Skinny Jeans Are Not My Friend

Full rear, muscular legs – thick thighs, robust calves - this body wasn’t built for jeans.  I knew it way back when and I mostly know it now.  Traditional jeans are tight in all the wrong places on me. Loose at the waist and knees and snug everywhere else is not my idea of comfort, attractiveness or high fashion. Skinny jeans?  We’re joking right?  Multiply the issues times ten. I mean who designs these damn jeans, anyway?  Seemingly made for pre-pubescent girls or straight and narrow boys whose width stays the same – slim cut, hip to ankle.  Unless you’re that lean, skinny jeans just aren’t your friend.

My jean (dis)enchantment started, probably like most other girls, in junior high.  Everyone had jeans – Wranglers no less – and I wanted a pair too.  What kid doesn’t want what everyone else has?? So one afternoon when I got home from school, my mom hands me a plastic Meijers bag and inside are the first and only pair of Wranglers I’ll ever have.  My mom heads back to the kitchen to start dinner as I excitedly kick off my comfortable after-school sweats.  I jump into those shiny, new Wranglers as fast as I can and breathlessly wait for the transformation, one that would be a long time coming.

Ugh.  The Wranglers, a size 14, are too big and too long and so awful I still shudder when I return to the memory of that sweet girl, standing in front of the mirror with her hoping, faith-filled twelve year old anticipation.  She stands there, looks at herself in that full-length mirror outside her parents’ bedroom door, and pulls at the jeans.  Trying to somehow re-arrange their sad fit, straighten the poor cut, make right the wrong-for-me jeans.

I tried rolling them up, thinking that might help. And let me just say, rolled up jeans weren’t a good idea then, as they aren’t now even though “the boyfriend jean” is trying to tell us it’s avante garde.  (Ladies, only a couple of us can pull it off, and hopefully it’s you, because I know it’s not me!) It looked like I had my big brother’s jeans on. Now maybe if I was a boy and had had a big brother, that would have been fine.  But I wasn’t a boy. No big brother. It wasn’t fine.  And after about five minutes of studying my reflection, tugging and pulling to no avail, and trying to not take this whole jean travesty personally, I did what all women do at some point in our judgment-filled lives . . . I turned on myself.

Not for the first time perhaps, and certainly not the last, I let myself have it.  “You look fat and stupid.  Everyone would laugh at you in those. You don’t fit in. You are too much and will never be enough . . .” Try that on for size.

I kicked off the jeans as fast as I could, crumpled them up, and shoved them back in their white, crackly plastic bag, throwing it onto my parents’ bed.  Just then, my mom came back from the kitchen where, if I had to guess, she was making one of those hearty, stick to your ribs (and thighs!) casseroles – full of cheese and cream of chicken soup for dinner that night.  One look at my upset, tear-stained face and bare legs, she then takes in the bag with the jeans tossed on her bed.  Rejected . . . the jeans . . . me.

“What’s wrong,” she asked.  “Did the jeans not fit?”  Let me think a minute . . . did the jeans not fit . . . Did the jeans not fit???  Hell no, they didn’t fit.  No. They were terrible, awful, made-me feel-fat-and-stupid for even wanting them. Trying them. The rolled up, wide cuff made them even worse, as if that was possible.  I can’t wear jeans. I will never wear jeans. Jeans were not made for me.  Jeans do not love me. They are not my friend . . . I do not love me . . . I am not my friend . . .  (Tale of a thousand women, this is how it starts.  Please let us re-write this sad story.  Start, now with ourselves.  Start now with our daughters; our nieces; our sisters; our mothers; our friends . . . )

Fast forward thirty years, countless hours of therapy, positive self-talk, healthy affirmations about my love for myself and my beautiful, healthy body, and we have arrived at skinny jeans.  Woo-hoo!!!  Now, I bet you can sense my great excitement and anticipation about skinny jeans; ohhh and those ones they call match-stick jeans, even better.  Now let’s just say, if this body wasn’t geared up for Wranglers at the ripe ole age of 12, how are you thinkin’ those skinny jeans are workin’ for me in my 40’s???  Well, we’ve come a long way – no Viriginia Slims as part of the deal either.

Here’s the scoop on me and skinny jeans - by and large, skinny jeans and I made a pact to know when to say when.  However, there is a form of skinny jean that works for me though Oprah’s fashion expert Adam Glassman strongly advises otherwise.  It’s a denim that is more jegging (jean/legging) than jean in that they stretch and mold in such forgiving ways, I think even he’d allow me this one fashion fumble (and if he’d seen me in the Wranglers, I’m pretty sure he too would say, “You’ve come a long way baby!”). 

Who knew we’d all be praising lycra, dear Goddess of Stretch, for what she could do with a pair of jeans?  Without you, where would we women be?  The ones who’d written off jeans for good, back when one cut certainly didn’t fit all but we thought it should.  When that mean game of “Hate Your Body, Hate Yourself” started much too early, when the life-long no-win battle of “You’re Too Much” and “You’ll Never Be Enough” got rolling in earnest.

For me, it was amidst my mom’s constant childhood assurances of “You’re just right! Not too big, not too small . . . just right!” She said this while she fasted for weeks on end, me watching her ingest only apple juice for fourteen days straight, starving to lose weight I couldn’t see her needing to lose.  I learned then that women shape themselves to live in a world where they don’t accept themselves for who they are and they seek control wherever they can get it.  Even if it’s at their own expense.

The game began early for me and so insidious was this thinking, it became part of my ingrained belief system that I still contend with EVERY DAY on some level. I am much healthier in how I manage what I benignly refer to as “my body image stuff”.  But it is never far from heart (or head).  It’s been a lifetime of work, self-love and –acceptance, affirmations, pleas to that something greater to help me be bigger in the ways that truly matter, that are more than skin-deep or based on appearances.  But it still sneaks up on me in moments when I’m not standing vigil and my little girl fears get stirred up . . . It’s then that I remind that little one within, “I’m a grown-up now, a big girl.  I will take care of you.  We are O.K.  Just the way we are.  I love you. No matter what.”

Now, go put on your big girl panties, or your skinny jeans, or your boyfriend jeans, if that suits you.  And let’s get out there and do our thing.  We’ve got places to go and things to do.   We’ve got a difference to make that is so much bigger than the size of our bodies or our jeans. 

Don’t let anyone have you believe differently.  (Quick, go look in the mirror. I’m talking to her too.)