A Walking Willendorf Statue

Hey, at least I'm walking. But as time drags on and I careen toward 40 at breakneck speed, I am stunned at the reflection that greets me when I get out of the shower each morning. Now, I was never thin. Those days ended when I went with my mom to pursue her graduate degree 80 miles away. I enrolled in 9th grade and Dad picked us up each weekend to go back to our hometown. Mom and I had a two-bedroom apartment within walking distance of her classes and my school. And we became "food buddies."

Here's how bad it got: We go to the grocery store and pick up a frozen pizza. If that wasn't bad enough, we'd buy extra sauce, cheese and pepperoni to go on TOP of it. Or, we would pick up a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese...the kind where the cheese came in the skinny round can. We'd pick up a block of Cracker Barrel Extra-Sharp Cheddar, sour cream and bacon bits and ADD it to the mac & cheese and chow down. I packed on 40 pounds that year and it never left me.

Granted, my weight has remained semi-steady ever since then, give or take 10 or 15 pounds, usually in the "up" direction. I give myself kudos for eventually learning that I can't eat like that anymore and lay around like a sack of potatos all day. By the time I reached 30, I was walking regularly and watching what I eat. But that change in behavior kept steady pace with my increasingly sluggish metabolism, so even though I'm far more active than I was at 15, and despite being more conscientious about my diet, I'm still heavy. And it has, and probably always will be, the single biggest bane of my existence.

I don't need to be skinny. Or "thin," even. Just comfortable in my own skin. Today, my legs don't cross comfortably. I have a freakishly large paunch beneath my belly button that enters a room before I do. I haven't tucked my shirt in in over 20 years.

When I was 32, I somehow was able to shed 15 pounds. I was still considered overweight, but I didn't have to shop at plus-size stores. I shopped to show off, not hide. Frankly, despite not being all trim and buff, I was nevertheless thrilled with my size-12 body. At the time, I didn't have much of a social life, nor did I have a lot of money to go out. So my free time was spent counting calories, taking long, brisk walks and going to the gym. There were few social gatherings with food and drink to tempt me.

Then I met a guy. I put on about half of what I lost. Then we broke up, and it threw me in a deep depression that stole my appetite for almost a year. Despite ingesting fewer than 1,000 calories a day for almost a year, I only lost what I had gained in that relationship. Once my heart recovered, I made new friends and sculpted a busy, robust social life. That's where things went downhill weight-wise.

Five years, and too many vain attempts later, I'm back to where I started, plus about five pounds. And it consumes my every waking moment. I think about it in the shower, at work when I try crossing my legs and my knees get sore from the effort required to keep them together, when I bend over to tie my shoes and it steals my breath.

My boyfriend tells me at least 10 times a day how beautiful I am...how he knew the first time he set eyes on me that I embody what he's looked for his entire life: a woman he will never grow tired of looking at. We'll be talking about something as mundane as tax deductions, and he will interrupt me and say, "God, you're so beautiful."

I believe him, in that I believe that HE believes it. But I don't. And it steals the joy - not to mention the appreciation - of being what every woman wants to be: beautiful, graceful and desired. It isn't fair to him, and I feel so guilty sometimes when he tells me that. He deserves a woman to blush and be thrilled over such kindness.

This is no way to live, and I'm losing hope that it will get any better. I'm not sure I have it in me anymore to even try.

Monkey-Roped

Back in grad school, I took a high ropes course with my fellow residence life staffers. I was a residence director for a co-ed, upperclassmen hall. All the RDs and RAs were participating. For those of you who don't know, high ropes is an obstacle course that's about 40 feet in the air. It's a teambuilding exercise, designed to instill trust and closeness in a team. It usually starts with you climbing an unsteady rope ladder onto a slim beam of wood suspended between two trees. That's the easy part. There are obstacles that require partners to get you through it (thus the trust-building), and other areas where you're on your own and must draw on the encouragement of others to get through.

One part, which they called the "Monkey Ropes," requires you to slide your feet along nothing more than a rope while you grab another rope hanging vertically in front of you with both hands. As you stand there, your legs shaking and praying you don't lose your balance, you must release one hand, lean over, and grab the next rope for stability. Only then can you release your other hand from the first rope and move forward. Think of a monkey swinging from vine to vine in a jungle and maybe you'll get the picture.

I was talking to a friend last night, and I think I might have coined a new phrase for a relationship strategy so common it's practically universal. I call it "Monkey-Roping," where you won't let go of one relationship until you're fairly confident you have another one to go to. It happens all the time.

Certainly I can't be so original! Convinced I wasn't the first person to conjure this metaphor, I googled the phrase and came up with nothing. Excellent!

This is the strategy we've come to use in our professional lives, where we change careers five to ten times in our lifetimes. The preferred method is to have the next job lined up before we leave the one we have. And I think we've allowed ourselves to carry that principle into our personal lives, where, just like our jobs, nothing is permanent and loyalty can be both fickle and fleeting.

If you've been the victim of monkey-roping...where your significant other breaks it off with you because he/she has another relationship lined up, you've been "monkey-roped."

I must say, this is perhaps the cruellest of relationship strategies for the hapless victim. You can be dating the biggest loser known to man, but guaranteed, he or she will have someone waiting in the wings the second the relationship ends. While out with friends the next night trying to forget the jerk who made your life miserable, in the happy couple walks, giddy and acting as if they finally met "The One."

What is so genius about this strategy is that it's usually you, the victim, who chose to end it. The "monkey-roper," as it were, makes life intolerable by checking out of the relationship, breaking dates or not showing up at all, or just being the biggest asshole or bitch known to mankind -- which, if whoever is waiting behind door #2 even knows about you, only serves to give your soon-to-be ex-lover an alliance against you. You're the bitch...or the asshole, as it were, when it's THEM who has put you in his/her back pocket until someone better comes along.

The monkey-ropers are different from cheaters. They don't officially start the relationship until they've made you miserable enough to dump them. But they've been laying the groundwork for months. You suspect something's up. Your partner has "mentionitis," where your soon-to-be replacement crops up in the most innocent of conversations.

You: "You know, I just don't get why cereal has to be so sweet!"
Him: "Megan only eats cereal where sugar isn't listed in the first five ingredients."

You: "That movie really sucked."
Him: "Megan only eats cereal where sugar isn't listed in the first five ingredients."

To my knowledge, I've never been cheated on, but I've been monkey-roped more times than I care to count. Seemingly out of nowhere, attention is replaced by attrition. Closeness is replaced by withdrawal. You didn't see it coming, but there it is. He's unavailable. She's mentioning this person all the time. And the most infuriating part is that when you confront them with your suspicions, they become sanctimonious, indignant that you would dare question their fidelity or loyalty.

And while you're the one who chooses to end it, you're also the one left feeling as if your insecurity, irrationality, or suspcicious nature (which you never had before) drove them away and into the arms of another.

It's as if you were the one who was dumped. Because, with a monkey-roper, you always are.