Maternally Challenged

Hey! Who's the Writer Around Here?!

So the eight-year-old gets up one morning before school and stumbles downstairs to curl up in daddy's lap while he is reading the paper. (Yes, we still subscribe to a newspaper. Hopelessly retro.) I am drinking my coffee and also reading the paper, and am just barely conscious myself. The Hubster and the older daughter wake up bright-eyed and chipper and talkative, like squirrels, while the eight-year-old and I walk into walls for the first 45 minutes. Anyway, the eight year old, all sleepy and curled up in a little purple chenille ball, says: "Tell me a story, Daddy."

So he does. "Once upon a time, there was a turtle," he begins, and I start to listen out of one ear, because somehow when the kids say to me, "Tell me a story," my mind goes blank in precisely the same way it goes blank when somebody says, "Where do you want to eat?" or "What do you want for your birthday?" So I am always interested in what my Better Half--who is a scientist, NOT a writer--can dredge up, because he is pretty inventive.

This one's about a turtle who lives in a little bitty mud puddle and is veeery, veeery slow and likes things that way--until one morning, "when he woke up, and discovered he had grown an outboard motor."

"NO!" commands the eight-year-old, who slaps him with the end of her bathrobe belt. "I don't even know what an outboard motor IS, so NO OUTBOARD MOTORS"--and dad dutifully complies. Which is a shame, because I was really wanting to know what happens to a turtle in a small puddle who grows an outboard motor.

No Wonder the Kids are Confused

Some friend posted a video on Facebook the other day of a baby standing in front of a television, dancing to a music video. It was funny, but what really fascinated me was the video the baby was watching--Beyonce, singing her hit song "(Single Ladies) Put a Ring on It." I was mesmerized. I looked it up on YouTube, and watched it maybe four or five times. And I had some thoughts.

First:the dancing is spectacular. Tragically unhip as I am, I still know who Beyonce is. Without a doubt, she's a force of nature--a stunningly beautiful woman, a gifted singer, an amazingly multi-talented entertainer. And here she is presenting a message about the value of commitment. "If ya liked it then ya shoulda put a ring on it," she sings to a former lover--but she has one now, from a man who truly appreciates her. What's not to like?

But there are so many conflicting messages embedded in this thing, a person's brain could explode. As the context makes clear, the "it" the former boyfriend liked was sex--so right off the bat, we are back in the 1950s, where nice girls don't "put out" unless the boy's willing to marry them. In the 21st century, nice girls can give out free samples of "it"--but for a limited time only. There's no permanent nookie pass, apparently, without a ring. We've come a long way, baby. And if this place looks a lot like where we started--well, never mind. Move along.

Because this is also about sexual empowerment. Isn't it great that young women are no longer bombarded with messages that sex is somehow "nasty," but is a wonderful, natural thing? When there's no longer a double standard? When a young woman can enjoy sex just as men do....as long as she wears a skimpy black outfit that looks a lot like those Playboy Bunny suit of the 1960s, minus the collar, and provided she can grind and thrust like a professional pole dancer. Is it just me, or do most recent definitions of "sexual empowerment" look a lot like the entertainment at a frat party?

But wait. This is a song about commitment, which I think we can all agree is a good thing. Note, however, that this particular kind of commitment involves a great big honkin' rock the size of the Hope Diamond. Okay, that's for effect--but still: you get the distinct impression that an itty-bitty chip of something from Kohl's just wouldn't have the same wow factor. What we have here is the the concept of commitment all tangled up with the concept of financial security....which is strange in two ways: "golddigger" is such an antique term, number one, and number two, this is presented by a female entertainer whose earning power is, conservatively guessing, at least double her husband's. 

Finally, there's the image of a beautiful black woman--every inch of her beautiful--flanked by two other black women, each of whom also beautiful in her own way, each of them with hair that has been chemically straightened and glossed and flat-ironed to a point where it bears no resemblance whatsoever to actual black hair. And let's not even talk about the eating disorders you can cultivate by getting skinny enough to fit into those outfits. Yet we constantly tell girls, "You are beautiful just as you are. Be yourself."

The dancing baby was watching this video so intently you could practically see his little neurons firing as he/she struggled to imitate what was happening on the television screen. It was hilarious, and harmless. But it was also a sobering reminder of how our culture imprints messages on us all, starting before we can even talk or walk. I have a daughter in middle school who, as it happens, is not a Beyonce fan, but who has friends who adore her. Those girls, and millions of others just like them, are also watching intently. Somehow, when I think about the welter of conflicting messages these girls are getting from our culture, stuff like this no longer seems harmless or hilarious. What are these girls thinking? What is Beyonce thinking?

Put Down Those Canning Jars and Back Away Slowly

I think there should be a magazine for people like me called "Stop Me Before I Martha Again!" It would feature monthly stories of domestic arts gone horribly, horribly wrong. Case in point: it's peach season. I grew up in Georgia, and I love peaches--in all forms: fresh, canned, pickled, spiced, brandied. Yes, brandied! I saw a recipe for this in the NYTimes Magazine week before last, and was inspired, because around here, unless you buy from the Amish, you can't get peaches in any form other than packaged and syruped to a fare-thee-well. I went out and bought jars and lids and, I dunno, about 10 pounds of peaches. Then I spent an entire morning blanching them, peeling them, slicing them, sterilizing jars, making sugar syrup, doling them into jars and pouring a bit of brandy on top (except I ran out of brandy halfway through and thought, what the hell, rum works too). When I was done, I had a wrecked kitchen but also one dozen pints of lovely brandied peaches. I thought, Martha would be so proud. They'd make perfect Christmas gifts. Look at the money I saved!

The jars sat there on the kitchen counter for several days--I couldn't figure out where to keep them--and finally, at lunch on Saturday, I thought: I am going to sample some of my delectable creation. So I opened up a jar and took a bite.

Let's just say that if someone had been holding a Bic lighter in front of my mouth at that moment, I could have a new career as a circus fire-eater. If I'd HAD any tonsils, they would've been gone. We are talking way, WAY too much brandy...and it didn't mix so well with the peaches, either. The last time I tasted something like that, it was home-brewed in a car radiator. About the only good thing I can say about them is that if you keep on eating, you will soon be too drunk to give a shit about how they taste.

So now I have a dozen jars--make that 11--of something that looks like peaches but which would actually be better put to use as charcoal lighter fluid, or maybe as a field dressing for open wounds. Then again, maybe I'll just display them prominently on a shelf so people will think I am a domestic goddess. Then, if they annoy me, I can take a jar down and say sweetly, "Here--let me give you one of my jars of home-made brandied peaches"--and watch their heads explode.

Learning to Cuss Like a Pro

I grew up in a Southern Fundamentalist household, which mean that the strongest language heard in our house was an occasional "darn." Even "geez" was borderline, since in my mother's opinion it was just a cheater's way of saying "Jesus," and not in a prayerful sort of way. (I'm not going to count the things my dad would say to the lawnmower when it refused to start, since he did that out in the yard and my mother's position on that was, what? Daddy said what? I didn't hear anything.) So when I grew up and became a newspaper reporter, my virginal ears were quickly assaulted by what passed for daily conversation in the newsroom--which, in those pre-PC days, was extremely blue. "Goddamn shithead motherfucker..." "What an asshole...." "Why the fuck did he..." --all this and more was just normal discourse, a kind of constant background noise which nobody thought twice about. The result was that, after a late start in the cussin' department, I finally learned how, and from some real pros. Everybody knows that the South has a formidable literary reputation; what they may not know is that much of that literary gift has been put to work in the cause of coming up with some phrases that would peel the shellac off your dining room table. We are talking about colorful, inventive and highly original ways of taking Our Lord's Name in Vain.So it was a great place to pick up bad habits--and, as bad habits do, this one quickly became entrenched behavior. Occasionally, if I let something slip in the presence of my mother, she would fix me with a stern gaze and say, "Tracy Anne, you were not raised to talk that way." And I would reply, "Yes, Mama, I know. I had to go out and learn it on my OWN." 

And then I had kids. Before the arrival of Kid #1, my husband put me on notice that I was going to have to clean up my language. How did this come up? Well, for a while, in the later stages of pregnancy, I got this thing where every time I bent over, the baby's head pressed on my diaphragm muscle and something would spasm and I would get the hiccups. Let me tell you, this is funny the first time it happens, mildly amusing the second and third times, and after that it makes you want to kill somebody. I kept saying (Hic) "GodDAMN it!" and my husband would say, "Would you please stop cursing?" and then I would go bang my head against a wall or something. But I tried. Truly, I did my best.

But I am only human, which is a roundabout way of saying that neither one of my kids is going to have to go beyond the confines of the family home to learn how to cuss a blue streak--because, whether I intended to or not (and I definitely did not) they are learning some new words from me. I swear (get it? SWEAR) I try to keep it clean, but inevitably something comes up, and usually the "something" involves serious and unexpected pain. Like what happened yesterday.

What happened was, Suzanne accidentally shut the minivan door on my right hand. That time, I managed (heroically, if I do say so) to keep my exclamations to just saying "OH! OH! OH!" over and over, while Suzanne was saying, "Mommy are you okay, mommy are you okay?" over and over. By the end of the day, my right hand was bruised from the tip of my fourth finger halfway down to my wrist, and on the palm side as well. (I'm looking at it right now, and it's pretty spectacular.) And then, this morning, Suzanne and I were getting ready to go run some errands when I realized there was a great big heavy table in the back of the minivan that I'd forgotten to ask my husband to unload for me. So I tried to drag it out with my left hand, with some limited assistance from my bruised right hand, and of course it fell. On my left foot.

And, my fellow Americans, as Richard Nixon would say (and he was no slouch in the Bad Language Department, as the Watergate Tapes make abundantly clear), it is a good thing we have the First Amendment in this country, because at that point I fully availed myself of its freedoms. And somewhere through the roaring in my head and the fierce throbbing of my foot, I could hear my eight-year-old daughter's voice saying, "Mommy, did you just say the S word?" Hell YES, I said the S word. That was the LEAST of what I said, as best I can recall.

I guess it's not all bad, though. At least this way there is absolutely nothing my kids will ever hear on the playground that will be new or titillating, that they will be tempted to go around repeating for the shock value--because, for them, there will BE no shock value. The F word? Ho-hum. I mean, I wanted them to have large vocabularies, though this was not exactly how I'd planned to teach them. Still, once Bad Words lose their thrill value, and I explain to them that words are just words and that what is important is what those words convey and do to other people, maybe they will be interested in moving on to some other words that are more interesting. And I will say to them that Bad Words are to language what Tabasco Sauce is to cooking--something you might, on occasion, use a drop or two of. But only, I will say, on very, very special occasions, like when a 50-pound table falls on their foot. And the bruise from that, by the way, makes that bruise on my hand look like a teeny widdle boo-boo.

Back When the Skies Were Friendly

Just got home from the West Coast, and I can't stop thinking about the way flying used to be.

When I was a kid, the child of a dad who worked for Delta Air Lines, flying was something only rich people did as a habit; for everybody else, it was a rare treat. As Airline People, though, we flew whenever we felt like it, pretty much, albeit as Non-Revs (non-reservation passengers). Going to, oh, San Francisco for the weekend involved just throwing some things in a suitcase and heading for the airport, where we'd wait at the gate until all the paying passengers got on. Then there'd be this announcement from the gate agent: "Thompson family, party of four," and we'd go up and get our first-class tickets (because First Class was always the last to fill up). Back in those innocent pre-9/11 days, the pilots actually left the cockpit door open at times, and even when they didn't my dad could still stick his head in at the end of the flight to say hi to the pilot if he knew him (and he usually did; most of the pilots of that era were military alums, and my dad had known some of them in the Army Air Corps). The stewardesses (there were no male airline attendants back then) treated us like the British royal family. Meals were served on real china, atop real table linens, with real silver. In-flight movies were shown on a real screen, which was pulled down from the ceiling, and when that wasn't happening the stewardesses were always coming by with some offer. Playing cards? A complimentary cocktail? A small snack? Would the kids like to go up to the cockpit and meet the pilot? (Yes, that really happened). Once, flying to Los Angeles from Atlanta and ahead of schedule because of some extra kick from the jet stream or something, the pilot got permission to deviate from the flight plan, and took us over the Grand Canyon. At one point he turned the plane nearly on its side so we'd get a better view; I remember practically kneeling on the window, awestruck, looking down at this stupendous chasm while a lady about two rows back made discreet use of her mal de mer bag. I was sorry the aeronautic acrobatics made her sick, but it was a view of the Grand Canyon very few people get to see.

Yesterday's five-hour ordeal was somewhat less exciting. We were in economy, naturally, since only Ponzi scheme moguls can afford first class these days, and that meant I had my butt wedged into a space which was approximately 85 percent the actual width of my butt, and I had a view of the head of the lady in front of me which would have been perfect for searching for head lice, had I been so inclined. To cross my legs required the contortionist skills of a Ringling Brothers circus performer; getting out of my seat was practically impossible. And that made it doubly tragic that I was seated on the aisle of a row which contained the Kid With the World's Smallest Bladder, who required no fewer than FIVE trips to the airplane lav. He was accompanied by his mother, who popped her bubble gum like rifle shots as she sat reading some tiny book in gilded Arabic letters....Islam for Dummies, maybe? I couldn't tell. Mom had a friend three rows back who appeared halfway through the flight to stand right at my elbow and conduct a spirited half-English, half-Farsi gossip fest right in the middle of the really bad TV show I was craning my neck to see, in a doomed attempt to make myself forget the fact that I had lost feeling in both legs below the knee. So between my neighbor's gum cracking, the multilingual hen party and the Boy Who Had To Wee-Wee, not to mention the toddler in back who kept kicking my seat and the pre-boarding security pat-down the Department of Homeland Security thought I needed...well, let's just say that air travel has lost a lot of glamour.

Which is not exactly an original observation, but I can remember when travel was a big thing, an exciting thing, something not everybody got to do. It was a privilege. Vast temples were built for travel; the architecture was a recognition of the fact that going on a journey was a potentially life-altering experience. To my kids and their generation, travel is, literally, a pain in the ass. The world has gotten smaller, which is a wondrous thing in a lot of ways. But in making the world smaller, we have lost much of its mystery.

Stories the Laundry can Tell

So here I am, just minding my own business, folding yet another load of laundry and putting some clean underwear in my eight-year-old daughter's dresser drawer when this....THING caught my eye. A thong, to be exact. A black lace thong, with a tag that said "Sweet But Sexy."

I stood there probably a full minute looking at this thing, trying to wrap my mind around it. Ooookay. My eight year old doesn't wear thongs, much less black lace thongs. Hell, I'm doing well to get her into  underwear, period (she's been known to go commando). My 12-year-old doesn't wear thongs. I sure as hell don't wear thongs. (I've always thought of them as butt floss, to tell you the truth.) My husband doesn't...well, okay, you never really know the person you're married to, but if he has some sparkly dresses and a few pair of high heels stashed away somewhere, over the course of 15 years and some pretty strenuous closet cleaning, I've never found 'em. Which leaves one possibility, right? The obvious one.

Nope. My husband would never do that. Tracy, a voice in my head says. If you lined up all the women whose husbands have wandered off the reservation and who said the same thing, they'd circle the globe. Oh, come off it, said my other self. You found this in your daughter's dresser, for pete's sake. This indicated to me that in fact my husband my PUT it there, since a) the kids have to be threatened at gunpoint before they will put away laundry and b) my husband's ability to detect whose panties belong to who around here is precisely nil. And what cheating husband stashes the evidence in his eight-year-old's dresser drawer?

Still. So I did what any normal, neurotic, middle-aged wife would do in this situation: I searched his dirty clothes hamper. No evidence. I went through his jeans pockets. Nuttin'. Not so much as a stray blonde hair, much less a lipstick-stained handkerchief or unfamiliar address.

In moments like these I go to my deepest, most inner self, the one who is connected to all the cosmic energy flows out there. I call her Perfect Tracy, because while she doesn't say much--in fact, our contact is very limited--she steers me right when she does talk. So I said, Perfect Tracy, what do you think?

Not your husband, she said. Yeah, I said. I didn't really think so, either.

So I stuck this black lace thong in my jeans pocket and spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how in hell it had materialized in my eight-year-old daughter's dresser drawer. A playmate who'd spent the night? Maybe had mistakenly packed a piece of her mom's underwear...? Nope. Picturing any of the moms I know in a black lace thong was almost as bad as picturing myself in a black lace thong, and that made my eyes roll clear to the back of my skull. So what, then? Hmmm. Well, there was the playmate from down the street; she and my eight-year-old were back and forth to each other's houses all the time, and who knows what they may have been poking their noses into. And while I definitely didn't want to spend more than a nanosecond imaginging my neighbor in a black lace thong, it was safe to say that at least I could, fleetingly, without a SWAT team from the League of Decency rushing across the foreground of that mental image. But still: didn't seem likely. Besides: "Sweet but Sexy"? Kinda girlish for a married lady, don't you think? Then there was the church retreat my 12-year-old had been to the previous weekend. Maybe one of the girls in the dorm? Well....maybe. But, overall, the United Methodists are not known for their loyal patronage at Victoria's Secret, if you get my drift.

The day passed. I almost forgot about the black lace thong in my pocket, and then it was late afternoon--the time of day when the kids come in and dinner has to be gotten on the table, and the husband rushes home and the crisis du jour erupts, usually with screaming involved. I did forget about it, actually, for about an hour while I got things organized for supper, and then, just as we were all sitting down at the table, I felt this thing in my jeans pocket and pulled it out.

"Anybody here know where this came from?" I asked.

Pandemonium. "ARRRRGHHHH!" screamed my eight-year-old, covering her face. "EEEEEEEEKKK!" squealed my 12-year-old, while blushing furiously. "NOT ME," said my husband, with this look on his face that said, I know what you're thinking and don't even think about thinking it.

And right then it came to me: the babysitter. My husband and I had gone away for one night the previous weekend, just a quick get-away, and we'd asked our long-time babysitter to come spend the night with the girls. They'd had a blast--staying up late watching movies, cooking something or the other in the kitchen, just hanging out--and we'd come home to an immaculate house. It'd been great. But there was that one thing that slipped out from the eight-year-old, about how Nancy, I'll call her, had called her boyfriend from here, only he'd been busy and couldn't come over after all--a mention I'd decided not to pay attention to, because overall Nancy is extremely responsible and besides, she's practically an adult and it is not my job to inquire into her extracurricular activities unless they involve my kids, which this didn't. But would Nancy wear a black lace thong? Yeah, I could see that. It still didn't explain how it wound up in the laundry, but....what the hell. Must be Nancy. Yeah, that was probably it. But what now? Call Nancy's house and say to her mom, Oh by the way, when Nancy gets home from school today would you tell her she left a black lace thong at our house last weekend? There was absolutely nothing good that could come of that conversation. And what if Nancy said it wasn't hers? What then?

A few days later, I told this whole story to a group of moms over coffee. There was a silence when I got to the end of it, and then one of the moms, who I didn't know all that well, said, "You know, I think you ought to just throw that thing in the trash and move on down the road."

Good advice. And that's what I did.

Susan Boyle: Frumpy Middle-Aged Women of the World Salute You!

Take a look for yourself, and stand in awe at the glorious talents that hide in plain view, all around us.

'Nuff said.

Woe Is Us

Is it just me, or have we gone overboard on this end-of-life-as-we-know-it recession stuff?

I am not making light of people in genuine economic peril, and God knows there are plenty of them. I'm not discounting some things that could well mean the end of life as we know it (global warming comes to mind). I think what I am making light of are stories written by journalists who have perhaps a skewed (ahem!) idea of what "deprivation" means, due--I can only surmise--to their own sheltered upbringing, or perhaps their editors' too-focused attention on appealing to an upscale readership demographic. I am not Ma Joad by any means, and my chronological age is well under the century mark, but I can remember when moms did their own canning, lots and lots of people had vegetable gardens and thought nothing of it, and sewing one's own clothes was considered a perfectly unremarkable fashion choice. (My sister sewed my prom dress, which I still remember with affection.) When birthdays came, someone (usually mom) whipped up a chocolate cake and the family sang "Happy Birthday" at dessert time. Life went on.

These days, however, it seems to be a great big friggin' deal when parents have to forego the $500 birthday bash for their kid at the local dinner theater/theme part, and opt instead for the birthday cake from the bakery at Giant and family dinner, with a few presents. Or take this piece, in today's metro section of my own newspaper, the Washington Post, about an Ashburn, Va. family who have had to give up shopping at Juicy Couture, start clipping coupons and buy frozen shrimp instead of fresh. Lord Almighty, the End Times are here.

Maybe, in a perverse way, these news items are meant to cheer us up: a nation that can steel itself to eat frozen shrimp instead of fresh can weather almost any crisis, right? But I suspect, sadly, that the real explanation has more to do with the growing income inequality in this country, the alternate realities inhabited by the poor and everybody else, and the fact that it's pretty hard to get a job at the New York Times or any other big-name media organization if you began your life in a trailer park, and thus have some real-life experience of what "doing without" actually looks like. Mind you, I don't have any first-hand experience of living in a trailer park, either, but nobody ever said journalists have to know everything from first-hand experience. The only true bona fide job requirement of being a journalist is to know what it is you don't know. These days, a lot of economic stories seem to be written a journalists who don't know what they don't know. Or maybe it's their editors. I don't know.

Meanwhile, all these stories of hard-hit suburbanites just barely scraping by in their clothes from Target provide a rich source of unintentional hilarity. Someday, the kids of today will tell their grandchildren about the bad old days, when mom and dad couldn't afford their Tae Kwon Do lessons and the family had to sell the SUV. Let's hope the grandchillun don't rise up and strangle them.

Unpaid Caregiving

Yesterday I was at the pediatrician's office with my 12-year-old daughter, who had a sore throat. While we were waiting, I watched two other moms in the waiting room. One had a three-year-old daughter; the other had a three-year-old son (I overheard them comparing ages), plus a baby sleeping in her arms who was six months old. There was nothing out of the ordinary about this encounter; these were just two moms shepherding their kids through the pediatrician's waiting room. But in the space of 15 minutes, I saw one or both of these women

• teaching a child how to use the toilet
• teaching a child how to keep his voice down and behave in a public space
• teaching a child how to share toys
• teaching a child that he/she must say "excuse me" when stepping on a stranger's foot
• swapping information with another mother on caring for a baby with a cold
• collaborating with another mother on discipline
• teaching a child that his actions have consequences (i.e. that if he does not behave himself, he will not get an expected playdate later in the day)
• encouraging a child to develop his physical coordination (using toys in the waiting room)
• attending to the child's physical needs (by being at the doctor's in the first place)
• answering a cellphone call
• retrieving a child's favorite toy from a back pocket, where she had thought to stash it in case of boredom

None of this was remarkable; it's what all mothers of most young children do. And in our society, they call this "not working."

In Which I Become a Fashion Victim

No one, except someone suffering from serious delusions, would accuse me of being a fashion victim, which was why I started out my visit to the mall on Saturday with such a combination of wild hope and foreboding. Hope--because it springs eternal--and foreboding, because I had a feeling of what was in store. Foreboding won out. If you are over 50 and over 150 pounds and don't get out shopping much because writing at home and driving kids around doesn't require much more than clothes that cover your nakedness, this is what you can expect to find if you are, say, looking for something nice to wear to a relative's wedding this coming June:  

 

1. Skin-tight dresses made of stretchy fibers and cut all the way down to Florida (I could shoehorn into one of those numbers if I bought enough Spanx, but I am afraid that when I was done I would look like a Polish Sausage with cleavage).

2. Peasant dresses of loose-weave cotton that go all the way down to the floor. These look good on a pregnant Agenlina Jolie and are acceptable to put on when getting out of the shower but I'll be damned if I can figure out when else you'd wear one

3. Boxy mother-of-the-bride suits that not even Laura Bush would wear (and, speaking of suits, have you ever thought about what it's like wearing a suit when you're having hot flashes? Has anyone ever mentioned to designers that middle-aged women may not BE hot but that they GET hot?)

4. Floral dresses of the kind Ma Clampett might've worn to Sunday meetin'. Yee haw.

5, "Event" dresses with lots 'n lots o' bling, totally inappropriate for an afternoon wedding or anything else, really, except maybe being decorated by the French Foreign Legion

6. 6,000 racks of booorring Hillary Clinton pantsuits
7. Lots and lots of "jackets" and "twin-sets" that are really pieces of cloth sewn together to make it look like two coordinated pieces instead of one crappy piece. Can we make that against the law?

 

I was about to give up and just go to Burkas R Us when, wandering through Nordstrom's again on my way back to my car, I realized (sound of heavenly music) I had missed the Eileen Fisher rack.

I didn't have a chance to try anything on--by then it was late and I needed to get home--but it gave me a glimmer of hope. I plan to go back later this week, when I return the crappy JC Penny's pantsuit I bought in what was the fashion equivalent of deciding to turn tricks on the corner--a moment when I said, Oh, what the hell.

But seeing the Eileen Fisher rack--interesting clothes, sophisticated clothes, clothes made for bodies which may be bigger than size 6, clothes which you may even be able to wear a couple of years from now--gave me a wisp of hope. Maybe, just maybe, there is something out there for me after all. At any rate, I can dream.