Tell It To COACHIE

This year I have had plenty of time to do a lot of reading and to acquaint myself with endless anti-woman conspiracy theories. Sometimes I can see some truth to them, sometimes I think they are a load of horse hockey. However, I think the most pernicious force against women and a pressing issue of the times can be described in two words: mom jeans. When I read this article in The Washington Post last month, I thought about writing about it but got distracted by all of my bulk religious inspirational/hate mail.

For those of you unclear on the whole mom jeans thing (and uninterested in reading that whole article) here is a brief description:

“The styling and cut is often generous, especially in the pants leg, waist and tummy. The fit is comfortable, which is important for active moms with on-the-go children. And finally, most of the jeans are often very reasonably priced and can be found at retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Kohl’s and JC Penney. … But the problem is that mom jeans flatter almost no one. Though they were ostensibly designed to compliment a real woman’s fuller figure, the reality is that most of them make an average wearer’s behind, hips and stomach look…well, big.”

First, a confession. The final vestiges of mom jeans were only cleaned out of my wardrobe four years ago. I had ditched the super-high waist at some point in the 90s, but the “slightly” tapered leg held on in my closet until I was pregnant with Marty. In my defense, I am a product of the 80s which was the heyday of tapered leg pants. In fact, in a high school speech class, Danielle and Celeste (the cutting edge cool girls) gave a whole demonstration on how to turn a regular pair of jeans into a brightly dyed pair of “pegs,” and we all sat mesmerized. Over the years, the tapered leg jeans were always available, so it never occurred to me that they were a really bad idea.

Then I saw “What Not To Wear,” a show that may rank right up there with Ken Burns’ 9-part Civil War series in the amount of knowledge provided to me. Woman after woman showed up on that show with mom jeans, and woman after woman heard the message that by making your ankles the smallest part of you, you are making every other part above your ankles look wider, and by putting tiny little pockets high up on your rear end, you are making your rear end look like King Kong and your pockets like Jessica Lange. Woman after woman refused to believe the style gurus, but in the end, woman after woman left that show looking 15 pounds lighter and 3 inches taller by ditching the mom jeans and putting on good jeans.

So why are these universally unflattering jeans so widely available? Not just at Wal-Mart but at the Gap and Old Navy? Even Calvin Klein makes mom jeans. Why? Would the extra fabric required to untaper the leg really break the bank? If women could only find lower-waisted (and by this I do not mean low-waisted since I have to pick things up off the floor for 80% of my waking hours and am not interested in mooning the neighbors) straight-legged pants, they’d buy them and be happy. Why are flattering jeans so expensive and hard to find?

Another interesting quote from the article states that

“The mom jeans phenomenon, Guzman says, ‘encapsulates what happens to some women when they become parents. For many women, there’s also this idea that dressing in a way that’s obviously figure flattering or youthful is unbecoming to a mother. There’s something insidious in this culture that suggests this. That’s the thing that (author) Judith Warner captured in “Perfect Madness,” and that other writers are picking up on. There’s that message that if you’re not martyring yourself, and that extends to your physical appearance, then you’re not doing your job as a parent.’”

My sister and I have discussed this very point. We have both encountered a rather hostile group of power moms at our children’s schools. These moms run the PTO and all of the fundraisers, and they are always at the school volunteering for one thing or another. The power mom uniform is mom jeans or sweatpants and cartoon character t-shirts or huge sweatshirts. We have both gotten the impression that no matter how much we volunteer, we will never be accepted in the power mom crowd, because we’re out of uniform. (I wear sweatpants as often as I can at home, but somehow they doesn’t seem appropriate for working at the book fair or chaperoning a field trip.) If you don’t look like you’re “martyring yourself” and you are taking the time to put on clean clothes and blow dry your hair, clearly you are not as dedicated to helping the kids.

So who is behind this mom jean conspiracy? Rich women who can afford nice jeans and don’t want the masses to look as good as they do? Power moms who want to be able to look put-upon and differentiate themselves from the less devoted? Men who want their wives to look dowdy to keep away poachers? Verizon?

Since neither Stacy or Clinton from “What Not to Wear” has been assassinated, maybe the mom jean conspirators are not as powerful as I think. All of the high schoolers today wear boot cut jeans, so maybe some day the mom jeans will die out. But probably not until I die out, and that means (hopefully) another 40 years or more of jeans that say, as Saturday Night Live put it, “I’m not a woman anymore, I’m a mom.”

Since I discovered Advil long ago, I’ve never really been in a great deal of pain. Sure I had children, but the physical pain part of that was rather short-lived (the mental pain part is rather durable, but that’s a story for another day). I’ve never thrown out my back, cut myself on a broken storm door, or been hit by a car. Due to my excessive milk drinking as a child, the only cracked bone I’ve ever had was my thumb, and that wasn’t even enough pain to keep me up at night. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be shot or stabbed (hey, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands to worry about home invasions, snipers, etc.). In movies, apparently a gunshot is not so disabling that you couldn’t, you know, jump onto a moving train or something, but somehow in real life, I think you might think twice about such a move (or not even be able to think twice because you are in so much pain).

In college I had really bad knees for a whole summer. The doctor who evaluated my knees diagnosed me with homesickness, apparently deciding that when I said I loved college, I was really saying “Oh God please don’t let my parents send me back to that hell!!” After he dismissed me and sent me off to continue to live in pain, this time with a knee brace, my mom decided to buy Advil, which had never been in the family medicine cabinet. The first time I took it, I could hear the harps playing in heaven. It was the first four hours without pain I had enjoyed in over two months. I became an Advil junkie of sorts, but I didn’t care. Whenever my knees started to ache, I knew there was a way to make them stop.

Now my luck has run out. In the 33 days leading up to my dentist appointments last month, I did not have any pain in my teeth, gums, or jaws. In the 33 days since then, I have had sensitive teeth, sore gums, and a dull pain in my jaw and temple that becomes duller with Advil but never truly goes away. I suppose I was unprepared by how much trauma my mouth would experience by getting five fillings drilled out and replaced, but now I long for the days when my teeth were painlessly decaying around the edges of my fillings. To top things off, I got two huge canker sores from the sensitive toothpaste I bought to make my teeth feel better.

Although the hydrogen peroxide worked as described and eliminated the canker sores, the other problems remain. To rest my jaw and end the temple pain, I’m not supposed to do a lot of chewing. But most foods that don’t require chewing are either really hot or really cold, which makes my teeth start hurting. I have a new bite guard to keep me from grinding my teeth at night, but I’m afraid to use it now because I don’t want a return of the canker sores. The only fix I can think of is to go to Mexico to one of those rapid detox clinics. If I was sedated and medicated for five days, chances are I could rest my teeth and jaws enough to calm them down and make them stop torturing me.

I realize that Laura Hillenbrand (author of Seabiscuit) has chronic fatigue syndrome and still manages to produce award winning books and articles. A little mouth pain shouldn’t keep me from scrounging up some crappy posts. But it does. Now that the HP is over the Atlantic, rapidly approaching Baltimore as I write, maybe I’ll be able to sleep better and grind my teeth less. Until then, I can only apologize to my five readers that I have slacked off on the lame ass essays you’ve come to expect with your morning coffee (or tea).

(Plus there’s that whole Verizon problem, but why waste time on that here?)

(click on Erin below for an explanation of this title)

Dear Verizon,

Someday this scam of yours will be exposed, and if I had a video camera nearby and charged, I would begin gathering the evidence right now. Explain to me why my internet will not connect until I enter your helpline voice menu hell and then suddenly, the lights on the modem come on. As soon as I hang up, the lights go out again. I’m assuming this is some sort of “rolling blackout” - since you don’t have enough DSL connections for everyone you’ve decided to give twice as many people half as much service. I know that you are vehemently opposed to providing customer service, but recommending that I visit “verizon.net” to find out how to solve problems with my internet service that will not connect to the internet is … words fail me.

I’m on to you and currently seeking a high profile conspiracy theorist to advance my cause,

Shannon

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Dear Top Chef,

First the chicken tongues and now this. Can’t you have a stinking chocolate competition? One of the few advantages of the HP’s deployment has been my long hiatus from Scrapple. And Scrapple is bad enough. I really don’t want to see people playing with and then eating the parts that would typically be ground up and turned into Scrapple. Do you think the name “offal” is a coincidence?

Ew,

Shannon

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Dear Seven-year-old girls at lunch,

Did I hear you correctly? Did one of you really say “My house is really, really, big”? Did the other of you really say “We have a friend who is sooo rich”? Why and how in the world is it that you two sit around lunch discussing wealth? When I was seven years old I was obsessed with Little House on the Prairie where the Ingalls girls had only two dresses and lived in a cabin. I envied them. What are you watching that makes you experts on big houses and being rich?

Read a book (about poor people),

Aislinn’s mommy

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Dear Nancy Pelosi,

?????!!!

You are an idiot,

Shannon

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Dear Microsoft,

Stop trying to help me. I don’t want my menus shortened to only show the things I regularly use. I don’t want automatic bullets or numbering or borders. You are not a mindreader. You are just really really really annoying. And stop underlining “really,” I meant to write it three times.

LEAVE ME BE,

Shannon

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Dear Dr. Rodney Howard-Browne,

I have become quite an expert at overblown religious junk mail lately, but you have surpassed even Focus on the Family with your lunacy. Cystic Fibrosis is caused by the devil? And all we need to conquer him is 100 million souls and 1 billion dollars? And when you say “the devil will pay” do you mean the 1 billion dollars? Are the people who send it to you the devil also?

Which bible are you reading?

Shannon

PS. Not to raise a sticky subject, but if a genetic disease is caused by the devil, where does that leave the whole “intelligent design” discussion?

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Speaking of bibles,

Dear Big Tin of Dark Chocolate Kisses and Nuggets,

Are you the modern day loaves and fishes? Maybe I can help raise 1 billion dollars if I send out a mass mailer about you to all the mailing lists I’m on. I appreciate the generosity but you can’t be good for my teeth or girlish figure, so please feel free to take this miracle on the road.

Feed the hungry,

Shannon

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Dear Erin,

As long as you are thoroughly absorbed in wedding planning and as long as I’m sitting here alone with my big endless tin of chocolate, I’m afraid I will always be able to steal your correspondence bit back.

Well, for two or three more weeks anyway,

Shannon

PS. Your Top Chef “jack-headed judges” comments were spot on

Every so often in life, you face a moment when you find yourself challenged, a moment of crisis, of soul-searching. You begin to question the way you live and what you have long believed. You must decide whether to stick with what you’ve always believed or to consider a new way, a new perspective. Today, for me, was one of those days.

Things started out as they always do, I hustled the girls to the bus stop, negotiated Marty into his clothes and dropped him at school. I came home and had a cup of tea and read the paper online. Finally, I went outside to survey the grounds of our estate.

I determined that a clean up was definitely in order, so I got one of our six rakes from the shed and began organizing the front yard leaves into long rows. I realize I have a rather unconventional method of raking, but Part One of my philosophy of raking is that each leaf should be moved as little as possible. Part Two is that I don’t want to wind up in the care of a chiropractor from trying to transfer each little leaf into a leaf bag. Therefore, I rake the leaves into long rows and then rake each row onto an old sheet. I roll the sheet up like a burrito, put the whole thing into a leaf bag, and then shake the sheet until it is unfolded and all of the leaves are safely in the bag. This may sound ridiculous and I may look like an idiot, but it is a method that is surprisingly effective, quick, and most importantly, in strict accordance with my raking philosophy.

In less than one hour today, I had produced these:

And this:

Today was an Indian summer sort of day, with warm breezes but little sun so while I got some exercise while raking, I didn’t end up a sweaty mess. Unfortunately, the weather conditions couldn’t stave off the existential crisis brewing in my soul.

Problem One: the leaves. We discovered in Kentucky that the trees chosen for on post housing areas are generally the trees that no one else wants on his property. In Kentucky, one tree dropped little red fans that fit securely within the tread of any shoe for easy transport into the house. Another tree dropped what I can only describe as fuzzy yellow caterpillars (and sap the one year that it lost a limb - it rained sap from above on anyone unlucky enough to pause underneath it). Here in Virginia, our house is surrounded by pin oaks which drop enormous quantities of thin little, dainty little, finger-sized leaves that defy any rake yet invented and are easily trapped by grass longer than .06 inches long. They also refuse to fall in the fall, and instead drift down one by one over a four month period.

Problem Two: the grass. The lawn guy that I hired was great when he showed up, but he knows and I know that I have paid in advance for one mow that I never got. This development makes me highly skeptical of his claims that he was here 3 times a month all summer. Conveniently now his voice mailbox is “full” and advises me that I should “try back another time.” I wasn’t even going to bother with him, but I discovered that, beneath the leaves that have been piling up for some time, the grass is about 6 inches long. This makes the teeny little leaves even harder to rake and I doubt that my mower, currently set at the lowest possible level, could even cut it.

Problem Three: the acreage. I love our huge yard. If we had three kids that hated each other, we could provide each of them adequate space to hold a separate sporting event on our yard. Unfortunately, with the huge yard comes a huge expanse covered with teeny tiny leaves. Last year, the HP raked, I raked, my in-laws raked, my brother raked, (rako, rakas, rakat, rakamus, rakatis, rakant) and still not all of the leaves got picked up. So today, after I surveyed my successful raking stint in the front,

I found this on the east side:

This on the west side:

This on the north side:

And then the crisis began. I have always said that because my lily-white (and really, lily doesn’t begin to describe how white they are) kiddies need lots of shade in order to play outside, I am willing to rake the leaves. Now I wonder, am I? Maybe my sister (with her huge treeless yard and big umbrella) has the right idea. Maybe I don’t want big shady trees in the backyard. Maybe I want a meadow, or field, or black top.

But after a lot of soul searching and a little Clos du Bois, I’ve decided that the leaves are, in fact, worth the trouble. From now on I’ll persuade myself to rake by telling myself that in our little corner of the world, global warming is being reversed and massive amounts of compost are being produced.

Also, my father-in-law is coming at Thanksgiving with his leaf vacuum to snag the leaves that insist upon gathering against the house and in the carport. And the HP will be back soon, ready to enthusiastically perform all chores domestic and American (I don’t think there is much raking in Afghanistan). Next April when the leaves start to sprout and the whole neighborhood finds itself under a green canopy again, I’m sure I won’t even remember this episode of doubt.

I am always irritated by newspaper sites that require you to register just to read one article. Usually I will click away in disgust, and I imagine many other people do too. Don’t you want more traffic, newspaper sites? I suppose that the New York Times and Washington Post figure that they can somehow make a buck from the thousands of people who want their content, and I don’t blame them. But wouldn’t smaller papers, say the Juneau Empire, be happy for the attention? Wouldn’t they want to try to get people to look through their website and check out all of those banner ads? Apparently not.

However, I am not exaggerating when I say that I looked through the archives of more than 20 Alaskan newspapers in an attempt to find some uplifting Alaskan news. Time after time I was skunked, and I really started to get depressed about our fellow citizens up there in Alaska. Didn’t anything good ever happen at the Arctic Circle? In desperation, I decided to register for access to the Juneau Empire. Then I decided not to since they had a rather lengthy questionnaire that seemed unnecessary given that I only wanted a quick peek at one article. So I went back to searching more depressing Alaskan newspapers, but finally I gave in, filled out the ridiculous form, and registered.

I am happy to report, my fellow Americans, that in the capital city of Juneau at least, Alaska has plenty of good news. In fact, the Juneau Empire has a weekly feature called “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” that profiles volunteer and non-profit organizations and lists what sorts of volunteers they need for short or long-term projects. Here are a few highlights from the “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” section in the past few months:

• Perseverance Theater – an organization dedicated to “tapping the potential of Alaska through the passionate creation and presentation of theatre.” Its website describes Perserverance Theater as “the state’s flagship professional theatre, serving upwards of 20,000 Alaskan artists and audiences annually with classical and contemporary productions on our main and second stages; extensive education programs for adults and youth; statewide tours; Alaska Native performance festivals; and outreach collaborations.”

• Juneau Watershed Partnership - an organization that “works to maintain and enhance the environmental quality and economic vitality of watersheds in the Juneau community.” They don’t have a website, so I guess it is a good thing that the Juneau Empire gets the word out for them.

• Association for the Education of Young Children-Southeast Alaska – an organization that “works to increase the the quality of early learning for young children through support of parents as first teachers and enrichment of early childhood programs.” One of their programs is Imagination Library through which children in Juneau receive a book in the mail every month to read at home.

I won’t bother linking to any of this, since then you will have to be filled with alternating bouts of rage and indecision about whether to register with the Juneau Empire. However, I’m willing to forgive anything of a paper that is willing to print good news, not just on occasion but as a regular feature. Maybe all of that isolation up there (who knew Juneau could only be reached by boat or plane? Anyone else out there as geographically-challenged as me? Anyone?) is a good thing. The question is, why can’t the other newspapers in Alaska and around the country carve out a little spot for some regular good news? If not in print then at least online. If they’ve got the capacity (and by capacity I mean whatever computer lingo would denote enough memory, bits or whatever - I good at computers) to have three different banner ads featuring the disgusting toenail fungus guy, then surely they’ve got some space for a little good news.

(As a little extra trivia and because I was at a loss for a name, I’ve included the state motto of Alaska as the title of this post)

(Because the people of Iraq and Afghanistan do not have regular access to electricity, I am not going to rampage about my Verizon DSL here except to say that I have been rather disappointed with the quality and quantity of connectivity it has provided lately)