Family Ties – Mary Ann Fitzmorris

Ladies and gentlemen, I have good news. After all these years, I have finally found the upside to middle age: You don’t have to be cool.

The art of being cool, and the grueling hard work of trying to be cool, is exhausting. Just ask any teenager. Or, if you happen to be in possession of a teenager, you get the dubious privilege of observing it first hand.

I have witnessed with actual pain the difficulties and the expense of being cool. The difficulties are my son’s problem, the expense is mine.

This is a new thing. The boy has never been interested in being cool. He had his own program. We never had arguments about clothes. Chasing labels is what everyone else did.

Enter girls.

Now I find myself watching my son try on things that he previously wouldn’t have been caught dead in, from places that he’d never before set foot in, carrying price tags that would never normally suck me in.

This situation requires a regular trip to the broken records pile. I rummage past the broken record on rap music, push aside the one on computer overuse, lift the one on disappointing grades, and there, right beside the one on the importance of getting enough sleep, I find the broken record I’m looking for: not keeping up with the Jones’.

I feel guilty lecturing my son on keeping up with the Jones, especially when it comes to clothes. I owe him a few. This is a kid who let me make his First Communion suit. I did it because I had some great fabric lying around, although not enough fabric to remake a jacket that was obviously, uh. . . flawed. The poor child looked like a member of Al Capone’s gang.

Pictures of the boy in line filing into the church make me wonder what made me do it. And, why my husband let me do it.

My son allowed it because he didn’t care about clothes then. He is making up for it now.

Not long ago I actually sprung for a polo shirt with the pony on it. The kid wore it twice before the dryer gremlin ate it. My son now refuses to wear it just because it has two huge brown burn marks on the collar! Picky. Picky.

The useless polo pony shirt had to be replaced. His two shirts cost more than my entire spring wardrobe.

But two shirts do not fill a closet, no matter what is on the breast or butt. Last week I ran into a great sale on classic shorts, so I brought my son to let him choose for himself.

He chose. . .not. Rejected everything immediately. He wanted to go to a store that caters to kids his age. After looking at some of the clothes, I became really excited. The shorts he has been wearing for years can be worn for several more years. They are just starting to look like the rags that were on the store hangers for amazing prices. The only thing uglier than the clothes in that store were the tattoos on the salespeople.

“Picture this,” I offered, “I’ll sew but leave everything unfinished. You’ll be so cool!” He gave me a cold stare.

We went to another store. Tamer, but still ugly. And still expensive.

Back to the first, more mainstream department store. He took another look at the shorts I wanted to get him. He countered my offer with some shorts exactly like the ones I was looking at, with the pony.

“Let me explain. Cool,” he said, holding up the ones with the patch. “Uncool,” he said, as he grabbed the ones I wanted. Neither of us could tell which was which if the patch wasn’t there, but it was a $30.00 difference in price. “Do you realize you pay thirty dollars for the patch?”

I asked, in a final attempt to make sense.

“Yes,” he readily admitted, placing the expensive shorts near the register for check-out.

I bought the patch-free shorts. Six pair. They’ll probably sit in the bag until he gets really desperate. Then he’ll wear them.

But I sure hope he never gets his hands on that First Communion picture. That will be worth a lot of ponies.