Category Archives: I am really 90

"Wow, you’re way cooler than my mom!"

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One of the characteristics of a stay at home mom is the propensity to wear jeans on every occasion.  Ultimately, though, those jeans wear out and one may find oneself splitting a knee wide open on one’s cozy faded pair while kneeling on the hardwood, attempting to extract many Lego pieces from under the couch, with the dubious help of a five year old.  And so it was that I found myself in the store at which I have purchased most of my jeans, the store which some of you may remember of the “bad butt” fame.
Some of you may wonder why I would continue to patronize such a store, but I will remind you all that it is difficult to find a good fitting pair of jeans.  For me, either jeans have too much stretch and end up baggy and sagging by noon, or they have too little stretch and I can’t move.  Either they are so low cut I am constantly showing the world more than they probably want to see, or they are so high cut they pinch my, shall we say, loose skin from my childbearing years.  So the fact that I found jeans that not only fit well but are extremely comfortable completely negates the fact that I was commiserated with about my “bad butt”.  I am not that fragile; the salesgirls could probably have called me an ugly stupid whore and I still would have gone back to buy more jeans. 
As I entered the store a cute and perky salesgirl came to help me, and I answered her necessary questions as to size, colour preferences, and fit.  To the latter, I answered only that – recalling the Self Esteem Crisis of 2010 – I would try anything but skinny jeans.  She smiled and turned to choose a pair from the display, saying, “I think you’ll really like these.  My mom has a pair and she totally loves them!”
That was discouraging. 
I told myself that maybe her mom was really hip and cool, but ultimately I know the truth.  I remember, years ago, having coffee with a girlfriend from prenatal class.  Our firstborns were still infants then, and we had noticed the appearance of skinny jeans in our favourite stores.  My girlfriend expressed concern that in a few years perhaps skinny jeans would be the only choice at such places, and said, “If that happens, what are we going to do?  I don’t want to start shopping at Tan Jay.”  We laughed, images of us pushing strollers wearing matching burgundy velour tracksuits or high waisted beige slacks going through our heads.  It seems less funny now.
Well, at least I’m not wearing these:
Image from NBC.
Addendum: I did find a great pair of jeans, but they weren’t the recommended Mom pair.  So, win?  Also, I was informed by my cute perky salesgirl that with the purchase of my jeans I could get a top at half price.  I looked at the various selection and thought maybe the “Justin’s Girl” and “I Heart Vampires” tops were not quite appropriate, so I passed.

Stripping! (my varicose veins) Boom chicka wah wah.

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When I was pregnant with Jake I started to develop varicose veins.  My calves are full of what I would call normal-looking varicose veins, puffy and purple.  My left leg, however, looks like a miniature boa constrictor somehow found its way under my skin and is attempting to suffocate my knee and thigh.  It’s not attractive.
For someone with my heightened sense of vanity, you would think that these veins would bother me from a cosmetic point of view, but they don’t.  I live in a city where 97% of the time I am perfectly comfortable wearing jeans, and for the other 3% of the time – or if I’m vacationing somewhere warm – I am comfortable in Capri pants.  I wear skirts only in the winter, when I can pair them with tights and boots.  The only time my legs are ever exposed in public is while swimming or at the beach, and I have found that the way to distract people from looking at the train wreck which is my leg is by wearing a bikini and showing a lot of cleavage. 
So I could happily go on living with my varicose veins if they weren’t so painful, if my leg didn’t feel like someone had run over it with a truck at the end of the day, which is how I found myself for a consult with a vein surgeon yesterday afternoon.
People, nothing keeps you humble like standing on a platform, wearing only your panties, under fluorescent lighting under the scrutiny of a medical professional.  I had always thought my vein was kind of ugly in a unique sort of way, and that viewpoint was solidified by the surgeon’s response, “Wow, that IS bad.  This is really rare.  I’ve never seen a case like this in someone so young.”
I took some consolation in being referred to as “young”, but then I felt kind of an appalled sort of reverence for my vein, like I was watching myself star in a reality show about freaks of nature, especially when the surgeon told me that veins like mine are normally seen on women in their 70s.  Way to go, veins!  You’re overachievers!  You’re not content with being just regular varicose veins; you are striving to be number one!  Hooray!
The long and the short of it is I have to have surgery, which I am coming to accept, although last night I clearly lost my mind and started googling “varicose vein stripping” and then found myself spiraling into despair.  I also found myself becoming an insane control freak, flipping through my calendar and fretting if the surgery will be on parent-teacher interviews and if so WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?  Today I’ve regained perspective, and I’m trying to look on the bright side: no more pain, better yoga practice, the ability to wear skirts in the summer. 
I’ll probably still show lots of cleavage at the beach.  After all, I’ll want to distract from my cellulite!

Makeup, Wine, and Say Anything

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I live in a neighbourhood with a lot of senior citizens, so I’m pretty used to opening my mailbox to find flyers from McInnis and Holloway about planning my own funeral so that things will go just the way I imagine.  Not that I imagine my funeral much, but it’s nice to know that the funeral people are so accommodating. 
These flyers unnerve me a bit, but on Thursday I opened my mail to find something much more disturbing: an envelope addressed specifically to me, containing a subscription card to a magazine catering and celebrating “older women.”  Ahem.  I have a feeling this has something to do with my recently purchased subscription to Chatelaine, which confirms my status as a suburban Canadian mom.  I’m reading the recipes and beauty hints, people.  I actually considered making red velvet cupcakes with beets – a superfood! – but then remembered that cupcakes are sacred and that vegetables should not be pureed into them.  Especially beets.
But back to celebrating older women.  I like older women.  I think that there are few things more beautiful than a face with smile lines and happy wrinkles.  I truly think that inner beauty starts to show externally as we age.  However, I don’t consider myself an older woman just yet.  Give me a few years, magazine people!

I have been feeling fairly youthful this week – despite a conversation with some friends with regards to fruitily-scented makeup phenomenons of our early years.  Does anyone remember Kissing Potion?  Ah, you couldn’t really say you had arrived until you smeared your lips with that gooey, chemical strawberry-flavoured liquid.  It’s been probably twenty-five years since my Kissing Potion days, although I have remained a lipgloss and lipstick junkie to this day. 

Are you a makeup person?  I most definitely am.  I am such a makeup person that I’m surprised that not everyone else is.  One of my good friends, who is lovely, almost never wears makeup and I was shocked to discover this.  I just assumed, because she is so pretty, that she wore makeup, but on close examination and questioning, I discovered she doesn’t.  Then I discovered that many, many women, whose lovely faces I admire, never wear makeup!  It was honestly a shocking discovery.  Before you think that I am being crazy and vain and obviously my own insecurities are driving my makeup addiction, let me tell you what happened the one time I showed up at school drop-off makeup free and with my hair in a ponytail.  Five – FIVE – people came up to me and asked if I was okay.  Wow, you look tired today!  That’s something no woman wants to hear.

But there is a reason I’m feeling youthful, and if you know me at all, you may be shocked to learn that I have given up drinking wine on weekdays.  I know!  I’m saving all my love, for yooouuuu, and by you I mean the weekend, and by love, I mean wine.  I have to say, I had a lot more energy this week and I’m attributing it to that.  My husband suggested that I drink a week’s worth of wine in one night and then live-blog.  Despite the entertainment value that such a scheme would possess, I just don’t think I’m up to drinking eight glasses in one sitting. 

Apropos of nothing, “Saving All My Love For You” has reminded me of that great Whitney classic “Greatest Love of All.”  One of my favourite movie moments ever: in Say Anything, the graduation scene where the guy is singing that song?  “They can’t take away MY DIGNITY.”  Alas, my dignity was gone with this post when I brought up Kissing Potion.

*EDITED TO ADD*
I was just voted Site of the Week over at Canadian Moms!  I’m so excited!  Thanks, everyone over at that fabulous site!  Love you guys!

I Don’t Have Bieber Fever

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This week saw the culmination of all my book fair coordination efforts.  I have been living and breathing the book fair.  My life has been consumed by the book fair.  I was even, unbelievably, dreaming about the book fair.  Now the book fair is over and I feel empty inside.
Actually I just feel exhausted.  I’m used to my life of leisure, and this week took a surprising amount of effort.  I would like to give a shout-out to working mothers everywhere, because this simple week of volunteer work left me exhausted and overwhelmed by such things as the laundry and making dinner. 
Nonetheless I very much enjoyed it, not the least because I feel like a minor celebrity, known around the school as “The Book Fair Lady”, as opposed to my previous title of “Mark/Jake’s Mom”.  When I walk down the hall I get students excitedly waving to me and bombarding me with questions about the availability or otherwise of the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and if we have any of those UV Light Pens left.  Those crappy pens became the bane of my existence.  Kids kept coming back with defective pens and buyer’s remorse.  
Adding to my feeling of general fatigue is the fact that it is bitterly cold and snowing, and getting the boys to get their gigantic layers of snow pants, winter coats, hats, neck warmers, mittens and boots on in a semi-timely fashion and getting out the door several times a day is tiring.  My kids come home for their fifty-five minute lunch hour, and the scramble to get them home, fed, and back is seriously trying what is left of my sanity.  Given that Mark takes a solid ten minutes to actually get out of his classroom with his many, many layers on, by the time we get home and peel off the layers they have approximately ten minutes to eat before starting the whole process over again.  It’s enough to make me eye the bottle of wine on the counter longingly.  (NOTE: I only eye the bottle.  I am a very responsible, non-drinking-before-bedtime kind of mother.  Don’t want to give the wrong impression here.)
Speaking of trying my sanity, the book fair was stocked with piles of books about Justin Bieber, posters of Justin Bieber, and even stickers proclaiming “I have Bieber Fever” and “I am Justin Bieber’s Favourite Girl”.  Frankly, I don’t get the appeal.  When I was the age of the girls who were excitedly pawing through the various Bieber merchandise, my pretend boyfriend was this guy:
I can still rock out to his music.  Justin Bieber, on the other hand…
I don’t like to be negative, but seriously?  What is with his HAIR?  Hoo boy, I just realized that made me sound like my father.  It’s not enough that I’ve inherited his prematurely grey hair, now I’m critiquing tween pop culture?  Sigh.

Travelled down that road and back again

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So I’ve been feeling blue and gloomy and then I realized this morning that in four weeks the kids are back at school, and a cursory glance at their dressers indicates that every single pair of pants they own have no knees. I’m not saying they have small rips, either, I mean that when they are kneeling on the ground large amounts of their legs are exposed. So I took my blue and gloomy self to the mall today, where I was immediately faced with the Gap, advertising – girls of the 80’s, are you ready for this? – jeans with zippered ankles. Zippered ankles! I stood and stared until it got weird, then I snapped out of my reverie to notice the mall was filled with young girls, all wearing jeans tight at the ankles with big, blousy tops and pointy-toed flats. What’s next? Acid wash denim? Bubble skirts? Going through a can of Salon Selectives hairspray every week to obtain rock hard four inch vertical bangs? Because I honestly don’t think the environment can withstand that kind of abuse.

If that wasn’t enough, I walked past the Apple store and the hundreds of people waiting for the new iPhone. There’s a new iPhone? My cell phone doesn’t even have voice mail. I feel like maybe tomorrow I would be shuffling around with a walker, wearing turquoise slacks and a floral blouse, with matching plastic jewellery and a gigantic purse containing a change purse and a roll of Scotch mints.

Then – I know! There’s more! – I walked by American Apparel and it reminded me of this article about the company’s sketchy hiring practices and the ensuing boycotts. Of course, that affects me not at all since American Apparel is not one of the two stores that I actually purchase clothing from, given my great dislike for going into different stores with different sizing methods and different clothing qualities.

When I was in university, I waitressed at a chain restaurant that had similar hiring practices. If a person was to drop off a job application, one was supposed to put a mark on it indicating that person’s “bar appeal”. If that person sat next to you in a bar, my manager explained to me, would you start up a conversation? If not, perhaps there was a position for that person in the kitchen. American Apparel’s hiring practices are not exactly unique, but they are distasteful. In a weird way, it made me think of that Seinfeld episode where George hires a secretary, passing up all the gorgeous, sexy women for the plain and hyper-organized and efficient one. Then – of course – he becomes insanely attracted to her efficacy on the job and they end up having an affair. The point, I guess, is that one should not judge a book by its cover? Or maybe that being a Type A is really really hot? I don’t even know what my point is, except that in writing this, I’m not so blue and gloomy. Even though I feel a bit like I’m one step away from getting a once-a-week hairdo at the local beauty parlour and finding a secondary use for bread bags.

Me, I want a hula hoop

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So here’s the thing: if you are trying to cut back on unnecessary consumption, and you decide on the third rainy, dreary day in a row to run to the mall to pick up some Father’s Day cards and also some teacher appreciation gifts, do NOT under any circumstances just “pop in” to Lululemon to “just look” because that “just looking” will lead to finding Tiffany blue yoga pants, and purchasing another pair of yoga pants is completely frivolous and unnecessary, but oh, look, they are TIFFANY BLUE and there is also a MATCHING HEADBAND and you have a yoga weekend workshop coming up in two days and aren’t they pretty? The next thing you know you will be leaving the mall with a bag full of cards, gift certificates, chocolate shaped apples, and a completely unnecessary yoga outfit, because you will inevitably find a top that goes with those pants, even though you were “just looking”.

Sigh.

Speaking of unnecessary consumption, the other day I was running errands and found myself at Wal-Mart. I know what you’re thinking: Wal-Mart, with its predatory pricing and suspicious business ethics and labour policies, but honestly, it’s a great place to stock up on shampoo and Kleenex. It’s also, apparently, a great place to buy hula hoops.

I may not be able to run very fast, and I may scream with terror and duck whenever a ball is thrown in my direction, and I cannot and have never been able to turn a cartwheel, but hoo boy, can I hula hoop. I can keep that baby going for a long time, and I can even do my childhood trick of starting the hoop at my waist,

keep it going on my knees,


and then skipping with it on my ankle.


The trouble with this youthful behaviour is that spinning a hula hoop on your legs and knees, when you have massive, bulging varicose veins leads to massive, purple bruises all over said veins. It’s just as attractive as it sounds. Sigh.

Oh, Blanche

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Rue McClanahan died! I always secretly thought that I would be like a non-slutty Blanche Devereaux when I am old: reeking of Chanel Number 5, making suggestive jokes in response to normal conversation, wearing support stockings and bright lipstick.

Query: have I already turned into a non-slutty Blanche Devereaux? I thought I had a few more years. In any case I’m not wearing bright, loose fitting but cleavage revealing tops, and I shall NEVER wear stockings with open toed shoes.

I don’t know what this says about me, but I loved the Golden Girls. I’m not sure what about four seniors living in Florida appealed to ten-year-old me, but I sure did love it. If it was on right now, I would probably watch it, if it were not for the inevitable ridiculing I would endure from my husband.

I have much, much more to say about many topics – not just my childhood conviction that I would be Blanche Devereaux – but I have been unable to write anything this week, given that I have been busy, busy, busy. Doing what, you may ask. In addition to the Scholastic Book Fair that I have been helping to run, there has been soccer, and my nemesis, soccer scheduling, and I need to leave the house in fifteen minutes for a kindergarten orientation, at which I am supposed to welcome the parents and remind them, ridiculously, not to jaywalk, but to use the crosswalks safely. Jaywalking – and parking illegally – is actually a significant problem at our school, one which leads to heated discussions and calls to bylaw officers and, once, an irate garbageman whose truck was blocked by all the illegal parkers. Is anyone still reading this?

* sound of crickets chirping *

Now I’m going to go put on some bright lipstick and Chanel Number 5 and head out!