gold fashion

It’s good to see the white stuff out there on the ground and falling from the sky, and it’s definitely my favorite time of year. I love the anticipation of the ski season, of picking up your ski pass and getting all your equipment ready and waiting for the lifts to fire up with the same kind of tingle in your belly you might get from anticipating a hot date.

Normally, about now I’d have all my various snowboard outfits in a big pile on the living-room floor to see what still fits. When you are 5 feet tall and in your 40s, you can go up a size overnight depending on what you had for dinner the night before. My closet is like a retail store, with enough sizes and styles to comprise your average boutique inventory.

Ryan is always telling me to take all these jackets and pants and sell them at Suzy’s.

“Get rid of it!” he’ll bellow. “Sell them all.”

I don’t know how to explain to him that I can’t part with those extra-small pink Volcom pants even though I haven’t been able to fit into them for, what, at least four years, because every girl knows buying bigger clothes is like giving up.

“Jesus Christ — just buy a medium,” Ryan barked at me when I cried because my snowboard pants popped open every time I bent over to strap in my bindings. “I don’t know why you think you’re a size small.”

Cue head spinning on shoulders, smoke coming from ears.

The point is that it’s not how you ski, baby; it’s how you look. This is Aspen — hello. We are essentially responsible for setting the standard for on-hill fashion. We are probably one of the only ski resorts in the world where the girl who is wearing skintight pants and a fur-lined, hooded puffy can actually ski.

Of course I have friends who will hold on to their one Patagonia jacket until it falls apart at the seams so they can then send it back and get a new one on account of the lifetime warranty — but they all live in Carbondale.

Well, this year is a little bit different. Like, I can’t even zip up any of my jackets. Not one.


I tried on those size-medium pants Ryan made me buy during that one particularly chubby spell, and I can’t even zip them.

“Maybe I could wear suspenders. And, like, put one of those belly-band things on so my stomach doesn’t get cold,” I said, standing in the living room in my bare feet with my pregnant belly protruding from over my undone pants like the beer gut of some middle-aged, fat dude.

Then I tried on the Obermeyer jacket that my friend Catherine wore through most of her pregnancy. It’s a longer coat that is tapered at the waist and meant to look like a trench coat. I managed to get it zipped with just a T-shirt on underneath, but it was so tight that my face started turning purple on account of cut-off circulation to the brain.

“See, that looks cute,” Ryan said, giving me the once-over.

“Dude. I can’t even breathe,” I said.

“Who calls their husband ‘dude’?” he replied.

“Bro. This does not look good. It’s pinching in the back.”

Ryan’s eyes clouded over with frustration. “Sell it. NOW.”

I went back to the closet and pulled out one of his jackets. It zipped up easily and engulfed me like a bed comforter.

“Now this is more like it,” I said, modeling the orange coat.

“See, honey? That’s super-cute,” he said, probably because he wanted the conversation to end.

I know I’m pregnant and that this is temporary. I know no one is going to care that I look like a pumpkin with feet. And I know, despite my wonderful Aspen-mommy role models, that the truth is I won’t be skiing that much. I’d like to get some wind on my face, and I have this notion that I’d like to skin so I can get some exercise and then stick to easy groomers to protect my precious cargo, but keep in mind that it takes a monumental effort just to roll over in bed.

Still, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past seven months, and that I’m sure parenting will teach me, it’s that nothing is ever what you think it’s going to be.

Like, being a small-chested woman, I always thought it would be cool to have big boobs. When I lived in San Diego, my friends and I fantasized all day long about getting our boobs done, but none of us had the money to go through with it.

All I can say is, thank God.

One thing I didn’t expect was to ever be able to fill a D-cup. And believe me, I was in denial for quite some time about it, squeezing into my B-cup bras, until one day when I was about to go out to dinner with a friend, and Ryan stopped me.

“Is that what you’re wearing?” he asked.

I nodded. “What? It’s just a T-shirt and jeans.”

“Do you think that bra fits you?” he asked. “You’re showing some serious nip.”

I looked down to find that half my boob was literally hanging out of the bra, a wardrobe malfunction to the umpteenth degree.

Having big boobs is nothing like what I thought. They’re not buoyant and sexy like on a celebrity but sort of frightening, like something out of a science-fiction movie or maybe National Geographic.

I think I’ll just stick with my husband’s clothes for now and the ski fashion will have to wait until next year. The last thing I want to do is end up making a fool out of myself on the mountain, looking like a boob.

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