The other day, I found myself up at my mother’s house with only a brown cardigan and a brown pair of corduroy pants to wear.
“It’s a Brown Out!” my husband exclaimed, upon seeing me.
And he was right. I felt like a big brown blob casting a chocolate-hued shadow over everything in my wake. Or like Winnie-the-Pooh pretending to be a little black cloud, except just brown and completely without whimsical charm.
It hasn’t been the only fashion disaster of recent times, I must confess.
I was talking to some mothers at the kindergarten recently when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sunlight glinting off the seam running along my sleeve and I realised, with horror, that my shirt was inside out. And when I went to turn it the right way around, I realised that my fly was completely undone. And that I had just been parading the Inside-Out-Shirt/Open-Trouser Look about at our local shopping mall for at least an hour.
That might have been it for the day. Certainly I had filled my usual quota of fashion mistakes within a 24 hour period, but then I realised that T. McGee’s shoes were on the wrong feet and, when we picked up Mr Justice from school, he made this big point of saying “Why do you think my hands look so strange in my pockets?”. Turns out he had his trousers the wrong way round, which quite possibly serves him right for letting his mother dress him at aged 6.
Still, I might have taken all that on the chin, if it hadn’t been hot on the tails of the Bad Trousers Day the day before. And don’t pretend you don’t know what a Bad Trouser Day is. We all have them every now and again, thanks to the Bad Trousers themselves. Ooh, those naughty naughty ill-fitting trousers. I’d paddle their bottom, if my own wasn’t inside them.
I have one pair whose bad behaviour seems to be linked to how much fluid I’m retaining – which either could be enough to make me look 8 months pregnant, or as little to make me look, well, seven and a half months pregnant. And there is a difference – at least as far as my trousers are concerned. In the former case, they fit me Just Fine, Thank You Very Much. And in the latter… well, the trousers become more slippery than a post-bath Tiddles McGee trying to dodge a good toweling.
This particular day, I had already set off on the school run when it became apparent that a BTD was upon me and I that I’d have to hold up my trousers oh-so-very-casually with one hand, while pushing the Valco Mobile Home with the other. Which was manageable until I came to a corner and this man in a car came up behind me wanting to turn into the street I was about to cross. I stopped to wait for him to turn, but he waved me across. I then panicked because I knew I would have to push the pram with two hands to get it over the curb and that my trousers WOULD and in fact DID fall completely down, revealing my polka-dotted backside to the neighbourhood at large. And that male motorist, who had a ring-side seat, must have thought all of his Benny Hill or “Zapped”-inspired fantasies had come true. I would have shaken my fist at him and shouted “Pervert!” except, well, I had to pull my trousers up.
However, I should just add that it was lucky for all concerned that this incident didn’t coincide with a Bad Underpants Day or even just a Temperamental Elastic Day. If it had, that male motorist might have experienced a whole different type of “Brown Out” with a “ring-side” seat indeed.
You’ve got to love it when a good arse joke comes together.
Not Drowning, Mothering. 