The great advantage kids have growing up in the age of digital cameras is that the odds are low that one day they will stumble on a collection of printed photos labeled “Quebec Summer: FAT PHASE.”
It’s photos like this I mostly wish were never taken of my awkward tween years.
Remember when you’d take your roll of film to the local drugstore and you would automatically get duplicates? So, not only did you have one set of photos you’d rather burn, you’d have 2… that’s 4 double chins. And while there was no social media circulation, you had the distinct non-advantage of having tangible proof that once upon a time you were the size of a blimp.
I stumbled upon the “Quebec Summer: FAT PHASE” envelope in the midst of some appliance-melt-down-induced cleaning. The photos, along with others from my more youthful summers, were striking reminders that when you grow up the chubby, knock-kneed girl, you grow up with an awkward relationship with shorts.
When your thighs touch, there’s almost no short length that doesn’t ride up when you walk. Instead of neatly aligned horizontal hemlines, the bottoms of your trunks form a wobbly V. It’s not only unattractive, it’s uncomfortable. Walking in bunched-up shorts is like walking with a golf ball wedged between your legs. So you learn to adapt.
First, you try the “Cowboy Walk.” The idea is to look like you just got off a horse after finishing a cattle drive. You point your feet away from each other and widen your stride, attempting to keep your legs as far from each other as you can.
It’s equal parts swagger and waddle. It’s also highly inefficient.
Next, you try the “Shake-it-Out.”
When you realize this is about as effective as the Cowboy Walk in ridding yourself of the ride up, you give into the walk, stop and pull down. It’s painfully obvious, but it gets the job done.
If you’re hell-bent on wearing shorts, these adaptations are better than the alternative, which is obsessing over something you can’t really change — the gap between your upper legs. Or, you can do the far more sensible thing and forego the shorts all together. Skirts are classier anyway.
The advantage to sharing a birthday with a loved one is that no one ever forgets it.
My father and I share a birthday. It’s also Canada day. My mother — a smart woman — has been milking this for years. What more does my father need, she says, when he has such a wonderful daughter!
This year, he turns 75. This is not insignificant. We’re having dinner at our favorite local restaurant and he’s getting some things from LL Bean and Nike. (I swear — if my mother and I didn’t give him clothes and shoes at every gift-giving holiday, the man would walk around wearing a sheet and flat-tire rubber sandals. We love him any way.)
Meanwhile, I’m hitting the big 2-9 — an unremarkable number save for the fact it marks the final year in another decade. I don’t plan to go through the same “29 Crisis” that some of my other single friends have — they upgraded apartments to ones they can’t afford, chopped off and died their hair, and got trainers. Every day, they post fitness selfies and “I’m an empowered single lady” quote on their social media feeds.
But perhaps, it’s too early to call for me. If on July 2nd, I post a photo of myself at the gym, in a sports bra flashing a “look how tight my ass is” pose, captioned with some motivational mumbo jumbo, you have permission to put me in a straight jacket (or at least, hand me a shirt.)
I digress…
A friend enjoys the magic at my 7th birthday party. 20+ years later, we’re still celebrating birthdays together.
As the child in the family, the celebration of my new year typically eclipsed my father’s. My birthday fetes were famous — at my 10 year high school reunion, girls I hadn’t seen since graduation day came up to me to say “I’ll never forget all your parties! You need to have another one, for old time’s sake.”
“I’m pretty sure that magician is dead,” I said.
For the first 14 years of my life, I took birthdays pretty seriously. Magicians, hot dog carts, excursions to the stables for horse-back riding, buses hired to the chauffeur us to the Jekyll & Hyde Club, virtual reality adventures, swing-dance lessons, fabulously fanciful cakes — there were distinct advantages to being an only child of older parents. Each year, I came up with a theme that felt au courant, researched the possible venue or vendor, and designed my own invitation. We always ended up at my God Mother’s pool and no one wanted to go home.
And then the parties stopped. I started fencing and National Championships always fell on the first week of July. Often I was competing on July 1 and all of a sudden, my father and I were in different cities on our birthday. This was strange.
I turned 21 in Atlanta. My Mother had been trying to get me to drink since I was a teenager — her theory was it was better to learn how to have a nice cocktail or glass of wine in a refined social setting rather than binge drink like a sorority girl. I was 16 when she sneaked me into a wine tasting in Napa. Ironically, when I ordered my first legal drink, a grey goose cosmopolitan (it was the heyday of the S&TC reruns on TBS, after all), she was painfully uneasy. I wasn’t allowed to finish it. A refill was out of the question.
When we finally got to celebrate at the Intrepid, we made the most of it.
My 24th birthday was the first one in about a decade when my father and I didn’t have to phone each other to say “happy day!” I had just come back from Texas where I had contracted a terrible case of Swine Flu. I was Tennessee’s first confirmed case and had to spend several hours on an IV drip.
That year was also my dad’s 70th, and my mother and I had big plans to make our celebrations about him. We intended to go to the Intrepid (he likes planes) and then have dinner at a South African wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen (Dad’s a Springbok.) Instead, we spent July 1 in the ER. Dad had gone in for what should have been a routine test a few days earlier, but ended up with a massive, deadly infection. Back to back trips to the hospital for us both was enough — we skipped this birthday. The Intrepid plans would wait for next year.
25, 26, and 27 each had their celebrations. One involved boats and friends. One was unremarkable. One came with terrible tan lines and an amorous bouquet.
I intended to celebrate 28 in this dress with lots of baked goods and Tanqueray… that is not how this went down
And then we come to #28… I bought a strapless mini dress — a style totally outside my normal wardrobe choices — and made plans to hit the town when I got back from Columbus, Ohio… Not. So. Fast.
I took a week off work to accompany Mom to Nationals — she’s the fencer now — and visit family in Canada. At the last minute, I made the less than wise decision to compete in a sub-elite division.
The competition was on my birthday and my primary goal was to finish early enough to get to happy hour. As I made my way up the elimination bracket, I could feel my age and old war wounds. At a 13-13 tie to go into the final, my knee gave out. The medical team diagnosed 2 torn ligaments and a sprained ankle on the strip and I was forced to withdraw.
A sprained ankle and damaged ligaments, but at least I was smiling. I wouldn’t be later. Happy 28!
For the next hour I lay at the medical tent, friends and teammates gathered — I was serenaded with a happy birthday while some referee friends tried to assemble my belongings for me. I was loaded into the car and my mother picked up two bottles of sake for me to drink (to numb the excruciating pain) as we drove 6 hours to Ann Arbor — our pit stop en route to rural Canada. My bellhop played football for Michigan and as I slurred my woeful story, we bonded over torn ACLs. He offered to carry me to my room. In retrospect, I was a fool to decline, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t showered yet.
Birthdays are a funny thing. When we’re young, we count the days till our next one. As we get older, we recoil at the thought of another and mostly want them to go unnoticed. And yet, we can’t help feeling slighted if they pass un-celebrated. We usually remember each one — where we were and who we were with — and use the day as an excuse to reaffirm or rewrite our New Year’s resolutions.
These days, my father and I have a simple rule when it comes to our birthdays — however we chose to celebrate them, no one is allowed to end up in the ER.
They say opposites attract… well, we were very attracted opposites
“I don’t understand why you’re still single,” Vince said to me after our first kiss.
I was undeniably smitten.
On paper, there was nothing about the two of us that suggested any kind of compatibility. I was the 25 year old Ivy-Leaguer, All-American athlete with a career in the arts and a passport with more stamps than pages to fit them. My motto was “you rest, you rust.” Vince was the 30-something former state-school frat boy whose sport was beer pong and whose great ambitions were to grow old, fat and retire to Florida.
Our common interests began and ended with the New York Yankees and a love of laughter. The former brought us together, while the latter seemed to inspire a closeness and familiarity with one another that was entirely unfamiliar, at least to me. It wasn’t love at first sight, and he didn’t have me at hello, yet from our first shared drink to our final kiss, every moment felt like a moment spent alongside a long-lost bosom buddy.
A few days after our third date, I got a text message that would simultaneously verify he was serious and mark the beginning of the end of our budding romance:
“I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, but when you have some time, give me a call. There’s something I want to tell you about myself because I like you so much.”
I panicked.
I knew I had counted my hens before they hatched. Sure he lived with his mother. And sure, he had an anxiety disorder that meant he had a fear of crowds, but he assured me a new prescription meant he’d be up for coming to an exhibition opening. So what was it that he had to tell me before we could go any further? A thousand possible scenarios ran through my head.
Maybe he wanted to warn me about how fragile his heart was. Maybe he thought he liked me more than I liked him and didn’t want to be disappointed.
Maybe he lived with his mother because he had just been released from prison, serving time because he had taken the fall for a fraternity brother who stole a keg from a gas station.
Worse! Maybe he was really a Red Sox fan.
In all the “maybes” I conjectured, it never occurred to me that Vince was a father.
“I wanted you know sooner rather than later so you have the chance to get out now, before I fall any harder.”
A bizarre mixture of relief, confusion, and attraction knocked the wind out of me and I paused to take it all in. I was 25. I had avoiding being in a serious relationship, and yet here I was, falling for an older man who came preloaded with a family. Could I handle that?
“Well?”
“Don’t think you’re going to get rid of me that easy.”
Vince’s son knew his dinosaurs from A to Z
With a chuckle, we both exhaled and he let the walls come down. He began to gush. He revealed that having a son forced him onto the straight and narrow, that his heart broke when the boy’s mother took him away to California, that every night he would read “Dinosaurs A to Z” to his son over skype, and that his adult life was as much shaped by the daily absence of his son as by being a father.
I was flattered by desire to let me in. I was touched by the tenderness and pride in his voice. Most of all, I was relieved he didn’t have a criminal record.
Children and I have a notoriously tenuous relationship. In theory, I want one, but not yet. But Vince’s suggestion that I meet his son had my mind wandering. The zoo, the dinosaur halls at the American Museum of Natural History – all of a sudden, I was planning family-style afternoon excursions and making mental notes to pack extra sunscreen so the little tyke wouldn’t get sunburned.
A few more dates happened. Sitting along the Hudson one unseasonably cold summer night, he told me his son was coming to visit him for a few weeks. When I got home, I went to my bookshelf and pulled off a beautifully illustrated fantasy book about worlds where men and dinosaurs co-existed. It had always looked funny next to all the Jane Austens and John Steinbecks. Vince and his Brontosaurus-loving son would appreciate it better. I wrapped the book in paper mottled with baseball caps and catcher’s mitts, stuck a flirtatious “I just can’t resist temptation ;)” card with it, and set the package aside for our next date — his birthday.
There was no next date.
Like so many before and so many will after, our relationship quietly evaporated until we officially ended with an apologetic/well-wishing set of emails. He had decided to be a father, and that meant picking up and moving west. Of course, I understood. I’m not sure we ever would have made it much further than we got, but it doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes wonder what he’s up to, and if his son still likes the Brontosaurus best.
What girl doesn’t want to be as cool as Annie Hall?
We all make bad decisions when it’s 1am and the lights are off… sometimes it’s putting on the wrong pair of jeans.
I’ve always been a fan of the Diane Keaton/Annie Hall androgyny look. Ties, blazers, tuxedos, wingtips — they may be built for boys, but sometimes us girls wear them better. Especially, when we remember to keep our feminine touch.
But as much as we girls love borrowing styles from our men, men love it when we make their clothes our own. As soon as the sleepovers began, my exes were all keen to designate one of their t-shirts as “Kitty’s shirt.”
The t-shirts are almost always gray and almost always too long and almost always washed in some over-scented detergent. One former flame also offered up a pair of what he called geisha pants, a gift his mother brought him from Japan. He was 6’4 but she had clearly forgotten that. On me, they were stylish lounge pants. On him, shorts. He kept the shirt and the pants on a “my-sized” “shelf” — the closet floor, on top of his extra towels.
I do not look as cool as Victoria Beckham when I wear boyfriend jeans.
While I’m always grateful for “Kitty’s” shirt because it means I can pack light, one thing I’ve never been comfortable borrowing from my boyfriend are his jeans.
To begin with, “boyfriend” cut jeans look ridiculous on me. I always envy those tall, slim women who can wear oversized denim and shapeless shirts in a way that looks effortlessly cool. Those same styles on my shorter, curvier (yet flat-chested) frame look like a hot mess.
Also, unless my boyfriend is an NFL linebacker with legs the size of sycamores, there is no guy who wears jeans I can borrow and look like I’m wearing “boyfriend” jeans.
See exhibit A:
Not only did an ex and I like the same inexpensive but well-cut classic line of Gap 1969s, we liked the same style and same wash: always skinny and dark indigo. His long, lean legs were an alluring part of his frame, even if both of his thighs together equaled the mass of one of mine. To put it mildly, his “always skinny” and my “always skinny” were not the same “always skinny.”
And this is why I don’t borrow his jeans… Epic Fail.
But at 1am, when it’s dark and you’re a drink or two in trying to get re-ready to go head back out, one pair of indigo washed 1969 jeans looks like any other pair of indigo washed 1969 jeans.
“I think these are yours,” he said tapping me on my shoulder.
I turned to look, my eyes wide in horror. My feminized skinny jeans were practically falling off him — there was enough room to fit three more of him inside the waist band. Meanwhile, I could barely squeeze my ankle into the opening of the pair I’d retrieved from the living room.
“They look better on you,” I said, trying to pretend I wasn’t embarrassed.
“Doubtful, but you know I always preferred them off you anyway.”
I gave him credit for a good save and made him swear to never talk about this again. I’m pretty sure the next time I stayed over I purposely wore a skirt. #confusionadverted
As long as he wears his, and I wear mine, they really are born to git.
Men should not only go to, but should be like gyms.
“Men should be like gyms,” a Park Avenue Power Lawyer, breast-cancer survivor and mother of 2 grown children advised me. “Conveniently located.”
This is a rather good criteria, and it’s true that of late, real estate has been a deciding factor in romantic endeavors. When I discovered the guy I started dating last summer had an apartment on the upper east side, a stone’s throw from the Met, a block from my favorite Italian market, across the street from my doctor, and directly above a restaurant with the best gnocchi on the planet, I was sold.
Mr. UES had a small handful of things going for him, but the location of his apartment — the fact it wasn’t in Brooklyn and came with the opportunity for a proper pied a tere in my most frequented neighborhood — persuaded me to ignore the inclining that this was a poor match and thus helped lock him in as my one and only.
It was sinkholes like this on the road to my ex’s apartment that killed my beloved car
As our relationship progressed into the winter, I made it a habit to bypass public transportation in favor of driving to his apartment. For the last 10 years, I’d been driving my first car. It was a compact SUV, invaluable in schlepping artwork around the Hudson Valley and I’m convinced it could drive my favorite routes through Manhattan by itself. I knew its time was limited, but it was a car built to last… and it would have, if it wasn’t for my ex-boyfriend, the Major Deegan and global warming.
If you were living anywhere in North America this winter, you’re well aware of the havoc the cold and snow inflicted on the roadways. The drive to his apartment was riddled with sinkholes, most of which were hidden by poor street lighting and other vehicles. The drive to Mr. UES’s apartment on snowy winter evenings bent the underbelly of my beloved FreeLander in half.
And then, in the coldest heart of winter, we broke up.
Not only did he refuse to buy me earrings for Christmas and never took a duster to his furniture, he broke my car.
With my 4-wheel companion for the last decade deemed irreparable, I started shopping for a replacement. It was time for an upgrade.
It was the day I settled on a Ranger Rover Evoque that I met the foreign athlete turned PhD engineer and agreed to dinner. A new car. A new boyfriend. It felt like upgrades all around. Needless to say, I got over the broken car and the broken heart in the time it took to sign the paperwork.
Transportation Upgrade Fail
Not. So. Fast.
2 weeks into my new car, and it was being towed out of the supermarket parking lot on a flatbed. A part was faulty. I couldn’t get it out of park. 2 weeks into life with a loaner car, and 4 weeks into our romance, Le Monsieur showed his true colours.
I was paying for a car I didn’t have and I had already ended two relationships before the end of the new year’s first quarter.
It seemed my upgrade came with a virus.
But luckily, viruses usually can be treated. Just in time for my 3rd month’s car payment, the dealer called to tell me the new part had arrived from the UK and was replaced. I could come pick-up the car whenever I was ready.
So now, a few months later than I planned, I have my new, twice upgraded car. It’s a silver Ranger Rover Evoque with black leather interior. It has a push start and heated steering wheel. The panorama roof comes standard. The soundtrack heavily featuring songs like “Diva” and “Bad Girls,” and “Fancy” is driver-supplied.
If you ask nicely, maybe I’ll take you for a ride sometime…
Clearly my new haircut and 90s childhood inspired my Mother the stylist
“You should wear that,” my mother said as she pointed to a model standing center floor in a 5th Avenue Department Store.
We had decided to spend a Sunday afternoon shopping for spring clothes together. I had one of idea of the type of wardrobe I wanted to cultivate this year. She clearly had another.
“THAT” was a crop top.
A crop top.
My mother, the woman who was constantly telling me that skirt was too short for a woman with legs the size of mine was advocating that I wear a shirt that barely covered my nipples.
“That’s not a shirt,” I told her. “That’s a collar.”
“I saw Kevin today,” she continued, ignoring my refusal to show off my upper abs as she pulled a shirt “my size” off the rack. “He’s gorgeous, of course, and almost done with Law School now. He doesn’t want to move in with that girl, which means it’s not serious. You should call him. Worse case, he’ll have some friends.”
It was a this point I tip-toed away to look at maxi-dresses. I’ll do backless, but I won’t do shrunken. I might be a child of the 90s (we thought crop tops were so cool), but I’ve grown up a bit. I was also not in the mood to discuss Kevin — if this was still the age of arranged marriages, our parents would have has us hitched a decade ago. Frankly, I don’t think this would have worked out badly for either of us.
When it was time to cash in on the fitting room, I noticed hidden in among the many silky floral printed blouses and high-waisted skirts of my choosing were more belly-baring numbers my mother deemed appropriate for the new season.
Was my mother recommending I start rocking this look on Saturday night!??!
“What are you trying to tell me, mom?” I said, handing her back the arm-full of short shirts.
“Well, you know some things to wear when you go out. Maybe it’s time to change things up a bit. Maybe a little less top-shelf and a little more sorority girl? Maybe it’s a less intimidating look. I mean, you go to the gym, don’t you?”
I secretly hoped she was flasking it.
“Take these out and try again.”
She came back with a stunning striped Equipment blouse that fell neatly below my hips.
“Just testing you!” she cried. “I wanted to make sure you hadn’t turned desperate on me.”
I wasn’t sure if I all the way believed she was punking me, but when the only thing I went home with was the blouse she found on the replay, I was willing to forget the whole crop-top incident ever happened.
This Equipment blouse made me willing to forget the whole crop-top incident ever happened.
They Told Me to Find a Rich Husband 