It was a cold, wintery night and my mother showed up at my house to drop off some packages. As she stepped into the light, I noticed that she was wearing my sister’s old maternity coat, the one that I had put on in my last pregnancy, and my husband admonished me, saying “You’re gonna wear that out?” with such disdain, that I quickly stuffed it back in the closet and got a new coat. I sent it back to my sister, and somehow, before hitting the poor people of Africa, it made it into my mother’s closet.*
The coat was close to 10 years old, a deep army green, with a dead-squirrel looking trim around the flimsy hood. There was no stuffing left between the two layers of shiny polyester fabric, and I wondered if it would even keep a person warm. And yet, this is my mother’s current coat of choice, alternating with a variety of other coats from our high school years that were cool 15 years ago, and were left behind as we all moved out.
“Mom, you don’t have to dress like a homeless person,” I said, fingering the edge of the matted hood that felt remarkably like steel wool. “Why don’t you get a new coat?”
She looked at me with surprise. “But I love this coat! It’s so warm! Why would I get another one?”
I offered to buy her a new one, but she wrapped her arms around herself, as if she were hugging the coat defensively, protecting it from my purging ways, and stated that the coat made her very happy and she would be keeping it. I let it go, and accepted my vagabond mother as she was.
My mother has always done her own thing, dressed in her own comfortable way, and this is okay with me. As a teen, I wasn’t embarrassed because my friends thought she was funny and cool, even if I necessarily did not. She is separate from me and just because she wears Crocs and leg-warmers, does not mean that I have to. But apparently, I am also unstylish. “Are you wearing that to my orthodontist appointment?” my daughter asks me one morning. I look down at my sneakers and leggings, tucked under my skirt. And the running shirt that would be masked by my puffy down, non-maternity, coat. I was wearing exercise clothing, except the only real visible aspect of the ensemble would be the sneakers.
“Yes,” I said. “What’s wrong with this?” She rolled her eyes, as if I should know. But I didn’t. What was wrong with exercising? Or wearing sneakers out of the house? For some reason she did not appreciate this. “Lots of moms walk around in this all day, not just on their way to the gym,” I threw in. She looked defeated as I listed names of cool moms we knew that wore gym clothing to social gatherings, but she was still markedly upset.
I can’t believe that I had become the mother who dressed ugly so early on in life, and that I was an embarrassment, already! I don’t sing along to music, loudly, in public. I don’t try to hang out with her and her friends and have not yet made my own account on Musically, a social app that tweens use to share videos of themselves lip-synching and dancing, although I have threatened this (and maybe by the time this goes to press, I will have one). But yes, I do wear gym shoes out of the house sometimes. So that is my heinous crime.
A few days later, I was dropping off one of my kids late to school, and the child who is embarrassed by my style was walking by in the hallway with a friend. Her face lit up when she saw me, and then, her eyes slowly traveled down and hovered on my sneakers—because it was a gym day for me—and she grabbed her friend’s hand and disappeared down the school’s hallway, running as fast as she could in her own glittering sneakers. If I wore sparkly shoes, too, would that make it ok?
“You just don’t know anything about the world,” she tells me one evening, sighing at how far removed she imagines me to be. I lift up my hands and check to make sure I am not encased in a plastic bubble that separates me from reality. But there is nothing. Only a large gap in our vision, in our styles, the same familiar gap that haltingly resonates between my own mother and me. One I have to come to know, and even to embrace.
* My mother kindly granted me permission to include her in this article.
Sarah Abenaim is a freelance writer living in Teaneck. She can be reached at [email protected].
By Sarah Abenaim
