I hate malls.
I also hate the stores in malls that have surfboards dangling precariously from the ceiling over unsuspecting, teenage patrons who, in fact, do not surf. It also smells like spilled toilet bowl cleaner and is much too loud.
Dressing rooms feel like closeted trauma triggers. There are too many mirrors. Too many sizes. Too many that don’t fit me right now.
But I happen to have a pre-teen who loves it here. The mall. The store with the ironic surfboards. And I am desparately trying to not allow my own hangups to interfere with how she views her own body and engages with clothes.
And so, I am in the dreaded, dressing room waiting for her to try on a few things and attempting to be positive and present while circle breathing in the corner of other, non-surfer cast-offs.
“Excuse me?”
I looked up and saw a girl exit the dressing room next to my daughter’s. She was in her late teens, early twenties. Stunning, and with a kind smile she asked if I wouldn’t mind telling her whether or not the jeans she was trying on were too short.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am really not the one to be asking fashion questions, but she looked so earnest and sweet and I really wanted to rise to the challenge.
I told that they were adorable, but perhaps too short if she wanted to wear them now, in winter in New Jersey, unless she had boots in mind.
She thanked me and said that’s what she was thinking as well, before disappearing back behind her dressing room door.
I directed my attention back to my own kid, navigating her own pant-situation.
"What do you think about the jeans?” I asked tentatively through the door.
“I really like them, but I think my legs are too short.”
“Your legs aren’t too short,” I replied, “It’s never your body that’s wrong, it’s always the clothes. If you love the jeans, we can just have them hemmed on the bottom.”
I waited patiently as she made up her mind and I retreated back to the cast-off corner.
Girl with the too-short-pants problem emerged, sans the too-short pants and gave a friendly wave in thanks before turning to exit the room. But it seemed like something was on her mind because she spun on her heel and walked back over to me. Bending down to meet my eye like one does a child, she blurted out,
“You’re a good Mom.”
It caught me off guard. I mean, any decent person would have told her the pants were too short.
“That thing you said to your daughter? I heard you. That it’s never your body that’s wrong and that it’s always the clothes? I needed to hear that. I wish someone said that to me a long time ago. I’m going to say it from now on,” and then, embarrassed, she walked as quickly as humanly possible out of the swinging surfboard doors.
Parenting your children in places where you harbor some of your deepest hurts is a wild, wild thing. You get to frame things and shape language differently for them- and as you do so, you’re able to do the same for yourself.
It’ll take some time for me to break the narratives I’ve carried- You don’t work hard enough. You don’t contribute enough. You’re not good enough. Your approach/decisions/choices are wrong. You are wrong. Your body is wrong.
But something broke free a little tonight.
I want to be a good Mom.
But I also want to be good tomy own body that has carried me through so much from childbirth to illness to deep trauma to pain, through swinging surfboard doors.