Yesterday was my birthday and I’m feeling older than my age. I’m not at all close to AARP membership eligibility, but my out-of-shape body tells me otherwise. To add insult to injury, this week I saw a report about a 40-year-old American swimmer, Dara Torres, who’s gunning for her fifth Olympics. If she makes the team, she’ll be the oldest female Olympic swimmer at the age of 41. If this isn’t crazy enough, she had a baby a mere 15 months ago and yet has freakish washboard abs. It’s just not human. It disgusts me that she’s doing all this at about the same age as me, while I’m getting winded walking two flights of steps.

Today I felt aging pains quite literally as I began the process known as “Chunky Girl Gets Dressed for a Wedding.” Control top pantyhose should be a girl’s best friend, but they’re really not. They make all types of hose, but a woman my age always goes for the control-top variety. Control top, put another way, means “cram all the fat in one neat little package so nothing wobbles around too much and hurts anybody.” They should put that right on the box. I estimate I burned a hundred calories getting them on, so that’s a plus. But once you’re in them and the elastic band takes hold above the midsection, there is nowhere for an expanding, after-dinner stomach to go but straight out. Lovely.

I managed to get into my ensemble without too much difficulty, but what worried me was the shoes I’d be wearing. Four inch high-heel stilettos that should only be sold to 20-year-olds who consider flavored water a food group. I just can’t walk in these things anymore. I know it, yet I keep wearing them. My only other choice was near-flat shoes that make my legs look like tree stumps. I chose the painful ones because they look better. They make my feet swell up like sausages, but they look nice. And nice is the goal. Pain is a necessary evil. Dave was given pre-event instructions to not walk too fast in front of me, as I can’t keep up in these things. I teeter-tottered my way from the car to the church and marveled that I almost fell only once. During various parts of the ceremony, when most of the congregation listened to the minister extol the virtues of married life, blah, blah, blah, all I was thinking was when can I sit down and take a load off? I took every opportunity to remove my cruel shoes – in the church, in the car, and even later at the reception dinner table.

Speaking of dinner, we were having a wonderful time of things until Dave was joined by a few little visitors — ants. Oh, how nice. Makes the meal so appetizing, all those little black specks walking around. I won’t identify where the reception was held, but let’s just say it was a country club somewhere in the Lehigh Valley. Dave showed me the first one when it made its appearance clinging to a straw. “Kath. What’s this? That an ant?” “Um, yeah. That’s gross. Just toss it aside and eat your meal.” Ten minutes later while working through his crab cakes, he gets another visitor. This one’s doing laps around his dinner plate. I discreetly smash it into oblivion with a napkin and vow right then to blog about how it is a $10,000 membership fee country club can serve up ants for dinner. Lehigh Valley Country Club, do you know you have ants in your kitchen? Oops, did I just say that?

Following coffee and dessert, a photographer friend insisted she get a picture of Dave and me outside. I resisted the attempt, as I knew as soon as I stood up, the belly bulge was going make me look like I was pregnant somewhere in the range of 5-7 months and begged her to please restrict her pictures to head shots. I also had to consider that my shoes were choking my feet and making me walk in a way that twisted my back into a new configuration that was going to take my chiropractor weeks to undo.

But we were coaxed into going out anyway, where the photographer asks us to pose real nice and smile pretty. I realize the only way she’s not going to get a grimace out of me is if I kick off my heels, which I gleefully do since the spikes are sinking into the ground anyway. But the problem with removing shoes from your sausage feet is that sausage feet take the opportunity to swell five times bigger when they’re free from their constraints. I’m just hoping no one is looking at my big bulbous clown feet and wondering how it is I’ll get the shoes back on without a shoehorn, a pulley and three assistants.

The photographer mercifully obliges me by taking above-the-waist-only pictures, keeping my faux pregnancy gut horror from public display. I vow that tomorrow I’ll start exercising and lose a hundred pounds. If Dara Torres can keep her shape and kick the asses of swimmers half her age, the least I can do is get a little serious about dropping some baggage and stop having to squeeze myself into control top pantyhose. And I might someday want to wear those stilettos again. Until then, they’re back in the closet where they belong….until the next time, because as you can tell by now, I’m a glutton for punishment.

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