Terms of Endearment

My husband and I don't do much terms of endearment. He calls me "hey you" and I call him "hey you." We're original that way. I think I've heard my husband pronounce my name less than a handful of times in our 17 years of knowing each other, and even then it was a fluke because he was talking to someone else.

We're not into the "honey", "sweetheart", "monster", or "godzila." (The term of endearment I use for my best friend). It just seems fake to us, I guess. "No need for terms of endearment when you already know how I feel about you." I think we've used "honey" before in a mocking manner more than anything and mostly in public. Not to make fun of others as much as show off our loving relationship so others would get a better understanding. But between us, we have no need for it.

Most of my life I've been underweight, bordering the sickly thin. At 5'3" and 92lb soaking wet, I was considered pettite by retailers (or "kids section" in some stores). My husband got used to living with someone who's always complaining she can't gain weight. When all his friends at work would complain about how much their wives gained weight since they got married, my husband would come back home complaining to me that he never has anything in common with his friends and he's the only one standing there feeling odd when he has to explain to his friends, "My wife would have loved to get your wife's extra pounds."

Then a couple of years ago I hit old age and my metabolism slowed down enough for me to gain 40 pounds in a year. Unlike most women who typically go up one size at a time and shop for clothes for each size, I went from a size 2 to a size 8, 10 and finally 12. Needless to say, charity gained a whole lot of unused clothes from me due to this rapid growth, and my closet is missing the sizes 4 and 6.

My weight has since come down a bit to a normal and healthy 125lb, and I've had to adjust to this huge weight by...complaining that I've gained so much. Finally my husband found a term of endearment for me - FAT COW! So with a size 10 jeans, my husband calls me "fat cow" every time I check myself out in the mirror. He does it with a smile, so I know he's enjoying this new marriage deal of being married to a normal wife (however you want to define normal).

Then came last Friday. Something I ate threw my health into a spin and in less than a week I've lost 9 pounds. Now I'm down to an ideal weight that I've been trying to get to for the past year and had to give up eventually. This morning when I realised how much I've lost and my new weight, I was all happy and told my husband about it. He looked at me with this smile in his eyes that is typically followed by "fat cow" and says "anorexic cow!"