A knock at the door startled me and a hesitant female voice asked, "Is everything okay in there?"
"Definitely," I lied. "Everything is great!"
"Let me know if you need..." she paused for an awkwardly long period of time. "Help."
I gave one last effort to get out of my situation. With all of my strength, I pulled and pushed. Gah! My body failed and I collapsed into a useless heap.
Looking down at my legs, I took in my predicament: A pair of skinny jeans wrapped around my calves like a wedding band wrapped around a swollen finger. The jeans had squeezed on with some effort, but getting them off was another impasse.
Lying on the dressing room floor, I looked up at the ceiling and scolded myself for my vanity. After my surgery, all of the weight I gained went to my hips. None of my jeans fit anymore and it was too cold for dresses. I remember trying on a pair of jeans at Nordstrom, embarrassed by the size increase, but willing to overlook it in order to have some cute pants.
As the months have passed, my weight has been creeping off and the jeans have become a bit... saggy. So saggy that it almost looked like I was wearing a diaper underneath. In fact, I wrote a new theme song for every time I enter a room:
Shawty had them saggy bottom jeans
Boots tight on calves
The whole club was looking at her
She hit the floor
Next thing you know
Shawty got low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low
I digress; it was time to replace my jeans with something more flattering, but finding a pair that fit was not easy.
Female runners can empathize with me. We have all been in that dressing room, grunting and groaning as we struggle to get the jeans over our calves. They fit beautifully around the waist, butt, even the knees, but the calves? That is the piece to the puzzle that will forever be a female dog.
Send me on a 20-mile run, an 80-mile bike ride, a 7-hour hike and I have no problem. Send me into a dressing room with 20 pairs of jeans to try on and that will be the hardest workout of my day.
After taking my pocket knife out of my bra and cutting the jeans off from my calves, I hung them back onto the hanger and put on a pair of shorts. Ahhhh perfect fit.
"How did it go?" the female employee eyed me curiously.
"Great," I ducked past her and hurried out of the store before she discovered the jean massacre of 2014.
*Please note: The dressing room story is not a true story. I actually did find two pairs of jeans that I love, love, love. No jeans were harmed in the making of this story.
