“Oh, no!” I groaned.
“Don’t worry, Heidi thought it was hilarious. She’s not worried about David. She was glad her mother-in-law finally made that comment so David could hear it. She’s suspected that her mother-in-law didn’t think Heidi was good enough. David was the one who was mad.”
“Oh, no,” I sighed.
“Don’t feel bad. If I looked like that,” she said looking at my breasts, “I’d wear a cami too!”
“Oh, no,” I moaned. This was not at all what I had intended or expected. My daughter would have been gloating, “I told you so” had she been at the store with me. What was I thinking? A shirt. Cool. Simple. Perfect for mowing.
A few days later my neighbor had her playgroup friends over and she yelled over the fence, “I want to thank you for wearing that shirt! I need to tell you….”
I cut her off and assured her that her friend had told me at the grocery store. This brought great laughter to all the women. Obviously these much younger mothers had already heard the story.
That afternoon I piled my camis, most never worn, and put them on my daughter’s bed. “They’re yours.”
“You think they’ll fit me?”
“Well, you can wear them under a shirt.”
Ania snagged them before I changed my mind and I told her the grocery store story, and she laughed at my misery, and then said, “I told you not to wear it!”
Oddly enough, Heidi, who is a large woman, started living in camis, and my daughter finally noticed and ran into the house and said, “Did you see Heidi’s shirt? You can see everything! Everything!” she repeated for emphasis.
“I know.”’
“It’s all your fault!”
“It is not. She probably thought they were comfortable.”
“She probably thought David was looking at you,” Ania snarled.
“Trust me, I’m much older than them, and it never crosses his mind.” Why did I fess up to the grocery store story?
“Then why would his mother say that about you?” She said you in that way that I imagined people snarled you to harlots.
My gorgeous fourteen-year-old daughter, who wears tiny shorts and camis, and seems oblivious to all the heads turning when we walk the dogs, is definitely the person the cami designers have in mind when they make these shirts, not us sagging middle-aged women who leave that rather disturbing squashed up, pathetic image. How life has changed.
When Ania was two and I was thirty-five, we flew to Wyoming to visit an old lover. I had first met this man when I was nineteen. Not only was I a mother now, but also three years had passed since we had last seen each other. Flying over the Tetons, I had grave concerns that I may be making a mistake. This lover was truly a lothario, or as they say today a player. It must have been a weak moment, a moment of hope, but for some reason I thought we may be in the same league.
Seeing me with a child was not what he had expected. The first night while we were in bed, he looked at my naked body and reported, "You have stretch marks on your back!"
Not only had I never seen those marks, which admittedly they'd be hard to notice since they were supposedly on my back, but I can remember asking close friends in moments of extreme vanity if they had noticed any stretch marks. Shirt lifted, eyes scanning, they'd say, "Not a one." It's possible that my friends were just being kind or had weaker eyes. Lovers are notorious for recognizing flaws. Now that Ania is a teen, she also has that keen eye.
I told the old lover he was crazy. Still, he insisted the stretch marks were there. Watching me bend my head to check for myself, he laughed smugly at my vanity. At that moment, I seriously doubted if I'd ever wear a two-piece swimsuit again.
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