Retail Therapy: Let’s get some shoes

In an effort to be comforting in light of my recent downturn in employment, this past weekend my oldest sister went UBER big sister on me and took me out for some retail therapy.  She called me on Saturday morning and informed me it was time for my wardrobe to stop its interminable suffering. "You used to be so fashionable," she griped. "What happened?" *crickets*

I'd like to say I didn't know, but the truth is, with the constant evolution and trimming of my department, my need to dress for the public disappeared. And so I got comfortable. "Too comfortable," she said. "When you look good, you feel good. We need to update your sorry closet."

Specifically: Shoes. The Mission: Get some.

What with my birthday having just passed, she decided the best gift would be some awesome heels to jazz up my life. Walking into Macy's amidst a massive shoe sale is like floating into Nirvana;. Within 10 minutes I was trying on 12 different pairs. When the iron is hot, you strike; when there is a shoe sale, well... that's a lot of iron striking.

My oldest sister is quite honestly one of the most fashionable people I know. And maybe when I got comfortable lazy with my wardrobe, I lost my flair for fun. My big sister gave me the permission to have fun. "Black shoes?" I say, when she asks what I'm looking for.
"You don't have to just go with black. There are a million colors and styles that can actually be just as practical." READ: Not lame.

And so she hands me shoes: Patent leather? Of course. Red patent leather? They're adorable! Platform-style suede 4-inch heels? JUST TRY THEM. Try them all-- test them; the right shoes will sing.

Look at these sexy CFMs. LOVE!

And so I did. Well, most of them anyway. But when the winners were placed upon my feet, they were singing like Aretha: awesome and righteous in every way.
The winner: these awesome beauties.

Greetings from a Super Villain

As a young lass, I never wanted the “typical” dream of growing up and getting married and having 2.5 kids and settling down into the 3-bed, 2-bath home with the picked fence. Partial lie—I wanted the picked fence, but mostly I just wanted my parents to build a picked fence around our army green, ranch-style tract home. (Talk about curb appeal.)

No. I dreamed of growing up, living a metropolis and becoming a superhero. I seriously thought it was achievable because a) they promised the future would have jet packs and b) with all the advances modern science has made since the 1970s, you’d think they would have made *some progress* on an invisibility suit. Also I was pretty much a boy until I hit 6th grade, but my feminine side really dug the lycra bodysuit idea. And a cape. Capes are magical.

Flash forward to what the future has revealed: I’m not only a married, but a *remarried* mother of seven kids living in a nice, somewhat customized tract home in the suburbs. Still no picked fence. Still no jet pack.

And instead of being a superhero, however, in my little world I am the bad guy. It’s sort of a twist, really, on Clark Kent. By day I go to work disguised as just a mild-mannered gal who works at the local newspaper; but at night and without foreknowledge or planning, I become an evil villain known as Mean Mom.

To wit:
Upon my return home from a long, utterly grueling day at work wherein I was forced to EARN my pay, my smiling, somewhat relieved self heads into the laundry room to find—duhn, duhn, duuhhhnnnn—the load of clean laundry I’d done the night before unceremoniously dumped on the floor, so as to make room for a teen’s work uniform. This large load, now mixed back in with unclean items, was left there for me to pick up. I call said teen and leave an angry cell phone message—privileges revoked! You must redo this laundry, fold it and put it away! I work too hard to have to blahblah blah blah. I tune myself out. It’s the usual bad guy monologue, complete with whispered threats of social life annihilation. Yes. Mean Mom strikes again.

Off the phone, when the heated moment passes, I feel like a troll. That’s part of being Mean Mom, too, I suppose. Honestly, I seriously doubt Lex Luthor liked himself very much after he lashed out. And I bet The Joker had a softer side, as well.

Focusing on the positive, I begin making dinner: green beans, grilled asparagus, steamed brown rice with pulled-pork loin. I notice my youngest has become somber, literally morose. Apparently I have ruined her LIFE. The discovery that the rice is not white has caused paroxysms of grief. And not only did I MAKE the wrong rice, I put it on her plate, and it TOUCHED the other food. Oh, the look that one gave me. And like a true villain I smile inwardly, knowing that only I have the power to make her eat. Three. Whole. Bites. Mwahahahahahaaa!

*sigh.* The fact of the matter is I hate being the bad guy. But my mom swears this naggy phase will pass and when the kids are older they will come to appreciate my mothering. In like 15 years. So while right now I feel like a big jerky larva, I’m actually in the chrysalis phase and someday I really will emerge as a beautiful, real-life superhero. And I shall be known as Grammy.

STRIKE

I stare at the overflowing, swill-trough of a sink and wonder what kind of a filth pit I have allowed myself to exist in. Anger roils in me as I take in what, clearly, is completely unseen by the selectively-blind children of the household.

There are many ways to view this mess. One could call it sculpture, admiring the clever way cheerios-steeped-with-coagulated milk paints the bottom of breakfast bowls, and how those bowls teeter carefully atop bone-laden, barbecue sauce painted plates frozen in place by a mortar of mashed potatoes. Or, perhaps, consider the archeological implications of the mass, given the dozens of glasses and mugs—each speckled with their own strata and appearing for the first time this epoch, having so recently been excavated from the man cave (aka the boys’ room). Add a sprinkling of coffee grounds and crumbs and other detritus, and place all of it in a pool of gray tinted water… and you have the edifice that greets me upon my return from work, every day, since the start of summer vacation.

I didn’t even mention the flies.

I am the largely unseen, heavily ignored servant that cleans this biohazard. Or, with enough strategic planning, I can delay my return home and entry to the kitchen long enough so that my loving husband and lifelong partner is stuck with the cleanup—which he willingly does most days, knowing my aversion to cooking until the kitchen is “clean.” (“Clean” being a subjective term.)

Avoiding the migraine that awaits, I trudge to the bedroom, past the dreaded sock bin in the hallway. With 7 kids, I do not attempt to match up socks. Everyone’s feet must fend for themselves in our home. Unfortunately, the bin is overloaded with maybe two billion socks and the socks spray down the hallway outward from the bin, like an enormous volcanic cloth explosion. A teen passes me and the bin, ignoring the mess and the look of sheer horror on my face. I want to throttle him.

Just days before, this same child nearly convinced me he suffered from hearing loss. Said child, who skipped his chore 3 weeks in a row, attempted to plead innocence of his dereliction of duty claiming I never “asked him” to do it. “It” being his chore, for which he has been solely responsible these last 2 months.

Here my husband chimed in, maintaining that even he heard my many requests of the blatantly-ignoring-me-to-my-face child—whereupon I was so overwhelmed by the uncontrollable surge of desire for my husband (as his assertion of my sanity is undeniably the sexiest thing I’ve ever witnessed), that I nearly forgot to shrilly scream, “I TOLD YOU SO.”

Some days I can actually feel my hair getting grayer.

Returning to the kitchen, I have made a decision to dismantle the art installation in my sink. I scrub. I rinse. I get out a blow torch. Within 15 minutes, I’ve cleaned the dishes and rendered the sink spotless. I’ve also made a strategic decision not to ever do this again AND THIS TIME I MEAN IT. Four of seven children filter into the kitchen for one thing or another, and I decide to make my move: I launch into lecture mode. I tell them they are each now responsible for their own dishes. I tell them how unfair it is for their father and I to come home after 9 hours of work to face the horrendous mass I’d just exorcized. No more! Put your dishes in the dishwasher. If it is full, unload it if clean; run it if dirty. They are all nodding, they are all in agreement. I am on a roll. I am feeling empowered. I am feeling heard…

…until two hours later I find a full juice glass left next to the sink by one of the meeting’s participants. The sink was empty. The dishwasher was accepting.

My shoulders sagging, I pick of the glass and consider my frustration. It’s just a dirty glass, why let it bother me? Because I’m a person and my requests matter, a tiny, ferociously annoyed voice in my head replies.

I deposit the dirty glass in the offending child’s room, where I have decided that all dirty dishes will now go—onto the beds and dressers of the guilty. One of the house’s largely unseen, heavily ignored servants is on strike. Let the flies deliver the message.

Prom

DSC_0068, a photo by girlmonkey on Flickr.

She can and she did

“Who is that, check her out!” The three boys laughed when I turned. “Turn back around,” they yelled. I kept walking. “Nope, not her. Her butt’s no good.”

Panic lit in me and I looked down. What? My butt was no good?! Here I was, fifth grade, minding my own business walking across the blacktop, and I’d already been stamped as having an unattractive butt FOR LIFE.

Yes, I was being inappropriately ogled by a group of boys on the playground and yes, whatever they said was grotesque and stupid and shouldn’t matter. But I was wearing overalls, for gawd’s sake, and nobody’s butt looks good in those.

And there you have it: how I thought about that incident for the next 30 years. They judged me, and I was upset that I’d lost the competition because I wore the wrong outfit that day. By golly, I could do better; I wanted to be the best darn object those boys ever judged!

And so began my life-long struggle with my body image. I have always been too flabby, too veiny, with a smile way too big and a butt way too– *sigh*. Don’t get me started on my butt.

Having such a struggle is a dangerous thing, especially in the hands of a female who grows into a woman who becomes mom (and insta-mom) to four daughters—two of whom have weight issues.

Put bluntly, they are overweight. This isn’t me with my body-image-critical glasses on; it’s something both of their doctors had labeled “obesity.” My older stepdaughter was able to be part of a weight-loss-based reality TV show last summer and suffice it to say, at age 19, she is in command of her own body.

But my younger stepdaughter… as a parent, I see it as my responsibility to make sure she gets on a healthy path and stays there. As a step-parent, I know I have to tread more carefully than to simply make changes and demands “because I said so.” Next year she enters middle school, and being one of the brightest, funniest, sweetest and prettiest girls I know, I don’t ever want her to be subject to taunts across the playground. Or end up spending her life looking down and wishing she was different. Or at least hadn’t worn the stupid overalls that day.

A few months back she and I went to the doctor and got the verdict: high triglycerides. Worse, she’s genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, no matter what her weight is. We talked about how important it was to get this under control now, so that she can help control it when (not so much if) the genetic component pops up.

At first we worked together to change her eating habits. We knocked out sugar; we reduced carbs; and we reduced portion sizes. I say we, but the truth is, she’s the one who made the choice to change. And she continues to stick with it.

Second, we looked at activities. Being that she was involved in every sport at school, it seemed it would be difficult to increase or add school sports beyond what she was already involved with. However, one lonely school flyer changed our world.

The flyer was for the iCAN Triathlon Club, a nonprofit organization that teaches kids ages 7 to 19 the sport of triathlon. Through 3 practices per week, both she and her younger stepsister have learned how to properly swim freestyle; how to mount and dismount a bike; how to run in a race; and then, how to do all three consecutively.

Our kids’ involvement with the group has been one of the best things we’ve been able to do for their health and their sense of personal accomplishment. Last weekend they both participated in the Sierra Kids Triathlon and had a blast doing it.

And, as a side benefit, my stepdaughter has lost one pound per week since she joined the club. Believe it or not, it’s been weight loss that hasn’t been miserable. By steadily working at becoming a stronger athlete, she’s almost lost 20 pounds. And she’s learned that if she works hard enough, she can meet and exceed her goals– and it doesn’t matter what outfit she’s wearing.