Geeky Mom

I hate shopping.  I like having clothes to wear, but I hate the process of finding those clothes.  My hatred for shopping goes back a long way, back when I was a scrawny preteen dying to get out of “kid” clothes.  I was barely 4’11, weighed probably 90 lbs, and nothing ever fit me.  I had been looking forward to shopping in the junior section, but back then, there was no such thing (at least not in my tiny town) as a size 1 or even a 3.  Size 5 was as small as you could go and even that hung on me.  Petite sizes were only for old lady pants with elastic waistbands.  So, inevitably, I’d gather a few things, head into the dressing room and then stare glumly into the mirror when I looked like a stick standing in a pile of crumpled cloth.  My mother didn’t help matters much, though I give her credit for hunting down a store a couple of hours away that carried small sizes and petite clothes in relatively fashionable styles.  I say relatively because had I been attending a posh prep school, those clothes would have been perfect.  Instead, I was in a public middle school where some 75% of the kids were on free or reduced lunch.  The first day I wore the purple linen pants with coordinating cotton shirt imprinted with an old tobacco ad on the back and penny loafers, I nearly got beat up.  “Who you think you are?” A tough girl said to me while I was standing at my locker.  Luckily, I had tough girl friends who intervened.  The next day I went back to my t-shirt, jeans, and nikes and reserved that outfit for dinners out with the grandparents.

And then there were the 80s.  We all looked bad.  I went through a Madonna phase, a punk rock phase, and a Working Girl phase.  I actually wore a business suit and carried a briefcase to school.  There’s an unfortunate spread in the yearbook of me and my best friend demonstrating the styles of the times.  There are stirrup pants involved.  There’s a lot of mousse.

In college, I went with the all-black poet look.  Literally, everything I owned was black.  I could be seen at parties wearing black jeans, a black turtleneck, and black Converse high tops.  I had black skirts, black t-shirts, black shorts, black socks.  Occasionally I wore patterns with black in them rather than all black.  I had a black houndstooth mini-skirt I was rather fond of and which survived into the 90s.  In my junior year, a tragic laundry incident caused me to rethink my wardrobe.  I was washing a load of blacks (some would say colors, but I owned nothing colorful) and when I went to go put them into the dryer, they were gone.  I had to start buying colors.

After college, I resorted to wearing what people gave me because I was broke, and by people, I mean my mother and my soon-to-be mother-in-law.  My mother’s style hails from the south and leans preppy and/or southern belle.  My mother-in-law’s style hailed from elementary school and involved themed sweaters.  When I look at pictures of myself from that era, I shiver.  Bulky sweatshirts with horizontal stripes topping coral pants with a too-high waistline.  The snowman sweater! The mom jeans.  Need I say more.  I was in my 20s, but because most of my clothes purchases were made by middle-aged women, I looked at least 40.  It was not pretty.

Now, I have better sense.  But I no longer have quite the body I did in my 20s, which, despite being a bad time fashion wise was a good time size wise.  I could fit into lots of good clothes.  I just didn’t have the taste to pick out good clothes.  So now shopping feels a lot like it did in my preteens.  I pull things off the rack, take them into the dressing room, and stare glumly into the mirror.  Only, instead of things hanging on me, there are bulges where I don’t want them, or a pair of pants in a size I thought I fit into easily won’t button or zip.  Or I feel like the clothes are just generally too young looking.  Sigh.

But I’m going shopping anyway, because everything I own now is only appropriate for schlepping around the house and/or lying on the beach.  The work clothes I owned have worn out or are too formal for a nice lunch out with a friend.  But I just hate it.  I hate having to look at myself in the mirror and be reminded of the fact that I’m not 20 anymore, and that I didn’t appreciate my 20s when I had the chance.  In other words, shopping often reminds me that I’m aging.  And frankly, aging sucks.