My Neck Feels Fatter

I don’t know when it happened, but suddenly my neck feels fatter.  Not like my gullet is hanging down, but like my neck is just thicker.  But I’m thinking that it’s actually a result of holding up my head and face that is starting to look duck-ish. As in, quack-quack.  My features just seem to be sticking out in a “duck” way.  My nose seems to be getting longer-ish, and my eyes sort of droopy, like I’m waiting for a piece of bread to be thrown at me while I’m paddling furiously in a lake.  When I was in high school I used to go to these weekend camps and my nose always seemed to get swollen.  It was like I could not stop looking at how giant it was.  And one time, it was red.  Like good ol rudolph staring at me in that mirror.  And there I was.  Seventeen and trying my best to live up my best years and I may as well be jumping from roof to roof with my nose guiding the way.

But I shrugged that off and reminded myself that college were my best years.  And now here I am, 26 year old…or maybe 27?  I can’t even remember at the moment and I have been married for three years to my best friend, I have the cutest baby boy sleeping in the other room, I live in one of the cutest places in Orange County, CA, I have a Masters in Theology, and still, my face is duck-ish and my neck is getting fatter.

My husband has a brother who just got married to one of the sweetest and prettiest people you may ever meet.  I couldn’t go because I am still nursing our little one and we couldn’t take him on the plane because I might of have a break down from all that crying  the flight was too long.  And tonight I looked on facebook and they had posted some photos from their honeymoon and they look so young and sprightly.  Granted, I’m not that much older, but she was wearing a dress and looked so fresh.  It got me thinking about my honeymoon wardrobe and I realized that I don’t think I even brought a dress besides the wedding dress on my back, and I’m wondering if this plays into my face starting to look ducky.

Because it starts with not wearing a dress.  Then a few years later you start to wear dresses grudgingly and  you only do it because you know you have to.  Then you get pregnant and you can’t even really fit into dresses anymore and the ones that you do fit into have a nice “lift” at the ankles only to reveal just how swollen your legs are.  And so then you find yourself 8 months postpartum, deciding it’s high time you put on a dress, and you are feeling great that you fit into your clothes, you’ve gotten a fresh hair do, and you think of how proud you are that you have really pulled it together while nursing, working full time, and loosing baby weight….and so you put on your dress and you look proudly in the mirror, only to find your duck-ish face.

And I’m serious here people.  I think it’s something that begins to happen in your late twenties, and I’m going to go and say that you can’t do anything about it.  It just one of those hormonal things.  And lately I’ve been seeing younger, thinner versions of myself out and about and I say things like “she hasn’t had a baby” or “she’s in her early twenties.”  I think I’ll start saying, “Her face hasn’t turned duck-ish…yet.”  But I’ll be holding my head high. Smiling out of pride and I will strut my stuff. Because in the category of people who have duck-ish faces, I’m doing pretty damn well.