Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of female writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you'll find here each week, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
The American ideal of reinvention, of becoming a new creature simply by deciding to be one, is both a delusion and a kind of seduction. It's also a delusion I embrace, a deceitful seduction I fall for every time, despite the fact that for me — as for virtually everyone else — making New Year's resolutions is an exercise in failure.
When I was younger, these flops weren't so obvious because my resolutions took a mostly unquantifiable form. I would vow to be patient, to behave more kindly toward annoying people, to listen in conversations without waiting for an opportunity to jump in, to turn my whole body away from the computer when someone I love enters the room. When I was younger, apparently, I just wanted to be a better person.
Lately what I want is to be somewhat less of a person. You wouldn't know it from a glance at my ass, but for the past few years my resolutions have hinged on losing the 20 pounds menopause left behind in its ravaging march to the sea. Time was when a couple of holiday pounds could be dispatched in January by adding an extra mile to my daily walk. These days I could walk to Plymouth Rock, and this year's Thanksgiving turkey would still be around to welcome next year's Christmas ham.
It's true I haven't given any of these weight-loss resolutions much of a chance. The calorie-dense luxuries other people cut out to drop extra pounds painlessly — alcohol, dessert, chips, soda, white carbs — aren't a part of my regular diet anyway, so I'm stuck with the painful options. Any calorie-tracking plan is insanely time-consuming if all you're eating is homemade food, and my one attempt to give up carbs delivered such an incapacitating headache that I abandoned it after 36 hours. The twice-a-week fast failed even faster; the only way I can make myself go hungry for an entire day, it seems, is during a colonoscopy prep.
Ever since college, my diet has consisted almost exclusively of whole grains, vegetables, fruits and nuts, with some fish and lean meat thrown in. I eat only when I'm hungry, and I only eat until I'm not hungry any more. For at least two hours a day I work at a treadmill desk, and that's on top of an hour-long walk outdoors and half an hour of core exercises. I live the healthiest life of any non-purist you could meet, and yet I look — as the women of my mother's generation used to put it — like someone who has let herself go: waist-less, sagging, undeniably plump.
In college, my own mother was a brilliant student of clothing design and construction. When she married at 28, she'd had years to dream up the perfect wedding dress to fit her perfect little figure — 34-21-34 — like the proverbial glove. Dad used to marvel that on their wedding day he could span Mom's waist with his hands. When it was time to plan my own wedding, I was thrilled to discover I could wear my mother's one-of-a-kind wedding dress without a single alteration.
I was less thrilled to consider the long-term implications of being my mother's body double: In the time between her marriage and mine, Mom's hourglass figure had slowly turned itself inside out, becoming its proportional opposite. Unless I was careful, I would inherit more than just a gorgeous wedding dress.
For most of my adult life, none of this worried me all that much because I harbored a secret confidence that my mother's example of human entropy was largely the result of her own doing. Mom ate what she wanted to eat, and sometimes the meal she wanted was five different kinds of cookies with ice cream for dessert. She had also grown up at a time when fitness was a side-effect of manual labor, and she had no desire to look, as she put it, like someone who spent her days chopping cotton. Since I have always made a point of healthy choices, I believed I would arrive at midlife looking very different from my apple-shaped mother.
Today I believe there's a special circle of hell reserved for the smug daughters of overweight women. As researchers learn more about the genetics of body type, it's becoming clear that not very much is actually within our own control. And if I was doomed to inherit my mother's body in any case, it's starting to dawn on me that I should have eaten more chocolate along the way.
I'm not saying it's impossible to change. Two years ago my sister-in-law, who is exactly my height and body type, lost 50 pounds by changing her eating and exercise routines. And a friend of mine dropped four sizes this year — whenever anyone asks her how she did it, she says, simply, "I stopped overeating." It's enough to make a grown woman cry, but I've gotten weary of despair. If five decades of life have taught me anything, it's that you never know how much life you have left, and I don't want to spend the rest of mine nursing a raging headache because I'm going hungry in a land of plenty, or feeling like a failure because I don't look younger or prettier or thinner or stronger. I don't want to spend any more time thinking about myself at all.
I fully intend to keep eating a reasonable diet, and I'll still log 12,000-15,000 steps on my Fitbit every day. But this year I'm ditching the body-perfecting plans and returning to the kinds of resolutions I made when I was still a size 6: I'll smile at more strangers, listen more whole-heartedly in conversations, bite my tongue more often with my teenagers, and try to be just a little kinder and calmer and more forgiving — even with myself.
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