Cutoffs
Mia feels so cool in the cutoffs from Target that she’s been coveting for the past year. Last summer when she was ten, I said no. I’m not buying something that we can make out of old jeans. The part I didn’t say aloud was that they made me think of late nights at the county fair and bonfires at the beach. That the world might notice the frayed threads at her thigh, and what if clothes still speak even when we don’t think they should. What then.
But a single year brings changes. More time alone in her bedroom with the door closed, a quiet determination, and inches of growth that turn all of her long pants into capris. A newfound independence that convinces me to say yes more often than I did before. When we visit friends after a long absence, from afar they mistake her for me. I’m almost taller than Mommy, she says proudly. That’s a stretch, but not for long.
And going shopping with a tween can wear a person down. Once upon a time, I dumped hand-me-downs from paper bags directly into her dresser drawers. She didn’t care much how they looked as long as they fit. She was particularly fond of stretchy pants.
But now the seven pairs of nylon shorts I pull off the sale rack at REI are too horrid to consider. You need something comfortable enough to hike in, I say. Ones that will dry quickly if they get wet. I think about water balloons and somersaults on newly watered grass. Her eyebrows draw down and she makes a sound like a car’s undercarriage scraping over a speed bump. Or we can get nothing, and you can boil in your jeans all summer! I warn her. But I’m bluffing. I’m not a mother who can let her kid overheat – I’m one who wants her to stay hydrated and notices when she comes home from school with a still-full water bottle. Just try the green ones on for me, I say. By the time we get to Target, hours after we started our quest for shorts, I might almost say yes to sequined hot pants.
This is how they win. They grind you down like sandpaper.
Today she feels so cool that she tries to dodge her day camp’s rule about wearing only red shirts and pairs her new cutoffs with a dark burgundy top with graceful bell sleeves. I admit it is cute with the cutoffs, but it’s a far cry from being red. Don’t you have any clean red shirts? I ask. She complains, those other red shirts… one has the buttons and doesn’t feel comfortable, and the other one just looks funny, and…and… So I reach to the very back of my dresser and offer her the red cotton GAP t-shirt that I wore with my favorite cutoffs thirty years ago in college.
There’s an old photograph of me in that outfit with my parents on the back deck of their house. My mom’s black hair is styled like Princess Di’s, and her skin is smooth over her high cheekbones. My dad—three years gone now—is holding a coffee mug, and he looks like he’s about to get up from his chair to bang on something in the garage. That was the summer I felt my power. There was a night on a porch in Ann Arbor, a tall, pretty boy, and dizzying freedom. Seemingly everything within my grasp.
Mia switches out her burgundy shirt for my old red one, and in her cutoffs, with her dark hair just a little longer than mine was that summer, she could almost be me in the picture. It’s moving too fast, I think.
At the end of the day when I pick her up, she’s splattered black ink from her brush painting class on the shirt, which just goes to show that she’s still a little kid after all.
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