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.