Recently a dear friend said that he had read the beginning of my book. He said he liked it, except it was all about hair, so this is a turning point for my story. This is not a work of fiction, and not being a novel, it does not have a formula to be utilized and sold as such. It is about real life.
So I decided to turn the other cheek, so to speak. Men, they are closet types. They usually fit well into one of three categories: breast, bottom, or leg. This friend happens to be an ass man. He frequently comments about loving bubble butts. His wife is one of my dearest friends. She and I have had different health issues, which transformed our formerly rounded shapes. We are now both quite thin.
My health challenges transformed my body into a frighteningly skeletal appearance. It was not a Sports Illustrated look. When I weighed in at around one hundred pounds, I looked at my strange frame with horror. My daughter, being ever supportive and trying to reawaken a sense of life into her mom, commented, “Mom, look at it this way—you can wear clothes you never could before.” And so I did. Working with a saleslady who took compassion on me, she chose a nice pair of slacks that would stay on my body without falling off and told me to wear a loose-fitting sweater to hide my morbidly thin frame. My internist said I looked like a pole. Friends would say, “Boy, I’d love to have that problem,” and I would quickly remind them that no one would want to go through what I did just to be so thin. So in former days when I chose certain clothes to hide weighty flaws, now I was utilizing outfits to hide sinking flaws. The ass had dropped four inches and was mid-thigh high. My once-robust chest resembled shriveled raisins. So for my friend, the ass man, I was a visual celibacy inducer.
Before I married my husband, I asked him to categorically state his preference. He said he was a face man. I was content with that as there were no offending areas if he just cared about a face. He is the only man for me, and I am the luckiest girl in the world to be married to him. This is not to say other women have lesser husbands; it is just to say that we are what my great-grandmother called a pot and a lid.
Shannon Callahan 