The Worst Thing To Happen

I attended my first dance on my fourteenth birthday. I arrived with my good friend Lindsay, hair painstakingly less frizzy, sporting my Doc Martens and best of all I was wearing my ultra luxe, long waisted, crushed velvet purple blouse. I was ready to drive some fourteen year old boys wild.

What cannot be overstated was that my shirt was long. It was long! 90's fashion was champion to the cropped and fitted shirt. Nothing was long then but the flannel shirt you tied around your waist over your cropped and fitted shorts. It was a confusing time. Add to that puberty where suddenly my body was spilling out in all sorts of places and you get why some coverage was so reassuring.

We were greeted at the door by a chaperone who informed us all shirts had to be tucked in. I was outraged. I didn't have a choice however and being of an obediant nature I went to the bathroom to tuck it in. My friend was sympathetic but she was a cute, skinny gymnast so what did she know? I looked in the mirror, my fears confirmed. I looked ridiculous. The length of my shirt scrunched up in a pouch at the front of my jeans. In a single tuck, I had gone from cool to "mom jeans".

I wasn't ready to give up yet, but after a half hour, then, yeah, I was. My friend got asked to dance song after song while I began the ageless tradition of trying to look cool standing alone against a carpeted wall.

After an hour my friend came bounding toward me, eager to share her discovery.

“Everyone thinks you're a chaperone.” She said brightly as another guy behind her worked up the nerve to ask her to dance. “That's why no one is asking you to dance. Because you look like a chaperone.”

I wish I could say this was the only time this sort of thing happened to me. It wasn't. A year later while as an understudy in the school play I joined the cast late in the season. My fellow cast mates thought I was a teacher's aid. I was a freshman. I didn't even have a tucked shirt to use as an excuse.

Of course it's not the worse thing to happen to me, not by a long shot. In fact, it's quite funny now but at the time it certainly felt like the worst thing that could happen. Now that I'm finally in the season of my life where I actually look the age I've always looked I find it interesting how wonderful my life actually is. Now it seems silly to me that I ever feared this time in my life. What's so wrong with looking like a thirty-something year old mom anyways, if it means that I have three healthy, wonderful children and am married to a fantastic husband? My life's pretty great. If looking the way I look is congruent with living the life I have then lucky me!

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