If you follow me on Insta, you know that I participated in something called #memademay this year. This is an optional motivational tool and fun adventure for sewists who make their own clothes to wear what they’ve made and feature it on social media.
I don’t think most of my friends sew, so while I hope they didn’t get sick of seeing my face in May, there was also the bigger thing of maybe no one caring that I make my own clothes. And the sticky issue of who, exactly, our social media accounts are for.
Us?
Our friends?
Attention for us, from our friends?
*cringe*
Where do you shop for clothes? How often do you shop? Is it medicinal, or is because you have an identifiable need? Do you shop ethically?
I’m a medicinal shopper. I’ve historically been pretty good at making it seem at least part of the time like it’s an identifiable need, but usually, it’s just because I’m stressed out and looking for a way to control my environment.
As a lady in my Late Thirties, I’ve become a bit of a snob with my shopping. I don’t remember how I discovered Anthropologie, but their quirky, European-inspired, artsy offerings appealed to me immediately. I had realized the cheaply made, fleeting styles of third party sellers on Amazon were often disappointing.
I started with Anthropologie’s hand towels. On sale, they are often around $10-14. Which is pretty expensive for a kitchen towel, but these aren’t your average kitchen towel.
We fall asleep reading the classics at our house. Why this matters may make more sense if you keep reading.
I’m in a little tussle with my school district right now.
The way it stands, I provided the same end-of-year information in 2018 to my school district as I did the year before, and this time, they said it wasn’t enough.
Recently I was talking to another mom at an event and she was telling me a little about her teenage son. I said something in response to what she told me that indicated that I wasn’t quite as involved in my son’s personal life as she was in hers. In that moment I realized we were both judging each other.
I was judging her for letting her son date at such a young age. I was judging her for judging her son’s girlfriend for not being Good Enough for him. She was judging me for my lack of involvement in my son’s life and my not getting up in his phone frequently enough. And judging her son’s (now ex-) girl for growing up in an unstable household without adequate support, leading to emotional issues and self harming behaviors.
She said the girl would call her son at 3 a.m. because her parents were fighting and she didn’t know what to do.
My kids could have done that this year. Called someone in the middle of the night because his parents were fighting again and he didn’t know what to do.
This spring, I read a blog post about romance novels, which led to another post, which led to another post. The gist of what I read is that more women should give romance a try: It’s written by women, for women, about women, and it’s about what women want. That’s pretty unique in the literary world, and the world in general.
I haven’t read a romance novel since high school, and the few I read then kind of shocked me. I didn’t make the genre part of my repertoire after that. After reading the articles, I felt perhaps I should give this underappreciated area of fiction another try.
