Manic Motherhood: Rites of Spring, or Why Does My Fat Migrate?

Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed. You know those days-everyone has them. No matter what you do, the day is doomed to stink. Unfortunately, science has been unable to find a cause for those days; they're just a mystery.

Take the day I had last week. I bounced out of bed. I felt…lighter. Like maybe a miracle had occurred overnight and my metabolism had sped up and I had actually lost weight while I slept. Or maybe I just laid off the Cheetos for a week-who can tell? In any event, I felt nearly thin.

And then I put my jeans on.

My trusty, always able to fit even on the fattest day jeans. And they were tight. Unbearably tight. You know the kind of tight I'm talking about. The kind where your spare tire morphs into a complete set of steel-belted radials and you can't quite get the zipper past them. Yeah, that kind of tight. Let me tell you, that's a very depressing tight. And it only gets worse.

Because you know once I tried to zip those pants up, I leaped onto the scale with a grace that most people sporting a full set of tires around their waist do not have. And my weight was the exact same weight it has been all season long. Which in itself is a source of mystery…but still. Why the heck didn't my pants fit? Why did I feel lighter on a day that I was completely the same? Did my weight shift overnight? Did the fat from other parts of my body suddenly migrate to my waist?

I don't know. It's a mystery. And it's why I've been wearing sweats for a week. I just can't risk trying on those pants again. It could put me into a depression that can only be lifted by consuming vast quantities of Krispy Kreme donuts. And frankly, that's a guarantee that those jeans will never zip again.

--Laurie Sontag is the author of Manic Motherhood, a popular blog at http://www.lauriesontag.com. Laurie has been writing about life, parenting and accidental butt cleavage sightings for California newspapers since 2001.