The weather as of late has me flailing a little bit. It was as if last week it was springtime and then it was quickly snatched away from us with the time change. We took one step forward and then two steps back.
I write about television and books because find that relate a lot to characters that I read about. The darker and cooler weather this week has had me living in my head a lot.
Perhaps I am being overly dramatic, but this week I feel like Daenerys Targaryen in the House of the Undying. Much like Dani in the House of the Undying, I feel like no matter what I think or reason, I am having trouble getting out of my own head. Maybe you could also say that I am like Alice, from Alice in Wonderland falling down a rabbit hole.
What am a spinning my wheels about? Who know? Everything, nothing. The present, the future. Big things and little things.
For starters, I am thinking about the same things that I worried about when I was a teenager, my appearance and how to connect to others.
About two weeks ago I started an Instagram account called @If Not Shopping Then What. It is an attempt to try to give myself credit for activities I do outside of shopping at Target and Wegmans, which are things I like to do to blow off stream while my oldest son is at preschool.
Since then, I have expanded my project a little bit. I have not only been trying to shop less, but I have also been encouraging myself to use things in my house and that belong to me that don’t get much use. I have been putting on necklaces a little more often. (Not too often though because Toddler Nugget still pulls off that sort of thing).
I have been using face lotions that I already own at night. I have been putting on my Jergens Natural Glow self-tanning skin lotion that I bought a few years ago, which is something that I love to do in February and March because it makes me feel like I am getting a jump start on getting tan. I have been putting on perfume sometimes and in general using any products I find on my dresser and in the bathroom that seem to fit a purpose. So many products, so little time.
Most noteworthy though, I have been wearing eye makeup daily. This is very unlike me. Until recently, for the most part I saved makeup for special occasions. I don’t know what I was saving it for but now it is mascara, eye shadow, and lip gloss every day.
The makeup thing started because I have been wearing my contact lenses much more often now that I usually am wearing a mask at some point every day. I hate fogged up glasses. My contacts and my makeup are stored near each other in the bathroom, so I figure, why not? It only takes another minute to do. The boys are pounding on the door already, saying Mommy, what are you doing? I might as well dazzle them.
I used to work at Wegmans cheese shop and terminology for doing anything beyond simply displaying the cheese in its original packaging is called “value adding”. This included cutting the cheese down to size and repackaging it, shredding it, and mixing it into dips and spreads. Sometimes when I worked there, it seemed like I spent entire shifts taking the cheese out of its plastic wrap and checking it to make sure it was still fresh and rewrapping it. Even doing that was considered “value adding” and I know that I felt good about adding value. It sounds good. Try it yourself in your daily life. Do a life task like folding your laundry and tell yourself that you are adding value to your clothes. It kind of works. You feel good about what you just did. You might believe that you are adding value to your clothes, mark my words.
Right now, I consider what I am doing to my normal appearance with the addition of the makeup, perfume, and tanning moisturizing, “value adding” to Katie. When I think about this “value adding” I think about it in quotation marks too because like the cheese in the cheese shop, I am not sure whether this primping is adding value or not but truthfully it feels good to say it.
Also thinking about “adding value” makes me feel good because I am using things that I already own. I feel good that my previous acquisitions, be it because someone gave it to me as a gift or I bought the products, are being used.
One more thing though about the products and primping: I think some people respond to me more positively when I am more put together.
And that is where I start to spin in circles a bit. Not big circles but little circles. I ask myself, “Who am I doing this for?” At first, I was doing it for me because it was fun. Now I am just doing it because it is something to do these days.
I have always had an uneasy relationship with makeup and jewelry and looking “feminine”. I read a lot of teenage girl fashion magazines starting around the age 10 and in retrospect, those might not have been the best for my psyche. I started believing very early on that I needed to change myself to fit some sort of ideal. I know now that was the premise of teenage girl magazines. Girls
Over the summers before the school year started, I would try out makeup tips and digest the advice about how to get boys to like you and be popular. I was always very shy though and I would wear my best outfits and makeup for possibly the first few days of school and then I would retreat to my normal, un-made-up t-shirt and jeans look.
In college, for the most part I wasn’t dressing to impress either. I wasn’t trying to impress my professors, friends, or potential suitors. I always looked young for my age and dressing very casually didn’t help people take me any more seriously. At the beginning of my junior year of college, I recall attending a party in pajama pants and visiting a college professor during office hours because I was trying to “rebel against the system that assigns value to people based on their looks”. When I think back on those days, I cringe that I went to an afternoon class in pajama pants and went to see a professor for help dressed link that like that.
I took a little time off from college after that year and by the time I graduated from college, two years later, I was dressing and grooming normally and at age 22 I looked like I belonged in college and it felt like progress. I felt more at peace with myself.
My relationship with how I dress and present myself has always been kind of fraught though. I have always struggled with what feels like unreasonable expectations about female beauty and grooming. I don’t really like to the fuss of wearing jewelry because I think that it gets in the way of going the activities that I want to do, and I don’t want to dress in a way that impedes my activities. Yet, I am sensitive to how people treat me based on how I look, and I do perceive that some people judge me for not dressing overly feminine.
Sometimes I assume that people don’t talk to me at the park or school drop off because I am not dressed like them. When I was a single woman and I got dumped, I sometimes assumed that it was based on my appearance and that if I looked different somehow that won’t have happened.
You would think that now that I am in my 40’s and I have my own family that I might have grown out of this thinking, but I still think about it when I am dropping my sons off at school or when I am with them at the playground, but I don’t. I am a little bit older than some of the other mothers and I don’t feel like I fit into some of the mom cliques.
But more likely, I think being popular and having friends is more based on confidence and sociability than appearance. I am learning this all the time by watching my five-year-old son. That boy doesn’t seem to let anything get him down. He chats easily with all kinds of people. He also doesn’t take rejection hard. If someone doesn’t want to play with him, he just moves on to his next potential friend.
Last week I witnessed him pick-up a nine- or ten-year-old girl at at playground. All he had to say was to her was “Will you play with me?” and she said “well, I’m playing with my little sister.” He replied, “Well, she can play with us too.” That was it. He was in with that family. It turned out that there were other siblings too and he played with them for the next two hours. When we left the playground he said, “I want to wave at my friends in their car and tell them that I am leaving.” So, we waved, and I asked him what his friends names where, and he said that he didn’t know, and I knew that it didn’t matter to him. He could be their friends and not know their names.
I don’t know how to be that forward. I don’t usually go up to moms in the school pickup line and just start talking to them. At five-years-old, he is already more socially adept than I am at 41. Yesterday, I had a pleasant conversation with the mother of one of his classmates because Patrick went up to the mother and the son to thank them for the Mario toy that came in the birthday surprise bag that the boy brought in for the class last week. I learned that her name was Lauren and that her husband is from the same area that I am from. I would never have had that depth of conversation had it not been for Patrick. This mother and I have been standing in the same line for two years now and we’ve never talked but Patrick got us talking.
He shall be my teacher. He will show me the way to converse with strangers. Ask and ye shall receive. I’ve been looking for a social guru all my life and now I have one.
I don’t know about wearing make-up in post pandemic days, but I do know that I can continue to take cues from my son on how to socialize. I guess it was a pretty “value adding” proposition to have children!
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