Bellyaching

If I see one more banner ad with a 19-year-old model who has never been pregnant looking down at her perfect concave stomach in mock surprise and delight as she holds up the ends of a measuring tape (as though it measured any different from the last time or the time before that)... it'll be one banner too many.

Alas, here we are many, many months after the baby and even after I finished breast-feeding (after which, I promised myself, I would go on a strict diet and get back my girlish figure). I've been doing crunches almost nightly since April, and recently started running again. I'm a few pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight (the same weight that I was all through college and my twenties). My breasts are nearly nonexistent. But I still have a belly that looks like I'm about 3 months pregnant. Why, oh why, is my body hoarding fat there? I have exactly one pair of pants that is comfortable and that I wear continually up until the moment I must leave the house, when I put on a pair of pants that cut into my stomach. I don't understand why most women find it so easy to get back their flat stomachs after the first pregnancy (the second one, though, seems to be a different story) - but apparently this hasn't happened for me. When I run, I can feel my belly wagging slightly from side to side in front of me. Ugh.

I guess part of this angst is just my unwillingness to accept that I am getting older. I don't want to admit that I can no longer blend in on a college campus, and wear all the same clothes with the same ease that I did back then. I want to present an appearance to the world (as some women are capable of doing, and real women, too, not just celebrities) that says, "Child-bearing didn't change me. Here I am, still the same lithe and beautiful person as ever." But, clearly, child-bearing did change me. I have the marks of it all over my body - more stuff sags, more stuff is stretched out, there are pale, feathery marks all over my flanks. I wanted to manage the whole biological event with the utmost of grace. Instead, I have daily reminders that I am mortal.