Successful Dressing?

Macy's carries about a bazillion women's belts,
every one of which I hate.
 

It’s official: I can’t clothes-shop.

I am in the midst of a 3-week stint of bringing my son to driver’s ed classes. He is taking them at a Sears store in a mall. I am in said mall every day for two hours.

I have wandered into every store in the place – expensive, cheap, department, designer, athletic, formal-wear, teeny-bopper and old-lady – and I can tell you with confidence that I don’t want 99+ percent of the crap they have for sale.

Did I miss a secret class or something?

Because I know there are women who dress just right for every occasion – the cute sundress for a cookout, the flattering cocktail dress with the little shawl for when it, invariably, is too cold for the cocktail dress. Where are they getting these?! And the shoes for them, too?

Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up in Texas. Texan women know how to dress. They embrace it, as a thing. I remember one real-estate agent telling me that, of course, our daughter would need a bigger bedroom than our son because “Girls just need so much gear.”

What gear?! I wanted to shout.

There is a book, titled How to Get Dressed that I could read.

In fact, there are a lot of books on the subject, like this one, this one and this one. But it occurs to me that reading about dressing is like reading about color theory for art. If you have to consult a written theory to know if something looks good, maybe you are doing it wrong?

My current quest: a belt – leather, with a non-cheap, non-trendy-looking buckle – for a dress I bought a while back. The store that sold the dress didn’t sell belts. Of course.

Think I’ll be able to find one?

Ha!

My Spot

I feel very proud of myself.

Every weekday morning, I have been getting up at 5 am, the ass-crack of dawn, to bring my son to a 6-8 am swim practice.

And because it’s so far, I have been bringing my laptop with me, ensconcing myself in my favorite hidey spot and writing blog posts, while I wait to pick him up.

My spot has seats and Starbucks and wi-fi, but it is not Starbucks.

I do not like sitting in a Starbucks with my laptop. It feels pretentious and crowded and rushed.

The business that has my spot may not be as thrilled with it as I am. It hasn’t worked out the way they want it to. It is not particularly a profit center.

The business is a supermarket not far from the pool. It has a loft seating area. Originally, it had put its Starbucks counter up there, but no one knew it was there (yay), so they moved the Starbucks back downstairs to the sales floor.

But the loft area remains. All I have to do is bring my latte there. Seats – with no waiting and no one waiting for them, once you get your butt in one. A TV, tuned to the news, which I could take or leave. It’s clean.

There are some fellow discoverers up there. Good thing: being up there all by myself might feel a little creepy. Sometimes, a supermarket employee taking their break. An occasional homeless person quietly eating and watching TV. But often, people dressed in business clothes with laptops, I think they are salespeople between calls. A couple have begun to nod hello when they see me.

I can even pick up a few things in the supermarket on my way out.

How efficient I am. Yay, me.

Aloud and Proud

Whenever anyone asks for read-aloud book recommendations, I get carried away.

Here’s why: reading aloud to my kids is one of the best things I ever did – and there’s something about reading to kids that a lot of people don’t know:

You can – and should – keep reading to them, even when they’re older.

I would have thought the same thing too, that reading aloud stops when kids can read themselves, except one of my kids was diagnosed with dyslexia at 4.

You know the saying among teachers that, “They learn to read till 3^rd grade and then they read to learn”? Well, as my daughter painstakingly learned to read, with her awesome teachers who patiently went over the nuts and bolts of reading, I saw my role as making sure her general knowledge didn’t fall behind.

When all her little friends were talking about Harry Potter, she could too. I lost count of how many times I read those books aloud to her and her non-dyslexic brother. Each time a new one came out, we would reread the previous ones in anticipation. And by the way, Harry Potter is awesome to read aloud. When you get to dialogue from Hagrid, just read what’s in front of you and a cool accent will come out.

The Narnia Chronicles, His Dark Materials, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the Percy Jackson books, the Peter and the Star Catchers series, Sherlock Holmes stories (a surprise hit): our family loved nothing better than to settle into a good long read.

And we haven’t stopped. Last summer, my kids (ages 15 and 18) took turns reading Jane Eyre aloud.

In that novel, incidentally, characters spend their evenings reading aloud to each other. For fun.

Which it is.

Beyond Me

From

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/28569778859657214/

I have reached a peculiar point in the whole parenting thing. A good point. A great point, the one you aim for.

But still, it feels strange.

My kids can now do things, or do things better, than I can.

I am terrified of highways and haven’t driven on one for decades. My daughter, who learned to drive here in Houston (learn to drive here, you can drive anywhere), can and does. She can also produce, on demand, a project based entirely on her own creativity, for her classes at art school.

I know, thanks to his recent lifeguard certification, that my son can lift a 200-pound unconscious person off the bottom of a pool. And just by dint of his growth, he can, when he sees me struggling, shoulder his way in: “Scoot over, Ma. I’ll move that refrigerator for you.”

Currently, he can do math that I am sure I must have learned at some point but which I have entirely forgotten. (A whole different topic. Why do we teach kids esoteric math, such as calculus, that, face it, most of us will never use, but neglect to teach them how to make change?)

So, my kids have capabilities that I don’t have. They will do things and go places that I never will.

Cool.

But weird and kinda sad too.

Negative Talk

I will always remember the time my daughter’s math teacher told me she was making progress working on my daughter’s habit of “negative self-talk.”

I not only negative self-talk; I negative everybody-talk. You could say I am an equal-opportunity negative talker.

When I don’t like something, when something doesn’t agree with me, it feels very natural to open my mouth and say so. But then I was bemused to see my other child, my son, complain about his homework the year he started high school. It took him longer to complain about it than it did to do it, which, of course, as his mother, I pointed out to him. (Part of my job.)

And I have come to realize that it’s a real bummer to listen to someone’s negative talk about everything.

What you take in from around you does affect how you feel. Just spend a few hours watching “My 600-Pound Life” and gory true-crime shows and Fox News to prove that.

So, in the interests of making the world a happier place for myself and those around me, I’ve decided to break my negative-talk habit.

However, this is how it’s been going:

Me, in car: “Move it, you stupid piece of shit … Oh, damn! I did it again!”

My son points out that I am now doing double negative talk.

This isn’t going to be easy.

Oh! That’s negative talk again, isn’t it?

Crap.

Keeper of the Calendar

Image courtesy of

Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It was major for me, when I figured out how to sync my computer calendar with my phone calendar.

How sad is that?

I know when my husband is on call, when our daughter goes back to college, when our son’s driver’s ed class starts, when everyone’s dental check-ups should be.

You know when military leaders in a war movie pore over a map spread out on a table? That’s me, figuring out our summer with printed-out, color-coded, cross-referenced calendars, except I’m the only one at the table, with a cell phone to my ear and a laptop open to Google maps and school calendars.

It’s still a bit tricky because one kid doesn’t yet drive and the other is sharing my car with me. I distinctly remember the shock, upon moving from New York City to Houston, of having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to have not one, but two (and three+ seems beyond ridiculous) 3,000-pound machines out in the yard, just to function.

I supposedly am the one who knows when the AC filters have to be changed and when Lola the dog needs her heartworm pill and when our car insurance needs to be paid. (It’s tomorrow: I just paid it online today. Whew.)

Travel plans, wisdom-teeth extraction, the quarterly visit from the Terminix man, birthday cards and Christmas gifts: it all goes through me.

I know, I know.  I should turn some of it over to my kids, who are old enough to deal.

But, guess what?

I didn’t raise fools: They’re not exactly keen to take it on.

What's Inside Your Head?

I recently drove my husband home after a colonoscopy.

They put you under sedation when they do a colonoscopy, which is why they don’t allow you to drive yourself home, and when he woke, he looked at me groggily and said to the nurse, “I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I really like my wife.” Then, he started singing to her (David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” “Ground control to Major Tom ….”). He told her he hadn’t “passed gas.” They pump your colon full of air during a colonoscopy so, afterwards, you are supposed to. She said, “Yes, you did, as we were wheeling you over here.” “Oh,” he said, his face clouding over, “passing gas is bad.” He cheered up, though, when she gave him some apple juice. When I was pulling the car up and a nurse was wheeling him out in a wheelchair, he did “airplane arms.”

It was sweet.

But I’m going to be having my colonoscopy soon. (My husband and I are both 50, the year you are supposed to start having them.)

While my husband’s head is full of sweet, happy thoughts, I wonder what it going to come out of mine. I think I may be a hissing, spitting, howling wet cat. I might tell the nurse to fuck off and go running down the hall in my hospital johnny. Who knows?

I have often wondered about the appeal of psychedelic drugs. According to the Wikipedia entry on “psychedelic experience,” the word “psychedelic” is from the Greek for “mind-revealing.” If my dreams are any guide (did you know that most dreams are negative?), what would be revealed for me are snakes and spiders and monsters that will chase me, except I won’t be able to move.

Umm, no thanks.