closeted

01May07

I am not married to the same person that stood next to me in the Campbell Apartment 2.5 years ago vowing to be true and not gamble too much. That man, the mister, started out a-courting with this insane drop your pants on the floor as you’re shaking them off on your way to bed habit, not even breaking stride, and the mister was the one originally doing all the asshole things he gets on my case about. The man that shares my bed today is a neat freak, not to be confused with a clean freak, but my question to the internet ether is this: where did you come from mystery man? Are you kidding me with the put-the-socks-away lecture every day? You knew when you married me that I am, at heart, a sterotypical bachelor slob who will eat a box of corn pops for dinner and not put away laundry for a year given the opportunity. All I’m missing is a hairy chest and a proclivity for porn. This is all beside the point. I’m just saying…

I cleaned out my closet this weekend. That whole buildup about the mister was to explain why I cleaned. My husband finally managed to guilt me into acting my age and picking up my clothes goddammit. He’s totally justified in being frustrated with me.

-But-

Looking in my closet would freak out most people I think. It freaks me out. There’s like five people who should be wearing the clothes hanging silently in my so-called closet, each with distinctly different political affiliations and girth dimensions. Size 4, 6, 8, 10, 12??, Maternity (Argh). The small stuff is decidedly “fancy hookerish“. The medium sizes say “I’m a professional, hear me whine”. The large sizes say “I’m still the same person with the fantastic ass, but I’ve donated my perfect body to science and will return anon.” The mumu stuff, the maternity stuff says “I’m a manifestation of the inventor’s guild’s quest to incorporate wet suit spandex into all mundane clothing articles, like jeans, so that everything but the mid-section can squeeze out freely into standard cotton, wool and silk to create undulating rolls of flesh for the entertainment of all of my fashionista friends who gasp at the horror of being a size **8**.”

It’s not easy being expandable.

I started with my underwear drawer instead. I picked up shredded rags of cloth that an old friend had brought back for me from Brazil…three years ago. She claimed that these oversized thongs were cut to fit our flat little Asian butts without riding up on us. Why do I distinctly remember many wedgies from these sad little things. Why were they still here?? Elastic completely shot from our horrible combo washer/dryer, every edge frayed to resemble the fringe from the skirt of Komo’s plastic covered couch. It felt good to purge the old and the ratty. Except I now own only three pairs of decent, upstanding underwear. One of them, ‘boy cut’, and my least favorite because I seem to have a wedgie magnet in my crack, produces the most annoying wads of fabric where I prefer to receive only northern quilted tp.

The bras took a good 45 minutes to sort through. I looked at the sexy C cup stuff and got confused. Who the fuck do these belong to? I collected all the bras that had lace, spaghetti straps and a glaring absence of those big holes that I’m so accustomed to with my nursing paraphenalia, and laid them out to sleuth the identity of the conniving bitch who was tempting my husband with these perky lacy things. Yeah yeah, I’m trying to be cute – they belonged to mom o’ max circa 2003. me. Next I looked at the D cups and the double D’s with their conveyer belt straps and just shook my head in disbelief. These gigantic contraptions were a second skin to me while I was pregnant and spooked into wearing them all the time except in the shower. My friends whispered things about knee slapping mammaries if one let herself sleep unarmored. Sleeping in them was torture at first, but then I developed a masochistic dependancy on the discomfort. Thank goodness I listened, otherwise, my boobas wouldn’t be preserved at their dizzying height next to my belly button. Finally I sorted my nursing bras and started remembering all the nights of indescribable anguish because of no sleep, the pain of nursing and failing, or the pain of nursing and being gently mutilated by my beautiful child, doubled over in bed and unable to go to to work or move during the worst of it. The blood sweat and tears were not even washed out very well; stupid combo washer/dryer.

Every item of clothing started to send waves of nostalgia up my arm and into my head so that it took me all weekend, between Max clinging to me and being endlessly torn between throwing out clothes that were too small, too destroyed or too hideously ugly to justify storing…or even donating, and keeping them because they seemed to be causing an existential melt down. I didn’t properly acknowledged my recent doings with giving birth and being a mother as these nursing tanks and bras were demanding I do.

I ended up neatly folding everything and vowing to myself that I would buy some new underwear, socks. I’m still wearing my nursing gear though I don’t know why exactly. I do have that ability to be honest with myself some times. I’ve grown fond of my nursing bras, we’ve been through some shit together, you know? I haven’t nursed for three months, and I don’t miss it. I just don’t know how to part with these bras, as in not wear them. I’ve never talked to my friends about this new weirdness. My friends aren’t that accessible. Besides, they’ve got their own shit they’re afraid to admit to. I’m sure there are other moms who have gone through the same separation anxiety with their non-gerie… right?

Filed under: butts, hormones   |  3 Comments