Mommy Style

The whole dress shopping incident (see yesterday’s post) made me think a lot about how our appearance is affected by motherhood. Pregnancy changes your body in ways that can never be fully reversed, but the day to day stuff that comes with motherhood changes it, too. You just don’t have time to doll yourself up like you used to. Rushing to get everyone dressed and out the door reasonably on time means sacrificing a check in the mirror to make sure everything is okay and in place. This has resulted in fashion disasters over the years. For the first two years of my daughter’s life, my work suits all had a big spit ring on the left shoulder from cuddling a slobbering baby before work. My solution? Slapping a big dressy pin over the stain as I zipped into my cubicle. I’ve arrived at work wearing two different shoes. I showed up one time with a big hole in the calf of my black pantyhose. Very noticeable to everyone but me for oh, about four hours. One time my skirt was inside out, seams and tag visible to even the severely nearsighted. Recently, on two different occasions I’ve gone to the potty and discovered that I put my underwear on wrong side out that particular morning. That’s one you just live with until you get home. My most embarrassing moment happened right after I returned to work from maternity leave. I was still breast feeding, and I worked in a busy TV newsroom. During a particularly hectic afternoon I looked down and saw that in all my running around, I had jostled a breast pad out of my bra and into the floor, smack dab in the middle of the room for everyone to see. Breaking news! Nasty breast pad in the floor! I wanted to crawl under my desk. Hoping that no one was looking, I kicked it under a credenza that hadn’t been moved in 20 years, hoping it wouldn’t be moved for another 20. Ten years later I held my breath when we remodeled the newsroom, hoping it wouldn’t turn up. It didn’t. Thank God.

My mother’s most embarrassing “mommy fashion flub” still makes me laugh. It happened when I was about eleven. She left me and my two brothers in the car while she went into the grocery store. This was back when you could leave children in a hot car and be comfortable that they wouldn’t be kidnapped by some freak. We might have killed each other, but we were safe from marauding kidnappers in our small town. Besides, she just couldn’t shop with three rowdy kids. After she had paraded up and down just about every aisle in the busy store, a woman approached and said, “Honey, you have kids don’t you”. “Well, yes. Why do you ask?” “Because you have a sucker stuck to your butt”. There it was, dangling from her backside like a badge, screaming “mother of three” (soon to be two when she found out who it was). One of us had laid a barely eaten sucker on the seat of the car just before mom sat in the driver’s seat. She was steamed when she got back to the car, especially since none of us owned up to it. Sucker? What sucker? I didn’t have a sucker? Did you? Nope. No sucker here. Through gritted teeth, she issued one of those mommy voodoo curses, “Just wait ‘til you have kids some day”. It worked.