My Pathetic Complaining (you've been warned)

     It has finally happened.

     Yesterday, I went to the grocery store with my kids, who were all clean, dressed cute, etc, while I wore sweatpants, a hood-less sweatshirt with a logo from Husband's last job on it, my hair in a ponytail, and no makeup.  I am now that mom.  The one who has gained twenty pounds since her last baby and can't get rid of it, so she just wears sweatpants to cover the shame of being a fertile woman. 

     It got this distinct feeling leaving the house.  I just did not care, but I cared that I didn't care.  I didn't care what the people at Wal Mart thought of me gosh darn it!  All I wanted was to be comfortable because I was exhausted and I knew this trip to the store was going to make me even more exhausted.  A preschooler and a toddler, I have decided, are the worst ages for public outings.  The. Worst.  

     Sweat pants just seem like the natural mom-item of clothing.  Anything else that a mom wears is just foreign.  How do you wear skinny jeans when your toddler is screaming on the floor and you have to bend over, or get on your knees, or drag him while he kicks and screams at you?  How do you wear a low cut shirt when children naturally stick their hands in there and yank it down?  How do you wear jewelry or  do your hair, when everything gets pulled and tousled and ripped out?  No.  I have discovered some serious benefits to frumpy-ness.  Fashion, come find me on their eighteenth birthdays!

      It doesn't help that I am not a slight female to begin with.  I tower over you at 5'11'' and you know what?  They don't make clothes for a woman that tall.  They just don't.  That's my recent discovery.  They make clothes for real giants, who are 6'4''; that's what you find at the "tall woman" stores.  They also make clothes for average and petite people in just about every store in the universe.  But people who are 5'11'' are stuck in this weird middle ground where average people clothes are just ever so slightly off, and "tall woman" clothes are just a bit too big, and so nothing looks right on them ever, and Clint and Stacy from What Not To Wear say to go to the tailor's, and there's hardly money to buy the clothes themselves, much less get them tailored, and its just easier to wear men's sweatpants than go through all that trouble.

     My little petite friends take me shopping, sure that they can prove me wrong.  They'll find something that will fit me!  I grab a size that makes them practically faint with how large it is, try it on, and watch their faces contort as they see how ill-fitting it is.  Shirt dresses end up looking like regular shirts after a few washes, pants are either too short, or too wide, or too tight, or all three in all the wrong places.  The clothing section has disillusioned me in so many ways at this point in my life.  At least I have something to sustain me.