Wearing Someone Else's Clothes

"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.”~ Thomas A. Kempis


While shopping for girls clothes at a local department store, a few days ago, I couldn’t help overhearing a mother and daughter arguing while they scanned items on a rack. Frustrated, the mother turned toward another lady and sighed as she conveyed to her friend her inability to convince her daughter to wear ‘girl clothes.’

I briefly glanced at the mother as I walked away – her face was caked with excessive make-up, her hair was painstakingly kept in place by a generous amount of teasing and hairspray, and her attire spoke of a desperate attempt at stopping time and never getting old. The girl seemed just as frustrated as her mother, though her lack discontent was overshadowed by her mother’s imposing will to turn her young princess into a mirrored image of herself.

I left before the mother and daughter finalized any purchases, but as I walked out of the store I thought of how common it is for parents to live through their children, or to see their children as a continuation of themselves. Certainly, we all want to steer our offspring into a direction we believe will be beneficial to them, but is assumption of what is best for them always stemming from a neutral point of sheer good will, or could it be that at times we allow our own perception of things to get in the way?

What is good for one person is not necessarily good for another, even if they share a few pints of blood; similarly, what didn’t work out for one might, instead, be the saving grace of someone else. Imagine, for example, a mother whose dreams were sacrificed in the name of a relationship gone awry; would she keep her own bitter perception to herself, or would she try to convey her disappointment to her daughters, hoping to spare them the same fate? If she does, in fact, allow her personal, negative experiences to influence her teaching, she can rob her daughters of important experiences essential to their own growth as individuals.

I often see parents pushing children toward certain activities, even when their youngsters have no inclination toward them, only because those activities are something THEY would have liked to participate in. While it is nice to provide opportunities for children to spread their wings, their own preferences should be considered before anything else.

I hated sports and loved books, and I am sure there were plenty of times my father cringed when I turned my nose at watching a game with him, but thankfully, he never pushed the issue. My mother and sister lived – and still do, to an extent – for fashion and shopping; well, I didn’t like those either. When it came to recreational activities, I was the proverbial black sheep, but in the end, I liked what I liked, and being forced into the skin of a different person wasn’t going to magically turn me into someone I wasn’t.

Of course, we all have ideas of what we would like to see our children do, but I will always try to keep my two cents into my pockets. Will my sons and daughter follow the paths I think they will take? Maybe, or maybe not, but in the end my goal is to see them happy in the lives they have chosen.

The Coffee Stain

“Shyness has a strange element of narcissism. A Belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.” ~ Andre Dubus


Growing up next door to one of the fashion capitals of the world, appearances used to be very important to me. I clearly remember that, as a teenager, I would not even go outside unless I had make-up on, or wore high-heels. Then life caught up with me, and over time I came to accept that some of these things really don’t matter.

Last week, I stopped by a local Target while on my way home from running other errands; since I had rushed most of the morning, I stopped at the adjoining Starbucks to get a cup of coffee I could sip while picking up groceries and new goggles for my daughter. I hadn’t even left the coffee shop when I felt something very hot splash over my leg – the lid on the coffee cup wasn’t completely closed, and some of the steaming beverage had spilled right on my pants!

Mumbling the whole way there, I went to the ladies’ room to see if I could, somehow, repair some of the damage. The stain had by now spread and there was little I could do; I wet a paper towel and vigorously rubbed the stain, hoping to magically see it disappear, but when I stopped the stain was still there; if that wasn’t enough, it was now strangely decorated with dozens of tiny paper specks that had attached to the wet fabric.

Great! What was I to do now? I couldn’t waste the precious hour of child-free shopping, yet I was uncomfortable walking around the store with wet, stained clothes. It was time to make a decision. And that’s when I looked around. Everyone was absorbed in what they were doing, and barely making eye contact with strangers. Were these people really going to snap out of their own reveries and routines to acknowledge the fact that my pants were stained? Hardly.

The decision was made – I wasn’t going to let a stain redirect the course of my day. I marched toward the aisles and proceeded to look for the things I needed. By the time I got back to my car, I assessed the situation: not a single person had looked at me twice, or even hinted at the fact they had noticed anything strange.

We invest so much energy worrying about what others are going to think that we often lose sight of the fact that most people don’t really notice the same things we do. And, even if they do notice, what are the chances that they will continue thinking about what they saw for more than a few seconds? Once we are out of their sight, their awareness of us and our ‘unforgivable’ problem is gone and forgotten; if they met us the next day, they would likely not even remember they had seen us before.

Similarly, I use to get irritated at my husband when he acted foolishly inside the grocery store; did I think that people were going to devote more than a tiny fragment of their time to evaluate his performance? Did I actually entertain the thought that they were taking that one experience home to be discussed over dinner with their families?

These days I no longer worry about appearances, just as much as I no longer feel awkward expressing my thoughts to others. Growing older doesn’t only bring upon gifts of wrinkles and gray hair, but it also allows one to realize that self-consciousness is often synonymous with personal arrogance.