Parenting: FANCY UNDERWEAR
by Joyce Maynard
Originally published in
Domestic Affairs, Syndicated Column
6:00. I stumble in the door with 3 bags of groceries in my arms. In the
course of the last 12 hours, I've done 2 loads of laundry, written one
magazine article, planted sugar snap peas, cleaned out the dreaded crisper
drawer of my refrigerator, driven one little boy to his tap dancing class
and another to baseball practice. Picked up both boys. And bought groceries.
Now I have exactly ten minutes to get dinner prepared and on the table,
before we head out again, to my daughter's band concert.
She greets me at the door. Her voice is faintly reproachful, almost parental, and she has a mail-order catalogue in one hand, which she has evidently been perusing. But this time it is not her customary reading matter -- the J.Crew catalogue (whose merchandise she knows so well, that sometimes we'll be walking down the street and she'll say to me, " See that guy? He's wearing the J. Crew Rugby shirt on page 32. $44."). This time it's my own favorite catalogue my daughter has been studying: Victoria's Secret. From the look on her face, something's bothering her.
"MOM," she says sternly. "You just spent a $64 dollars on underwear."
The box had in fact arrived a week before, but until Audrey studied the catalogue, she hadn't realized the prices of my purchases. It wasn't even a very large box, either.
There was a time in my life, when -- confronted with the kind of disapproval my daughter was expressing to me -- I would have stammered nervously that really, everything I bought was on sale. There was a time in my life when I would have been defensive and apologetic about spending so much money on something like underwear . More accurately, there was a time in my life -- call it virtually every year since my daughter's birth -- when I never would have dreamed of spending sixty four dollars on fancy underwear in the first place.
I didn't win the megabucks. But I came to the realization recently that I couldn't afford not to take good care of myself much longer, without running up a different kind of cost. Buying nice underwear is something I do for myself. Same reason I also put on perfume, even if noone's around but me. Same reason I buy myself roses now and then, and go for a swim at the Y every morning, even if I have to leave the breakfast dishes sitting on the counter. Same reason I fix myself a wonderful salad -- instead of a bowl of cereal -- even if nobody's joining me for dinner. In the words of that L'Oreal commercial, "I'm worth it."
Maybe none of these activities I mention seems like particularly radical behavior to some people. But the fact is, there were whole years of my life when I was so busy meeting other people's needs I never would have done those things for myself. And the fact is a lot of women I know -- wonderful women, hard-working and endlessly self-sacrificing women, devoted to their husbands and families -- would never do such a thing for themselves as order flowered silk underwear. Not when one of their children wanted a new bike, or gymnastics lessons. Not when they had a perfectly serviceable drawerful of just slightly too-big old maternity pants.
Self-sacrifice is an inevitable aspect of parenthood, of course. If you want to have a child, you'd better be prepared to put that child first at all kinds of moments in your life. That's not neurotic behavior. That's reality.
And when you first become a parent, the concept of putting someone else's needs above your own may be hard to accept. I remember, in those early months after my daughter's birth, how badly I missed certain aspects of my old, free, childless days: going out to dinner. Sleeping late on a Sunday morning. Getting to work in the garden all day without interruption.
But then a strange thing happened. (And it happens to most of us, I think.) I got good at doing without certain things. So good that I actually lost the ability to recognize my own needs, let alone meet them.
I will always remember something my husband said to me one morning years ago, when I complained to him because he was going off on a long bike ride with friends, while I was left at home to care for the children.
"You still get time for yourself, to do what you'd like," I said to him accusingly. "And I never get any."
"If you had a morning like this to do whatever you chose," he said to me, "what would you do with it, anyway?"
I opened my mouth
to speak. I was so sure a hundred answers would pour out -- a list of
all the things I used to do for myself, before I had children, that I
had ceased to do in recent years. But no words came. The fact was, he
had a point there. It had been so long since I'd done what I wanted --
for me -- that I no longer even knew what that might be. I was a little
like a person facing bankruptcy -- with a stack of unpaid bills in front
of her. Suppose someone came along and handed her a hundred dollars. How
would she use it? Where would she ever begin?
When I finally did begin to re-learn doing things for myself, I started
small. I went for a cup of coffee and a croissant with a friend in the
middle of the day, at the bakery around the corner. I signed up for a
figure skating class. I ordered myself a set of bright purple underwear
from Victoria's Secret. (You have to be rich to wear a rich woman's jewelry,
or a rich woman's coat. But just about anyone can afford a rich woman's
bra.)
"What's the
point of getting underwear like that?" asked my son Willy, as I unpacked
my latest Victoria's Secret shipment. "Nobody's even going to see
it."
"The point is," I said, " that I'll see it. I'll know I'm
wearing it. I do it for me." There was a little more to my story
than that, perhaps. But the rest I saved for another day.
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