Singing for a smaller me

Fair warning, I'm about to go off on a ranting tangent, but before I go off on my tangent, allow me to apologize. I'm in a bad mood - something that happened this weekend set me off and stupid things are upsetting me, so I'm just trying to get it all down before I explode.

One thing I pride myself on is being as honest and open with people as possible, to the extent I often find myself with foot firmly entrenched in mouth, but the simple fact is: I hate pretending. For cases of social acceptability, however, I accept there are times pretending is a necessity, hence I keep my freaking mouth shut and swallow what I *want* to say.

We (the hubby and I) have a friend, let's call her A, who is a very large woman. Very large. When I met A, A was part of a family of large people, and she had many larger friends. As the years passed by, her large family realized that they were too large and did something about it, and many of those larger friends moved on. Now, A is still there clinging to delusions of Fat Acceptance and "not having a problem" (except when she does).

Now, the A problem might be mitigated if she were, in fact, *my* friend and I could say something to her without offending her, but she's not; she's actually my husband's friend. They've been friends since high school so I try not to stick my two cents in (even if she tried her damndest to make sure we didn't get together when we first met).

Since Dave and I got married, we don't spend much time with A. Our groups of friends don't overlap anymore and she's "uncomfortable" with my going to Weight Watchers. She thinks I need to accept my body and not try to change it. When the rare "opportunity" to hang out comes up, I usually wave at the hubby, tell him to have fun and go shopping. In the event that A wants me there too, we have an unspoken agreement: I keep my mouth shut and pretend to enjoy myself.

A just turned thirty and invited us (me and the hubby) to her birthday party. Ah yes, the omnipresent birthday party wherein I know almost know one and have no interest in the activities planned. Joy. The upshot was that it was at her parents home, and we're good friends with her parents so I ignored the little digs and complaints about this and that, and even managed to summon up a little bit of excitement for board games (woohoo).

It turned out to be a beautiful evening and the party wasn't nearly as bad as I'd worried until I overheard A making fun of me to her friends. Talk about a slap in the face. Seriously, do you have to make yourself feel better by making fun of other people? I spent the rest of the evening fuming and silently reminding myself that it was her birthday, I shouldn't go and take her down a couple of notches in front of her friends.

Rant ends here.

So I barely made it through the evening, but I got to thinking. How unhappy must A be with her life? She's surrounded by thin people and people who are getting thinner. I was an easy target for her malice. A has decided that she's "happy" with who and what she is and lashed out at me. Fine. Fine. It's up to her to realize she has a problem. For now, I've decided I'm going to stop pretending around A because I'm happy with the choices I've made and the life I'm leading. This is one of those cases that "socially acceptable" doesn't apply anymore, so she can deal.

I also have to add how proud I am of my response to her hurtful behavior. Yes, my gut instinct was to hurt her back and eat the bitterness away, but I didn't. I stuck with my plan and I can look forward to seeing a loss at the scale when I weigh in tomorrow.