Oh the Joys of Womanhood

I love being a girl.

No, seriously. I absolutely love it.

Growing up, the only kids I hung out with were boys. If you know me fairly well, you will know that I have three little sisters who are 18, 15, and 12. I am 24. Doing the math, that puts me six years, nine and a half years, and 12 years older than them. That's quite a distance! So, until they became the age of being fun, I played with my two cousins. They lived next door, and they were only a year and a half older and ten months younger, so we had much more in common and much more fun together than my sisters and I did.

As you can probably imagine, I was a little bit of a tomboy back then. I loved bugs, snakes, baseball, hunting, fishing, and pretty much anything else a boy would enjoy. I still had dolls, a kitchenette, frilly dresses and Mary Jane shoes, and I enjoyed them very much, but I was perfectly happy swinging a bat in my cousins' front yard or slapping a puck in their garage.

Then puberty hit.

Instead of getting down and dirty, I was putting on makeup and trying to fix my hair. The bugs and the snakes were no longer awesome, but they were gross and needed to disappear from the face of the earth. I still enjoyed swinging a bat and being the water girl for the local high school (my dad was a coach), but I wanted to do it while trying to gain the attention of the cute guys.

I prefer this girly-ness much more than being a tomboy.

Until I get fat.

Being a woman causes this up-and-down crazy train of weight gain to magically appear when it is the least convenient.

One day, your pants fit and your tummy looks flat in a white shirt. The next day, you have an 18-wheeler-worthy spare tire around your mid section that not even a girdle made of titanium could hold it all in.

Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, but if you're a woman, you get where I'm coming from.

I am having a spare tire kind of week. Even wearing a black shirt with a ruffle-like design on the front can't hide this bulge I've got going on. It's just down-right depressing.

So what's the logical thing to do when I feel fat and get depressed?

Eat more.

I just can't help it. I love eating just about as much as I love being a girl. And not so much of the healthy stuff, but the processed, full of calories, little morsels of goodness (as you can tell in my Big Macs and Cracker Stackers entry). I do enjoy a good fruit smoothie or a veggie platter, but, let's be honest, drive-thru junk food are just so much easier. And sometimes cheaper.

So, to sum up how I'm feeling this week: I'm much fatter than normal, but I still want some potato chips. And pizza. And a large coke. Then go work out for 15 minutes to make me feel a little better.

Oh, the joys of being a woman.