Underwear is so personal

Last night I became inexplicably angry with the world and was sent to bed by my husband. I read for a half hour and fell asleep. Later I heard him discover the bag with sexy underwear I’d forgotten on the stairs and he came into the room where I was sleeping and kissed my cheek and whispered that he loved me. Sexy underwear is good for a few things. Myself, I just feel ridiculous in it, but it apparently makes Steve feel loved and for that I should just keep my mouth shut and buy more of it.

I’ve always surrounded myself in white cotton. Ever since I was a kid, it’s been full size cotton briefs. Hanes, for preference. Sometimes I’d splurge and buy them in colors, woo hoo. Pink, blue, yellow. Sometimes purple. But I haven’t worn bikini bottoms since before I got pregnant with my first child.

I think the motivation here was to hide as much of my stretched out ass as I could. Lately, the shape of my butt has changed a bit, due to regular running habits picked up in the last five years, and maybe that’s why I browsed the camisoles with matching panties rack last night while waiting for my youngest son to finish trying on blue jeans in the fitting rooms at Meijer. I haven’t graduated to Victoria’s Secret yet, you’ll note. I’m still only looking in the lingerie department at the giant grocery chain. But baby steps first, right?

The truth is, I know what I look like. I’m an artist by trade. I can’t fool me. I realize that I’m 44 years old and my hair is going gray at an alarming rate, that gravity has taken a firm grip on my belly and breasts and that the weight of the world generally keeps me from throwing my shoulders back and lifting my chin clear of the developing wattles underneath it. I see these things on a daily basis. I check the mirror.

What’s worse is seeing myself when I’m not prepared to, before I’ve taken that anticipatory deep breath, like when I’m passing jewelry departments and I catch sight of myself in one of the mirrors on the counter. It’s a shock, then, I can tell you, to catch myself, off guard, putting my usual foot forward instead of my very best one. Usually there’s a second or two lag time between when I first see myself and when I finally recognize that reflection for who it is, namely, me. It’s worse, somehow, when I don’t even know that it’s me, when the picture I have inside my head is so different from what’s out there for everyone else to look at and which I can’t even recognize without bracing myself for the experience.

It all boils down to the fact that I can’t seriously contemplate myself in skivvies that feature lace and ribbons and scalloped edging. Silk or satin or even slippery polyester just seems like it’s asking a cow to compete in a dressage competition. I’m not there. I don’t qualify. I don’t fit the pictures in the magazines or the advertising circulars. I suppose I could paint my lips with drippy wet lookinig lip gloss and pout them for the camera, but it would end up being a picture that would send me to the floor to roll around shrieking.

Still, go figure, my husband is absurdly delighted when I bring home a little bit of nothing made of padded cups and fuzzy red material, completely impractical to wear under my usual t-shirt and sweats, but apparently no end of a turn on for him to discover when I take off the outside stuff to reveal what’s left over.

I don’t get it, much, but I’m grateful. And a little ashamed of myself. Not for wearing the stuff, which isn’t shaming at all, but for not wearing it, when it so obviously gives him so much pleasure to see me in it. It’s got nothing to do with how I think I look, does it? It’s got everything to do with how he thinks I look.

I’ve rejected his version of me for the last twenty years. Now, here I am, unable to believe in myself as a beautiful woman, and I have to take his word for it. Thank god he still believes. And if all I have to do is put on bikini underwear with lace in it to get my solitary worshipper to renew his fervor for my favors, then it’s cheap and I shouldn’t be bitching.

Was I bitching? I thought I was being grateful.

Take note

I was dropping off my daughter, Alice, now a freshman in high school, at her soccer game. Getting out of the car, she stopped dead and said, "Shoot! John's here."

Since I knew she and her friend, John, had had a recent falling out, I asked her if it wasn't a good thing to see him today and tell him how she felt.

She gave me an exasperated look. "No, it's not a good thing, Mom. I wanted to talk to him on the phone. I don't want to talk to him right now because I don't have my notes with me."

Notes?

A few nights ago, she sat on my bed and, aware that my eyelids were at half-mast and falling fast, quickly recited her to-do list for the next morning. "I have to get up, go downstairs and put clothes in the dryer, take a shower..."

Here I interrupted, "Dad will put your clothes in the dryer tonight if you ask him."

She considers this and finds it acceptable. "Okay. I have to get up, go downstairs and get my clothes out of the dryer, take a shower, get dressed, dry my hair, pack my stuff, eat some breakfast -- I know you're tired, Mom, but I'm not going to talk long, I'm just going over my schedule right now for tomorrow morning -- and then get over to Bridgette's on time for once."

She looks at me every couple of seconds while ticking off points on her fingers to make sure that my eyes haven't slid sideways to the pages in my book. I'm not really having any trouble resisting the urge to read while she's talking because I've only just started this book and it hasn't gotten good, yet. Normally, I'd have to close the book to keep from irritating Alice but tonight it's more fun to leave it open, the pages a subtle threat in the competition for my attention, and see how many times I can make her check to see if I'm listening. Two, so far. She's getting pretty good.

Alice is proof that we're all individuals. If I hadn't been there I would swear that she emerged from another woman's womb. One lesson that I've learned as a parent: just because you and your spouse combined to create this person doesn't mean that this person is going to be anything like either of you. Although, come to think of it, Alice is a lot like my husband, Steve. Just not like me.

I've learned more about what my husband is like from watching Alice. He craves order and routine, like Alice. Schedules and having a plan B when plan A doesn't work out is how they operate. Funny how I can sympathize with my daughter's struggles to make sense out of chaos but I have no patience with my husband's same problems. I keep thinking that he ought to be over these petty difficulties by now and should just be more like me, more a live-life-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type person. I cut Alice more slack because I reason that she's relatively new to this living and learning stuff and it will take her longer to realize she ought to be more like me.

Alice is everyone's idea of the perfect daughter. She cleans her room three times a week. She mediates fights between her two younger brothers. She helps her friends' mothers when she visits someone else's home. Actually, I taught her that one.

"If you want to be invited to someone's house more than once, be especially nice to their mother. It doesn't matter whether the kid likes you or not. You might be that kid's best friend in the world, but if her mother doesn't like you, you'll never be invited back to her house again, ever."

Since about third grade, whenever I go to pick her up from this or that house and chance to speak with her friends' mothers, they all tell me the same thing. "Alice is such a nice girl. She helped me clean up after the party. I told her she didn't have to, but she insisted. She's wonderful!" I always nod and smile, guiltily suspecting that I've trained her to be everybody's favorite drudge.

So what am I hoping to train her to be? Well, I'd like her to be confident in who she is. It's hard not to criticize her efforts. Criticizing is my worst fault when it come to my children. The problem is that I want them to be perfect. Not like me.

I recently ordered a book that talks about how adolescent girls change as they grow to be women. They stop being outgoing and carefree and fun and devolve into opinionless, mindless, gutless nothings. I read this book and casually, I thought, asked Alice if she wasn't experiencing pressure to conform more to what's considered proper behavior in girls her age. She stared at me for a long moment before arching an eyebrow and asking me, "Have you been reading teenager books again?" Then she picked up the book from whence stemmed my concerns and started reading it herself. Now and again she'll point out some behavior of her friends' that she disagrees with and which is, coincidentally, outlined in the book. She's always triumphant about the fact that this book describes her friends and not her. I'm just happy one of us is reading it.

Alice is bright, funny and gifted. I marvel that she's my daughter. I somehow feel that I don't deserve to have her. I'm afraid that there will be a price to pay for all this delight, although I'll admit that there are times when this house is too small to hold two femmes on the rag at once.

Last Friday night, before the homecoming parade in which Alice was to take part, she experienced a major meltdown and dragged me, kicking and screaming, into her personal pit of despair. I resisted, of course, but it was futile.

In between clothes changes she cursed whoever had mislaid her favorite pin-striped men's suit (I didn't mislay it, I gave it to Goodwill), dissolved into tears once, begged for help twice and stared at me in disbelief when I suggested that it didn't matter what she wore because her friends would be happy to see her however she showed up. "No, they won't."

Eventually, after trying on nearly every article of clothing in three different closets, hers, mine and the boys', she finalized her costume for the parade -- a brown suit and fedora. I smeared a black mustache on her upper lip and then drove her two blocks to where the parade was supposed to start. She hesitated at the car door. "I can't see them!" referring to the freshmen float. I'd reached the end of my mothering rope. "Get out," I growled. She got. Later, when she came back home she hugged me and apologized for going off the deep end and I said I was sorry for losing my temper.

It's really pretty easy to get along with my daughter. I just have to be prepared to drop everything and listen to her when she's ready to talk to me. Usually, it's when I'm at my lowest ebb, say around 10:30 at night, or when I'm in the middle of a work crisis, juggling three clients at once. It's a kind of testing, I know. And no more than fair considering what I routinely put her though when she's reciting lists to me. My mother says I'm getting exactly what I deserve. Someone just like me.

Marie Marfia
© Copyright 2004

Science is gross

Lakeview Elementary had a science fair this week. I got to go with the boys, who each had something on display. Sam was required to attend from 6-7 pm as part of his assignment grade, so he could be on hand to explain his project to any interested passersby.

Nick’s project was a wooden catapult that he'd constructed with a lot of his dad's help. Both boys and Steve had spent a rollicking hour in the attic flinging marshmallows during the past weekend. You could hear the whoops and thumps from two floors away.

At the fair, Nick's project, along with about 30 dirty marshmallows, was placed on a table with the other simple machines. These were inventions built out of wood or cardboard. Most of them used pulleys and counterweights and levers to solve an obvious problem. Sometimes the problem involved something that the third grader was required to do but didn't like to. My favorite of these was the "Pet Letter Outer." Nick's catapult was named "The Hurler." I'm not sure what problem it was supposed to solve unless maybe it was the problem of what to do with an extra bag of marshmallows that would otherwise just lay around, useless.

We milled around the gym and it reminded me of every other science fair I'd ever attended. There were the usual 20 displays comparing battery strength and dish soap bubbles. No clear winner emerged from any of those. Dawn was the favorite on the north side of the gym, while on the south side it was Ajax, hands down. It was Everyready Alkaline at the front and Duracell at the back. One project explored how long it took little metal mailboxes to rust in various planetary atmospheres, using ball jars and complete with a backdrop of heavenly bodies. This will be important when we finally colonize Mars and need to receive mail there. Most of the displays featured obvious signs that someone's parent had gotten involved, like coordinated computer graphics, scientific sounding language and correct spelling.

Sam's project was a comparison between human spit (his) and cat spit (Kato's) to see which grew more bacteria over time. It showed, clearly, that the cat's mouth was cleaner than his, which sort of surprised me, and I had to wonder about his methods. He used six petri dishes, some sort of gel and the warm, dark confines of the guest room closet. The final display featured scribbles meant to be many-legged amoebas and pictures of yawning cat and human mouths, cut out with undulating edges and pasted wherever they happened to fit. As he neared completion on his board he'd tear off a picture to put something essential in its place, like a conclusion or his results. He didn't record his data in a notebook, per his dad’s suggestion, not bothering with writing down his observations during the experiment and instead relying on his “photographic memory" to assemble a graph, making up an arbitrary scale to use instead of an actual culture count. He still earned a score of 89, getting 10 out of 10 on his oral presentation, which just goes to show that he’s inherited my talent for talking but none of his dad’s talent for details.

Nick's catapult was the object of many admiring looks, right up until one of the older boys discovered that it was capable of flinging marshmallows 15 feet. After that it was hidden behind a press of small bodies and marshmallows kept popping out over the heads of the crowd at the rate of about 1 every 3 seconds. There were little boys chasing marshmallows all over the place. The missiles dropped onto the floor, plinked off of project boards and even smacked one mother in the face until one of the teachers, Mr. Petersen, stepped in and shooed the kids away. Nick was relieved his machine had suffered no damage during the mayhem and gathered up the catapult and the remaining half dozen marshmallow missiles, declaring himself ready to go home, which we did.

The next morning, I went out to the car to take the kids to school and discovered Sam already in it, waiting to go. He was chewing something and I asked him what it was, thinking he'd found some candy somewhere in the car. I was getting ready to deliver Standard Parental Lecture Number 366 about the follies of consuming so much sugar right before class. He didn't want to tell me what it was at first but eventually he opened his mouth and I saw the remains of a marshmallow in it.

Realizing that the only marshmallows in the car were the ones that came home with us from the science fair, the following thoughts raced through my head: Nick hadn’t taken the marshmallows inside last night. Those things had been in the hands of at least 20 kids, not to mention on the floor and the walls, and ricocheted off at least one person’s face. I was surprised and then grossed out. This was much worse than just sugar before school. "Do you realize how many kids had that thing in their hands last night? And it was on the floor, too. Yuck, Sam! How can you put that in your mouth?" I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled at me. "It tastes good," he said, as if that explained everything.

Which it did, in a way. At least, I believe the results of his experiment now. Ew.

Marie Marfia
© Copyright 2004