Jenny Lee - Skinny Bitching: A thirty-something woman mouths off about age angst, pregnancy pressure, and the dieting battles youll never win

W hen I was in my twenties, of course, I longed to be in my thirties. I had read that all the angst I was feelingWhat the hell am I doing with my life? Do I have the right job? Do I have the right man? Do I have the right hair?would just melt away somehow as real life truly began. So when I finally hit thirty, I wasnt filled with dread and despair over my lost youth; on the contrary, I had a brazen bring-it-on attitudebring on the respect of being thirty; bring on the perks of maturity; bring on the glam life, the successful career, the new marriage, the you-go-girl allure of a woman who, according to every magazine and HBO original programming, was just about to hit her sexual peak!

Yeah, right.

Obviously, I was too young then to know that I shouldnt have believed everything I read in the very same glossy rags whose headlines also happened to promise Ten Days to Skinnier Thighs! So there I wasa newly minted thirty-year-old (with the same fat thighs), and not only was I still subject to every damn bit of that old twenty-something angst, but now there was a whole new dimension to it:

I think I have the right job, but if I dontits too late to do anything about it! I damn well better have the right man, because were married, so now Im stuck with him. The hell with having the RIGHT hair, what do I do about the seven GRAY hairs I just found?!!!

And, as if to add insult to injury, I found myself with a whole new slew of anxieties: some of them superficial beauty issues (Should I start using eye cream? Where exactly does eye cream go? All around the eye, or just at the corner of the eye? And what if I get the eye cream IN my eye?); some just about age (I wonder if Im too old to pull off this babydoll T-shirt? Maybe Ill just try it on. Are you kidding me, who can wear these stupid babydoll T-shirts; who are they sized for? Excuse me, missyeah, you with the exposed thongdo you work here? Well, do you have any larger sizes of this shirt? Because the medium I picked up wouldnt fit a Cabbage Patch doll. Whats a Cabbage Patch doll? What do you MEAN whats a Cabbage Patch doll? When were you born? How old am I?? How old do you THINK I am? Wait, nodont answer that. Im thirtyish. NO, I didnt say thirty-SIX! I SAID THIRTYISH, MEANING I HAVE THE ESSENCE OF AWOMAN IN HER THIRTIES. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? IT MEANS IM OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER THAN TO WEAR A TINY LITTLE T-SHIRT THAT SAYS ROCK STAR ON IT. SO WHY DID I EVEN TRY THE DAMN THING ON??? You know, thats a very good question.); and there were even a few inklings of anxiety about headier things than shopping or catching up on the latest issue of Us Weeklythings like:

Am I satisfied with my accomplishments? What does it say about me that I actually believe that TiVo has changed my life? Am I still a feminist if I secretly bought a little T-shirt that says Rock Star on it and then proceeded to hide it in my bottom drawer? Will I be a good mother? Will I be one of those lame mothers who desperately tries to be her daughters best friend only to have the whole thing backfire like it happened to Holly Hunter in the movie Thirteen? Man, how great does Holly Hunter look now? She looks pretty hot for a woman in her fortiesMichelle Pfeiffer, too Hmmm, you know, I heard that your forties are pretty great

So basically what Ive come to realize is that being a woman in the throes of her thirties is much more difficult than being a twenty-something, mainly because when youre in your twenties you have youth (and, perhaps more importantly, cluelessness) on your side. So you still have to accept two hundred dollars a month from your mom for rent even though you are twenty-seven? Oh, thats okay; youre young; dont worry about it. Besides, everyone knows how expensive it is to live in the city.

But when youre thirty-three and still living paycheck to paycheck, and then you actually sit down to figure out your financial situation only to realize that, thanks to multiple credit cards and high interest rates, youre basically still paying off purchases you made in your twenties, your funny little motto of Bills Suck is no longer quite so amusingparticularly when its those sucky little bills that are keeping you from buying an apartment or a house the way your more responsible thirty-something peers are doing. (Though its hardly as if I have any open time slots in my general anxiety schedule