Children make mother’s fashion statements
I am not overly concerned about my clothes. Ask anyone. For sure ask my family who despair of getting me conform fashion. Ask the ladies in the women’s circles where everyone else chatted about their new shoes, holiday dresses or their latest piece of jewelry as they looked significantly at my old tennies and comfortable out-of-season clothes with unadorned shirt, neck, arm or ankle. The person in my chair smiled brightly and said nothing.
Good or bad, what I wear is noticed. Take the day I showed up at my sewing factory job wearing a necklace of mismatched, badly aligned buttons, threaded on a piece of string. The grandmotherly lady who sat across from me smiled knowingly. “Your fiancŽ’s children made that for you?”
I nodded, “He’s seven. He made it last night for me. So I am wearing it today.” In fact, I wore it a couple times.
A few years later, my husband took the children to select dress material for my Christmas gift. They chose a shocking pink material scattered with little girls in bright yellow pinafores under brown trees. I made it into a pinafore sun dress. The Sunday I wore it to church, the pastor reached for his sunglasses when he saw me coming.
I shamed him to silence. I said my dear, darling children had chosen that material so I could make a church dress, and I was wearing it to church.
At least the Sunday School room was well lit that day.
As the children went off to college, my wardrobe improved. My first college T-shirt featured a joyful celebration from the nation’s party city, New Orleans. I had several compliments on that shirt.
I never got to tie-dye anything in the 60s, but my youngest son made up for it last summer. He tied a shirt I had given him and dyed it for me to wear. It looked good. The only thing I needed when I wore it was a flower and a few less years to complete the look of the 60s.
After my son’s college made it in the final four, we all received celebratory shirts stamped with the team name. When his younger brother’s city team won a national championship, he passed around blue and gold stamped Tees like a proud father handing out cigars.
When my first born went to college, he gave me a dressy navy and maroon scarf. I struggled to make it look just right every time I wore it draped around my neck. Then it was lost in the back of the drawer during a remodeling phase. I found it last year and realized its colors coordinated perfectly with our new color scheme. That was the day it converted and became an easily draped table scarf accented with a white lace covering. It stays on the table a lot longer than it ever stayed on my neck.
The most comfortable gift of clothing were a couple cotton print work shirts I wear over a turtleneck shirt or breezily alone on a day when it is too hot for a skin clinging T-shirt. I was wearing one when someone asked if it was a shirt they had given me. I looked down, thought a minute, and said it was.
As I watched her face break into a smile, I was glad I had worn the shirt, just for that look of satisfaction and acceptance.