down.

i’m starting to feel more like myself these days. writing, dyeing my hair weird colors for no reason, etc. somehow, this always brings along some self-destructive behaviors, like wanting to chain smoke and forgetting to eat. those days are behind me, though, so i’m going to have to learn to cope. it’ll be interesting seeing how adventure time gish meshes with suburban mommy sarah. so far, rather irritably…

i seriously need to start blogging again. so i will, and i will start by commenting on this. it stems from this. i actually took the quiz, and the results were that i was first-generation middle or upper-middle class. as a little background, my dad graduated from a post-grad program when i was a baby. pretty much from then on, he was a government employee, in various white collar positions. my mom went to college, but didn’t graduate. she was a stay-at-home-mom until my sister was in high school, then got a job at the library. she started out as a page, shelving books, and by the time she quit to move to nc, she was in a position that was a little more clerical. she wasn’t really blue collar, but i’m not sure i’d consider her white collar, either. anyway, once dad was done with school, we were middle class, maybe lower-middle. as i grew up, dad earned more money, and by the time i left home, we were nearing upper-middle. (as for my parents’ parents, dad’s dad had a white collar job with an oil company, and dad’s mom was a housewife. mom’s dad was a civil engineer and mom’s mom did clerical work. i think both families would probably be classified as middle class?)

as for me, i went from lower to middle to near-upper class with my family, then lived under the poverty line with chris for a couple years. that was some culture shock right there, but since we were still in school, it doesn’t count, according to mr. murray. i suppose it was because, while we couldn’t afford food sometimes, we knew it wouldn’t be like that forever? i can see the difference. back then, it was kind of stressful, but it was exciting sometimes, too. i don’t think living in poverty now, with a baby and a ton of school debt, would be quite as sexy. also, even though my parents refused to help me because they were pissed off that i left home, and chris wouldn’t ask his parents for help no matter what, we still had families that wouldn’t let us die in the street. if you don’t have anyone, that’s probably terrifying. since chris graduated undergrad, we’ve been middle class. during law school, it was a little more lower-middle, because i wasn’t making very good money, but we weren’t starving. so, yeah, i’m aware of my privelege.

but i found myself a little irritated by both kate harding and charles murray. i’m getting a little tired of people trying to polarize every goddamn thing they can. i think it’s a little more important, these days, to stand together against the people who are really screwing us. if you’re in the 99%, you’re in the same damn boat, more or less. we shouldn’t be picking fights with people we view as hoity toity because they watch different things than we do. we shouldn’t be getting offended that someone insinuates we’re snobs, because this neighborhood was barely gentrified when i moved into it! yes, middle class spans a pretty long range. and it’s not fair that some people have more than other people, when poorer people work just as hard – if not harder – than the people making more of them.

but instead of middle class infighting, we should be fighting the people who are making a killing off of all of us. this petty infighting is distracting us, and if we keep doing it, nothing will ever change. that’s what’s keeping us all where we are. meanwhile, the 1% keep on stealing our pensions and taking out dead peasants insurance on us. where is the outrage about that? when the occupy wall street protests started, some of us got kind of excited about it, but then the media stopped covering it, and cities started kicking protesters out. i think there are a couple reasons the ows movement isn’t going anywhere.

1) a lot of us are making fun of them and calling them names, but shooting ourselves in the foot while doing so. there were people saying that they work 80 hours per week at three jobs, and these protesters needed to quit whining and get some damn jobs. but no one should have to work like that to get by. that is ridiculous. do the people who say stuff like that really want to spend their entire lives that way? maybe they think they’ll get rich someday, but the chances of that are pretty much nihl. tearing down the people trying to help all of us is only helping the rich. they do not need any more help of any kind, thank you very much.

2) as someone who is pretty much a pacifist, it pains me to say this, but we’ve tried talking to these assholes. we’ve tried getting public attention and sympathy for our cause. but the rich control everything and they want to keep it that way. most of our politicians and the media talking heads are rich. and if they aren’t technically in the 1% themselves, they’re being controlled by interests that are. corporations and the 1% who own them, own us, and they’re in charge. why are we allowing this? this needs to change. sometimes i think we need to get off our asses and fight. we outnumber them, by a lot. and while the military-industrial complex is a billions of dollars per year enterprise, the soldiers are far from wealthy themselves.

i know we’ll never see the sort of revolution that other countries have. it’s too scary, too hard, too uncivilized. as much as this country needs to clean house, it ain’t gonna happen. but we need to at least stop arguing over petty stuff like this. everyone should get fair pay for their work, and not be worked to death. even if we don’t all like the same stuff, and some of us don’t live as hard as others, we have to unite against the real enemy. while i guess the rural poor might consider kate harding a rich city girl (and please, let’s give the rural poor some credit here), the fact is, she’s in no position to help or harm you, financially. people like her, people like me, cannot hire or fire you. we can’t give you pensions or 401ks or stock options, and we cannot take them away. the fact is, aside from the extremes on either end, most americans come from pretty similar places, financially. like i said, the middle class is huge. we need to stop getting pissed off over our differences, and recognize our similarities. we can’t keep getting separated over this stuff. be angry or offended by the real enemy, and actually do something about it, instead of grumbling. and even if you feel like you can’t do anything, stop hating other middle class people. to different degrees, we’re all more powerless than the 1%, and, as a group, we need to focus on lifting the poor out of poverty, if nothing else. so cut it out, y’all.