Potting

I took a sleeping pill one night and then made the happy mistake of getting online and buying stuff. The next morning it turned out that I had bought myself eight pottery classes for three hours on a Monday night. I thought about canceling just like I think about cleaning the hard to reach windows upstairs and of course never actually did it and promptly forgot all about it. Then Steve came home from work one Monday and gave me this funny look and said, "Is that what you're wearing to your pottery class?"
"Pottery class?" So, I jumped in to my dungarees (this is a clothing blog so I'll tell you that dungarees are exactly what you're supposed to wear when sitting at a potters wheel unless you're planning on being the Patrick Swayze character in Ghost in which case you can go shirtless) and motored to class, leaving my Dearly Beloved in charge of our hysterical two year old and oblivious five year old.

Now to be fair, I have done a pottery class before so I knew what to expect, sort of. Except this time, we had a new teacher who had the people skills of a Customs Officer. Every single thing I said to Margaret (not Maggie, but Margaret) was met with a blank stare.
"I thought we were only allowed an ounce of pot."
Nothing.
When my clay pot fell to pieces on the wheel I announced, "Ah-ha! Now the student has become the master."
Nothing.
In fact, nobody in the classroom found me amusing at all which only took me about three classes to realize and finally quit trying, by which time the class had halved in size.

And this is precisely the point at which things became really relaxing. I don't know how things are in your town or country or home, but I live in an atmosphere of intense parenting competitiveness. In my little world it's not uncommon for every mother within a half mile radius to crane their necks when you open your picnic to see if you have packed enough anti-oxidants and organic free range carrots for your children. If you pick up your phone to make funeral arrangements for your dead sister while pushing your child on the swing at the park, someone will take a photo of you and write a very long moan on facebook about how parents are no longer present for their children. It's a fierce game of mothers-against-mothers out there and the only defense is to surround yourself with like-minded people who know how to return fire during a drive by criticism from a parenting busy-body.

It's exhausting and I'm looking forward to the day we all realize how unreasonable it all is and return to parenting like our parents did, which is to say, hardly at all.

In the mean time, there are pottery classes. A room filled with women all doing their best to make something out of nothing. All mothers, all learning to do something they have never done before and mostly finding the result to be completely different to the product they set out to make. In this room where the wheels spin and hum, where we all have our heads down concentrating ever so hard at our own task, it is not possible to criticise each other. When Donna's pot spins in to a lump of curved clay beneath her hands, there are sympathetic words from all of us because we all know we're one wheel spin away from making exactly the same mess. And when you have your hands on the clay and the wheel is pushing you around and making you doubt yourself and then suddenly your hands grow stronger and your arms tighten and for once you have a real idea of what it is you're making and you can feel hope that it'll all turn out fine and you let out an involuntary happy squeal, it is then that you'll feel a room full of women sending you their best.

The Swim Suit addition

Here is why I don't give you advice about what swim suit to wear this summer. In my experience there are only two swim suits; the one you wear when you feel good or even good-ish or good enough or better-than-I-used-to-look about your body and the one that you wear when you hate your body. Yes, HATE. Those articles that give you three swimsuits you could wear if you're self conscious of your boobs or you bottom fail to acknowledge that a large portion of the population just feels bad about their entire body, even their elbows. And at any given point in the summer, you could fall in to one or the other of these categories since the way you feel about your body has absolutely no basis in what your body actually looks like. One day you feel great about it, the next day, you hate it- same body. Well I spent all of last year loving my body and the first three months of this year wishing I had a winter moo-moo. So, with that in mind, I bought the following swim suit:

Yes, it's a real swim suit!

It's a 1950's swim suit made out of cotton table cloth fabric, complete with studs for me to pin my push up bra and I bought it on Etsy for $5. There are so many great things about this swim suit:

Number 1: I can still wear my underwear under this thing. I have no idea why I might want to do that but you never know, you just never know.

Number 2: Every time I get in the water to swim a lap, the handsome life guard on duty assumes a woman in full clothing has fallen in to the pool and he dives in to rescue me. Win!

Number 3: I am equally dressed for swimming as I am for taking off in a sprint for my run-away children or doing ballet or posing for my portrait on the nose of a fighter plane, it's just so versatile.

Number 4: Since there is only one of these swim suits in the world, I will never have to face a comparison with someone younger, taller and more buoyant than me.

Number 5: Also, at this point in my life, I would rather be on this side of the "she can do better" than on that side of the "she should cover up" chatter beside the pool.

Number 6: This only came in one size which is "chunky" and so I have room to grow AND when my breasts develop, I'll have some place to put them. Great news.

Here I am looking in to that wonderful gap between my body and the swim suit and imagining the potential.

 

Hot pants.

These are lunges. Also this might be a dude. Picture courtesy of manalive.com.

Want to warm up this winter? I have just the thing. Skinny jeans. Because nothing warms you up like trying on a pair of jeans so small and tight that the only way to get the crutch centered is to do lunges around the house for half a day or more. Better yet, go to Macy's which has a particularly lethargic staff at the moment, and try on several pairs of skinny jeans while your children leopard crawl beneath the doors of occupied dressing rooms. The combination of pull, lunge and then bend and drag will undoubtedly toast your roast nuts in time for the Christmas season. And don't pick the blue denim skinny jeans. Because you don't want to look like you accidentally bought skinny jeans on your outing to the mom denim store. No, you want to pick something loud and bold like leopard skin. Leopard skin skinny jeans on chunky short legs is the equivalent of doing a little dance after you trip so that it looks like you totally meant to do that. If you're going to sweat it out on your bedroom floor trying to wrangle your legs in to pants while they threaten to initiate rigor mortise, damn it, you deserve to get a look from someone somewhere for your efforts.

Grateful Shmateful

"What's happening on facebook?" my husband asked.

"Oh you know, the usual, we're all very grateful." I answered as I scanned the status updates.

Most of them start with the disaster, "A typhoon swept my home away," or "My dog was run over twice, once in Drive and once in Reverse," but without exception, they all end the same way, "I'm so grateful." This is a very Christian thing, which in a link I'm not certain I understand yet, somehow makes it a very American thing too, this trend towards being verbally grateful, especially when it looks like there isn't much that's great to fill up on.

 I had never heard this before moving to America but I have heard it countless times since I moved here, most often when a woman or girl falls unexpectedly pregnant. "Oh well,"  they smile, "God wouldn't give me more than I can handle."  Are you certain of that? Because I am fairly sure that there is a homeless man standing in the snow off Colorado Avenue who could dispute that if he still had his mind. I can't decide if people say these things as a coping mechanism or if they are genuinly worried about undermining God's will. If the latter is so, I hope you'll consider how large the complaints department is and how well equipped God must be to handle these sorts of things.

And why is it so important to be so verbally  grateful all the time anyway? Maybe it's just a matter of getting to the punch line first? Maybe people who say these things know that if they don't say it, you will? My parents had a robbery where the car and a lot of things from the living room were stolen while they were asleep upstairs and all anyone could say when they heard the news was how "lucky" they were that it wasn't worse. "Funny" she laughed, "I feel lucky almost all the time but nobody ever mentions it until today which happens to be the one day I haven't been lucky at all."

 I'm not saying we should all mope around and feel sorry for ourselves but maybe there is something to be said for people who assume gratitude, people who barely ever discuss it because it's a given that life is precious and we're glad to be here to experience one more day on this fragile blue marble, even if this particular day wasn't so hot. Perhaps it's my English heritage, but I find people who cast an excellent complaint littered perhaps with a few choice curse words and punctuated with a laugh to be the most human people I wish to know. I feel somehow related to someone who says, "This morning was so bad that half way through my staff meeting, I was wishing I had scheduled my mammogram for today," and I feel I'll never really know someone who says, "My babysitter quit and I'm home with my sick children, but I'm grateful to be here."

And for crying out loud, can we all just stop being facebook grateful for our husbands? If you're so grateful for your husband, why not get off the computer and go and give him...you know...hugs. Making a public statement about it is just flat out lazy and honestly, if you say it more than once a year, I stop believing you. Maybe these husbands are too busy bringing their wives coffee or diamond earrings or something, I don't know, but it looks weird to see all these wives adoring their men who are silent in response.

So here's the point of all this. Try writing updates that convey how you're doing today without using the words, "blessed" or "grateful." Why not show us what you see when you look at your life without spelling it out for us. As your friend and your audience, I want to know you better so don't keep me at arms length by using all those general words that mask the really specific thing that's going on. I promise you that no matter how you feel today, I've been there too and I'd be...well....grateful, for the company.

Modest clothing

Clothes are so...modest now. I was walking around the women's department the other day, looking for your everyday slutty mini-skirt to pair with my push-up bra circa 1997 and instead what did I see? Knee length skirts. Sleeved dresses with belts that go around the waist. Shirts with buttons and pleats and dresses with... Petticoats? Makes you wonder doesn't it? (Probably not) Which came first, the clothes or the modest buyer? Have the Amish finally swayed the fashion world to see their side of the hem line?

I'm certainly not complaining. It's a lot easier to do my job (I'm a financial consultant for a Sales firm in New York that doesn't actually exist in real life.) wearing clothes that don't make me pretzel my way to the floor while I mop up dog puke with my bare hands. And my legs look thinner when only the bottom half is showing, probably because it creates this illusion that I'm hiding more leg than I really am under there.

It shouldn't surprise me that my husband hasn't noticed the trend towards modesty since he is the kind of man who has no problem going to work in black doc martens, a spotted tie and a flannel shirt, but it did surprise me a little. Then I remembered that men just see women naked, no matter what we're wearing, all they see is what their fabulous imaginations make up and reality plays almost no part in any of it, which is a beautiful thing.

Anyway, just thought I'd let you know, that it's safe to dig out that skirt you like but never wear in public because you're scared people are going to start treating you like Olivia Newton John before she put on the leather outfit in Grease.

Short shorts

Right now, you can't cross the street without running in to a Girlan (that's what I'm going to start calling a person who is too old to be a girl but too youthful looking to qualify as a woman) in those really short cut off shorts. You know the ones; ragged edges, probably denim, tighter than The Eagles singing Hotel California, shorter than your average maternity swim suit. Well anyway, if you're tempted, on that one day a month when you feel thin and beautiful and unbloated and unirritable and completely clean and unrushed and full of money to buy a pair, please consider this: it takes one and a half minutes of sitting on a toilet to get that pink ring around your butt. If it takes you longer than this to finish...you know....reading that article in National Geographic Traveler, maybe you should think about going a little longer on the hem and saving yourself from looking like a Waterbuck.

Clothes I own (and wear) but probably shouldn't.

I'll never forget walking down a street in Kathmandu, Nepal when I saw a girl walking towards me wearing Aladdin pants. She looked awesome. Seriously. She had on a tank top and the pants looked like she'd just sort of thrown them on and they made her waist look small and her walk look casual and I couldn't get myself to a stall fast enough to buy myself a pair of those pants in purple! Then I returned to Colorado and on my first walk down the street, my friend Phil shouted, "Can't touch this!" and started to do the MC Hammer dance on his driveway. I hope for your sake that you have no idea who MC Hammer is. I looked down at the long elephant butt crutch and the ballooning legs waiting for his words to shatter the spell, but no. I still love those pants. In my mind, I look just like the bohemian twenty year old and no amount of crab walking from Phil or anyone else can talk me out of those things.

I wish that were the only pair of pants in my wardrobe that people have begged me not to wear.

Then there is the blue dress. Oh man, the fabric is so soft, the skirt is loose and flirty and the top has enough ruffles on it that you actually can't tell if I have boobs, let alone boobs in or out of a bra. There is only one problem, the dress has an elastic waist. It's supposed to be worn around my waist, but I actually don't have one. I mean there is this very, very, short runway between my breasts and my hips but when I put on a dress like this, it just disappears and I turn in to Humpty Dumpty. I still wear it though, mostly I wear it when I'm at home because if Oprah suddenly comes to the door to hand me a million dollars, I don't want to be in my pyjamas while the cameras role and I cry with joy, but there's also a chance she might not pitch up in which case, I'd like to be very comfortable while I go about the glamorous work that is housekeeping.

And there is the box of thin clothes. The thing is, I saved all these clothes I was wearing when I was twenty five because they motivated me to get back to that weight after I'd had two children. I just didn't consider that two children would...you know....change things. So here I am, seven years later, back to the size I was before but shockingly, the clothes just don't look quite right. I look in the mirror and think, "Oh so this is what they mean when they say "Mutton dressed as Ham"." Still, I can't seem to let go of those clothes. There's a dress in there that I wore on our honeymoon and though it's not a great dress or anything, not particularly well made or classic in style and I probably wouldn't notice its absence if my house burnt down, I still put it on from time to time when the kids are asleep and my husband is doing a late night run to the grocery store, and in low light, after a few drinks, it looks just like it used to.

PS. No photos were used in this article since I know you well meaning readers would lie and say, "It doesn't look that bad," and further enable the bad dresser in me.