Living most of the year in Africa when I was a child had a lot of awesome perks and there was none more awesome than buying my entire school wardrobe in one glorious shopping binge every summer. My mother and I would spend hours in the department stores of central New Jersey and then the clothes would mostly travel home to Africa un-worn, crisp and delicious for the start of a new school year. Often enough, the clothes were new in a school that was new with people, completely new. As rituals go, it was comforting.
One particular New Jersey summer shopping trip stands out. I was at the most nine or ten years old. We were in Sealfons, or Lord & Taylor, or maybe Macy’s, my mother and I, at the business end of some very full bags of new school clothes. We must have been done with the shopping but were still in a browsy sort of mood. I spotted something, and I don’t remember exactly the moment I did, but they were eggplant cotton cordoroy short-alls, and I fell in love. They were paired with a tee, dotted with little matchy eggplant-colored flowers. We can sit here and mock all we’d like that I fell in love with EGGPLANT SHORT-ALLS, and trust me, there’s ample mocky material here, but it’s really not the point.
My mother pointed out that we’d done all the shopping already; she pointed out that the short-alls weren’t even school clothes, that I didn’t need them. And she – and this is important – gently said no. And I remember being nine or ten and accepting that, walking away, not throwing a tantrum like I might have done when I was younger. We were walking down the polished department store aisle, away from the eggplant short-alls I’d set my heart on (perhaps because they matched my glasses?) and my mom turned to me.
She asked me if I was sad about the short-alls. I nodded. She asked if I felt all achy inside, like my heart hurt, because I was so sad not to have them. I said yes. And then she said okay, if I wanted them so badly to be heart-achy, then I should have them.
And my mom turned us around with all our shopping bags and bought me one pair of eggplant short-alls I didn’t need, and I used them to distraction for about two years.
And aside from the fact that hey, I wore eggplant short-alls for TWO YEARS, the point here is that what my mother saw. Because she turned to me in a moment of quiet, a moment my tiny young brain was determined to overcome, and saw straight into me and understood that I might have been nine or ten and they might have been EGGPLANT FOR CHRISSAKES and I might have had more than enough clothes for that year, but I wanted them. And so she got them for me.
And that moment came back to me today, and I’m not sure why, but I realized it was something I needed to say to her for Mother’s Day, something I could give her and show her, because she’s in Greece and I haven’t got a wrapped parcel to give. I need to thank my mother for being the sort of mother that could understand that heart-achy feeling when you just need a piece of fashion and there’s no explaining it but you’ve got to have it. Maybe that wouldn’t make the perfect mother for everyone but it makes her absolutely and without the shadow of a doubt the perfect mother for me.
And perhaps this is something that someone out there is going to judge, because some of you are judgy, but a gift my mother has given me is style and the times she gave it to me were sometimes, in those teenaged years of teenaged anguish, when we went shopping. It didn’t matter how we clashed like the Titans over a million other things, my mother and I could always go shopping together and have an absolute riot of a time. We still can, the clashes having long faded away.
Thanks, Mom. For the eggplant short-alls you bought for me eighteen years ago to the three-inch patent black heels you bought me a month ago, when it comes to style and so many other things, you just know me better than I know myself and for that I love you. Happy Mother’s Day. Let’s go shopping when you get back.