Wedding Post III ~ A Fashionable Wife For My Mother, Maybe A Clean Shirt

As a third choice replacement wedding escort, Mom asked her best friend Kay along.  I told them they should tell people they’ve become lesbians, said I would inform anyone who asked that they’d had a commitment ceremony.  

The friend got very excited by the idea & began to toss her head around with a nervous giggle.  After all, she knows Mom’s exploits all the way back to grammar school, they rode the bus together.  I seriously should send that chick a thank you note & a gift for being the buffer of Velveeta cheese in our spoiled meat sandwich.

Kay would really make a great wife for my mother.  She brings along boxes & bags of food, plus multiple varieties of drink, wherever she goes.  Their hotel room was set up like a supermarket snack aisle. 

She also lets Mom cheat at Scrabble.  She says she does it because Mom gets so upset when she loses that it’s not worth winning.  (Kay is a far better woman, as I would accidentally stab my mother in the leg with a fork if it meant I could get a Q or a Z and completely kick her ass.) 

Kay also has much better fashion sense than Mom (circa 1974) & could possibly do something about Mom’s clothing & very flat hairstyle.  I could only wish.  I realize it sounds really ridiculous, but it bothers me that Mom has lost all interest in maintaining her appearance &/or hygiene.  Kay, on the other hand, is almost hot:

Mom’s stretch pants & unwashed hair bug me mostly cause she used to look like this:

. . . and like this (far right, with my aunt & father).  Check out those glasses:

Here she’s with her second husband, looking relatively spiffy:

And here with her dog (I’m guessing on amphetamines, from the wild look in her eyes):

 

I realize everyone gets old.  But they don’t all lose every aspect of who they used to be.  It’s just weird.  It scares me that I might wake up one day and decide to wear a stained blouse & scrimp on Suave shampoo.  There is a mother/daughter thing that leaves me feeling personally violated when I can detail the last few meals eaten by the woman who bore me by reading her shirt.

The woman who introduced me to the Dallas Neiman-Marcus now buys solely Wal-Mart brand.

The first item Mom pulled from her luggage & said she was wearing to the wedding was a sweatshirt purchased at an Illinois farm market.  It had embroidered safari animals across the breast area.  She would hide it during the ceremony under a decent looking three-quarter length jacket, then let it all hang out at the reception.  Perhaps she thought others would be jealous of her hidden little menagerie, her animal friends. 

My daughter asked me, “Mom, is she really wearing that horrible outfit?”  Remember, this is the girl who I occasionally find with chocolate smeared across her neck.  Her standards are not entirely unreasonable.

I did not even try to argue the issue, as it’s not the first time I’ve been embarrassed by such a thing.  It would be difficult to make a worse fashion choice than the time Mom wore the swimsuit top to my niece’s 8th grade graduation.  Even zebras and tigers at a wedding cannot match the humiliation of stretchy lycra in a school gym.

Yet she freely passes out fashion tips.  Just as she suggested I shop in the Men’s Department as a teenager, she recommended the same thing when I mentioned sizing issues for my daughter.  “Men’s Department!  That’s where Penny & I buy our jeans!”  I’d rather my daughter go naked and make her living on a pole.

I purposely wore slinky dresses, tight jeans & push-up bras all weekend with heels, to accentuate my 50-pound weight loss and make the situation worse.

  

Fuck it!  If we’re going to be uncomfortable, let’s go all the way.