I haven't had a bad hair day in a long time, but one hit me this week five minutes before I was to walk out the door for Mass.
My husband poked his head in our room. "Aren't you going to church?"
"No! I feel like a HORSE!" Fwing! There went another skirt flying across the room.
He's a good man. He may have doubled over laughing when I finally left the house, but until then he kept a most seriously straight face.
"How could I be sick with the flu all week and lose ten pounds and nothing fits?" (Fwing! There went a pair of pants that would not button.) "But last week they all did! Tell me that, huh? How come they fit when I'm fat but not when I lose ten pounds?"
"That's the way it goes," my husband tried to console me.
"Well, I am NOT going." By then I was stalking around the room in nothing but my underwear and shoes. "I want to go. I want to be there. I just don't want to take my body with me. I don't even want to take my head. Look at these stupid bangs. You better get used to me not having any because I'm cutting them off!"
By then I had on a skirt that still reached the floor even with it pulled up to my bra. "Everything is either too big or too small!"
"What do you want me to say?!" My husband asked, like a panicked man before the firing squad. "If I say ‘stay home,' you want to go. If I say ‘go,' you…."
"I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR!"
All my clothes were screaming: Look at me! My face is bloated, my boobs sag, I have two tummies-one on top of the other-and no matter which way I look at myself in the mirror I see no womanly curves just some kind of blobby form that looks like a scoop of mashed potatoes plopped on a dish. Splat!
Worse, now I had to wrestle with the idea that I was going to miss Mass out of sheer vanity.
I dug a black sweater out of a laundry basket and put it on. Already my mood started to soften. There's something soothing about black. You can dress it up or down and no matter what it never screams at you. It barely whispers. But I can hear it. It says, "You look good."
I found a skirt to match and gave my husband a kiss on the top of his head before I happily stepped out of the house.
"You look very nice," he called after me.
"I know!"
