What Do You Mean You Don't Want to Dress Like Mommy?

Yesterday Precocious Daughter and I decided that we didn’t need to watch seven hours of Super Bowl pre-game, so we went shopping. (whispering: It wasn’t a hard decision.)

 

PDaughter, shown here twisting my arm.

We ended up at our local ginormous regional outlet mall. It’s shopping plus exercise. I mean, how do they even make a building that big? It’s so big it has two pretzel places.

Anyway, PDaughter and I both tend to get a little shell-shocked when we go to this mall. There’s just so much stuff. We know we can’t buy all of it, but it’s so hard to choose from the sheer tonnage of consumer goods that we typically go home sore-footed and empty-handed. We are the not-so-coveted Indecisive and Mostly Broke Anyway demographic.

A girl can dream.

 

But yesterday I decided I wanted cute new tops. And of course, once PDaughter got wind of what I wanted, she wasn’t going to come away without cute new tops of her own. Her sense of fair play is very well developed. Also, she likes when I buy her stuff.

Like mother, like daughter.

 

So we went in to this huge store that had acres of clothing. We had to wade past the clearance racks of puffy coats, which apparently some buyer somewhere thought were going to be the Big Thing this winter. Judging by the number of puffy coasts being sold off at please-for-God’s-sake-buy-me prices, this buyer is now a sock inspector at a low-end underwear factory somewhere.

 
Fortunately, there were also a gazillion cute tops. I quickly picked out two and then stopped myself. Because when it comes to shopping, I tend to count one, two, forty.  Forty was incompatible with eating for the rest of the month, so two it was. One was a little teal number with a drapey collar, and the other was a more casual olive-green Eddie Bauer top.

Why yes, it does make me look
exactly like Bar Rafaeli.
Thanks for asking.

 

Then we moved over to the Juniors section. It still makes me seize up a little inside every time PDaughter steers me to Juniors instead of Kids. I haven’t really accepted that she’s a teenager yet. Although I like the part where I imagine I gave birth when I was 12. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Whatever. We started going through the tops in that section. Of course, I vetoed everything that was see-through, backless, or had “SEXY” written across the butt. I’m not a prude; it’s just that the girl doesn’t have enough butt to fit a four-letter word. Me, I could put President Obama’s most recent inauguration address across my butt and still have room for Meryl Streep’s last Oscar acceptance speech. I won’t, but I could.

PDaughter found two very cute tops of her own that were both kid- and mom-approved. But as we were waiting to check out, a strange look came across her face. I asked her what was wrong.

“We got the same colors,” she said, horror-stricken.

I looked at the four items in my hands. Sure enough, although PDaughter had chosen two teenage-girl tops and I had picked two middle-aged (but very cool and stylish) mom tops, we each had chosen one that was teal and one that was olive green.

I'm sure this is what she saw.

 

Of course, I did the mature thing. I told her I had picked mine first, so she had copied me.

She decided to stick with what she had bought, even though they were same colors I was getting. But she did fix me with a solemn gaze and say, “We can never wear these at the same time.”

Because this, as far as she's concerned.

 

I immediately agreed.

I mean, who wants to look like a 7^th grader?