#@$%ING Mommypants Moment
by Cheryl, posted on October 11th, 2010 in Mommypants Moment
Today I’m introducing my new weekly feature, Mommypants Moment.
I don’t have a fancy button. Don’t need one. Because these guest posts? Speak for themselves. Also I have no tech ability so, yeah, there’s, like, no button.
I really can’t wait to bring you some of the best bloggers in the ‘sphere. These are women who can flat-out write. Some you will know. Some you might not. But I’m sure you will relate to their take on their Mommypants Moment.
To kick things off, I begged, cajoled, threatened and ultimately blackmailed the amazing Lori from In Pursuit of Martha Points. Her posts have made me laugh out loud. Some have even made me cry. She also raises money and awareness for the American Stroke Association through Project Purse and Boots. It’s a cause very close to my heart, as I lost my grandfather and my father to complications from stroke.
Anyway – I hope you love her as much as I do.
Can’t I Take These #@$%ING Pants OFF?
It’s like The Red Shoes.
Once you put the Mommy Pants on, they are on.
You put on your Mommy Pants the day your heart exploded with love for a life given to you for safekeeping. Those bad-boys painted themselves on your ass the moment you understood that a fragile, vulnerable soul had been given to you for growing and tending.
It doesn’t matter what the fit is like or whether or not they were on sale. You don’t get to make changes because they make your backside look like a double-wide trailer or if they chafe between the career tracks.
You can be wearing your sexiest dress after six months of Slim-fast and spin class, and as you look at yourself in the mirror you will see the subtle lines of the side-seams and pocket rivets under the sleek, black knit. Your feet will look slender and elegant in your strappy sandals, but you will see the shadowy outline of the track shoes you wear to playgroup.
In a fit of high-waisted fury you make an appointment at the trendy salon for a highlight and cut, and what the hell, you throw in an eyebrow wax for the hell of it. You sit in the chair and toy with the idea of a Brazilian, just because it’s something that young, hot women who have never even glanced at the Mommy Pants section of Macy’s do. But then you think about the rubbing and decide that the Mommy Pants will be just too damned awkward if you can’t even bend down.
I look at myself in my Mommy Pants and I wonder, sometimes, how I ended up in this costume that has molecularly bonded itself to my identity. I squint in the mirror trying to find the brazen young woman who lured the juicy upper-classman away from his date at the year-end campus party, and I can’t quite picture her in this rugged pair o’ dungarees. I try to wiggle my hips into the shape of them but my self-image is disoriented by the cut and they don’t yet have that comfy, familiar, lived-in feeling. I hold a set of characteristics that no longer fits on one hand and a set of characteristics that doesn’t seem like they’re mine in the other and it feels like nothing in my personality closet fits any longer because these Mommy Pants are on my body all the damned time!
Don’t you?
And yet…
They are tough. Tough as nails. Tough enough to wipe the butts and clean the puke and extract the splinter and ground the teenager and hand over the keys to the family car. I’ve noticed that dad’s khaki’s don’t stand up to that kind of wear quite so well.
They are durable. Between the arrival of the first child and the launch of the last child is no less than eighteen – and potentially as many as thirty – years of teaching, cleaning, coaxing, cooking, training, toileting, mentoring, lecturing, disciplining, crafting, signing, explaining, shopping and shaping. And the loving and the worrying…well, those last a lifetime. That’s a sustainability demand that few pieces of apparel could manage.
So despite the occasional wish that we could take a break – even for one day – from their bulky silhouette and sensible fabric, we still wear them every day with pride. We accept the uniform of the service in which we enlisted, and despite their utter failure in the trendiness department we know that we have little time for trends now anyway.
We can all just be grateful that Mommy Legwarmers never caught on.
Want even more Lori? She’s also guest-posting over at The Red Dress Club today, too!
Cheryl Reply:
October 11th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
Exactly. Well said.
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