I am indebted to Julia Roberts for making us natural forty-something mothers feel normal.
Surrounded by images of the toned bared midriffs of those who have succumbed to the surgeon’s knife to perpetuate their youthful abs, rather than work tirelessly on diet and exercise to check the march of Old Father Time, it is most gratifying to see a celebrity mother who looks normal.
Once you reach your mid-forties, you start to notice the deterioration of your skin’s natural elasticity. Suddenly you become aware of the crinkle and sag of your abdomen where the skin was stretched to accommodate your growing baby. In a lot of younger women, this area does apparently revert back to normal, although for those who have put on excess weight due to water retention, gestational diabetes, multiple foeti or just lots of pregnancies, the fluffy skin and stretchmarks never return to their pre-pregnancy appearance.
However, the onset of peri-menopause and the imbalancing of the hormones that control skin and muscle tone means that even those of us who have worked our butts off at the gym or consistently found ways to exercise throughout our working day start to become aware of a stretched quality to our skin that we certainly didn’t have before. It doesn’t even happen gradually. Just appears overnight. The first to go is the neck with the appearance of the waddle, much celebrated by Dyan Cannon, the object of Richard Fish’s lust in Ally McBeal, and followed by just a general loss of skintone when you pull faces or just move generally. Then the creases at your elbows suddenly seem to be so much more apparent. Crinkly and fluffy where once there was smooth definition. And then the abdomen. The hard-earned six-pack of yesterday seems to become an unsupported blob of nothingness overnight.
No matter how much you frequent the gym, dose yourself up with collagen pills or starve yourself, it seems to be impossible to improve the elasticity of the covering that holds the body together.
All you can do is keep working the muscle underneath in an attempt to fill it out and hope for the best.
But, woe betide you if you falter because there are no day’s grace before you look and feel flabby again and to expose such a sight in a bikini would be considered a public decency offence… pre-Julia.
In the face of such symptoms, the nipped and tucked freaks on our television screens will immediately resort to the surgeon’s knife and and have any excess tucked into their bikini lines, making the rest of us feel even more inferior, when it should be them that we point at for being abnormal. The world has developed a very strange slant in terms of what is right and wrong.
Of course, the alternative is to start downing vast quantities of lager like our menfolk. Somehow, beer bellies seem to maintain their firmness and fill out the skin above. Perhaps on a smaller scale, we could emulate them and make the most of the positive qualities of the mini-pod?
Well, it’s a thought…
Pictures Courtesy of http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00798/Julia_280_798565a.jpg
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