The Clothes We Wear

On hand-me-down adulthood, my mother's mirror & the alterations we do to make it fit...

This weekend, we landed in South Carolina to spend some time with family for the week. I always have a little bit of a hug tour scheduled to see, squeeze, and reconnect with some familiar faces, and this trip is no different.

My parents still live in my childhood home in Blythewood, SC, although it looks drastically different from when I lived here. “Upgraded” is a major understatement, for sure. Before this home, we were a bit nomadic as my dad’s naval career had us living in Orlando, FL (where I was born), Saratoga Springs, NY, Charleston, SC (where my sister was born), all in the first five years of my life. We then finally settled in Blythewood when my dad left the Navy, and I entered first grade in the middle of the school year. Still unsure of where we wanted to settle in this small, rural town just northeast of the state’s capital, Columbia, we spent our first few years in a mobile home. Which, at the time, I honestly thought was pretty cool…it was my home, the only home I had any memory of, and the fact that we were able to move it from Charleston to Blythewood was pretty amazing in my six-year-old mind. It was only later at school that I learned that living in a trailer somehow meant I was poor…less than…with absolutely no trajectory to popularity in sight.

My brother and sister talk a lot about how we each had such different childhoods, such different parents, despite the fact that they are the same two people. The versions of Sam and Myra I experienced were the hard-working young teenagers just entering adulthood for the first time, and then, also, figuring out how to do it with a newborn. At the age of 19, after graduating from high school, my mom started college, and my dad entered the Navy, and then on the heels of those big decisive moves, they found out they were pregnant with me. They got married and moved to Orlando, so big and so different and so far away from their family and friends in Ridgeway & Winnsboro, SC. They were alone, figuring it all out, doing the best they could with what they had…and also, raising a baby, while they themselves probably felt very much still like kids.

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Sometimes I think about what they might’ve felt in those early days. I’ve listened to their stories and those big, big feelings they’ve shared, and I very much recognize that same anxiety…the fear and stress of being adults for the very first time without fully knowing what that meant. Trying to prove their own success at adulthood to their families and friends, who probably thought they were nuts to pick up and move so far away from the safety and security of “home”.

There’s always this need to prove ourselves, right? Once you officially crossover from being a student in school (whether it stops at high school or college), there’s this transition, this moment…where you’re officially an adult…but really in title only…not quite in actuality. It’s almost as if we put on the adult versions of ourselves like clothes. But at first, they don’t quite fit, do they? Like most hand-me-downs, they’re too big, too bulky, and then there’s that voice in the background that says, “you’ll just have to grow into it”.

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I’ve been thinking about those “clothes” we put on…how much the version of adulthood we grow up thinking about, aspiring to…was actually predestined by the hand-me-downs we were given…how they were shaped and sewn together by our parents and their experiences with their own adulthood (which, consequently, were also given and shaped by their parents before them and so on…). I think about the “fit” of those clothes and how each of us goes through life, growing and trying to fill them in. But it’s interesting, each of us experiences a moment (or multiple moments) where we realize some of those pieces and parts will never quite fit. Just like our personalities, our goals, our dreams, our decisions take on a different path, a different shape from our parents before us, we, too, find ourselves deciding which pieces to keep and fill in, and which parts demand alterations, a gentle rip of the seams. What started as a dress might end up looking like overalls (am I taking this clothing analogy too far? Probably so, but you get it, right?).

I’m sitting here this morning on a balmy June morning…on my parents’ back porch overlooking their pool…that sits behind their amazing two-story home on around four acres of land covered by trees…with the distant crow of a neighbor’s rooster a mile away…all of this is truly theirs. This place is a space that both my dad and my mom have spilled blood, sweat, and tears for over the years. Maybe they’ve finally grown into their adult bodysuits they first put on when they were 19. I wonder if they feel proud or like they finally “got it”.

Honestly, you wouldn’t think so, the way my dad constantly tinkers and “to-dos” around the house and yard…there’s always something to fix, something to repair, something to replace. And my mom? She’s changed the interior so many times, I can barely remember all the colors of the walls in each iteration. The kitchen I grew up with is no longer here, and in its place is a fully remodeled one that beautifully opens and extends through to the living room, which is now on the same floor level (there used to be a step down into the living room, and they literally raised the entire floor of that level to be even). There are now hardwoods where there was wall-to-wall emerald green carpet, and the garage is now an entire other room of the house, affectionately referred to as the “west wing” of the home.

All that to say…it’s a far, far cry and a major glow up from the mobile home we started in…and maybe, just maybe, their clothes finally fit them.

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On this side of our story, I, in my 40’s and my parents in their early 60’s, I kind of love the fact that we feel so close in age. I feel a camaraderie and a kinship and a friendship with them that’s uniquely mine and different from the relationships they have with my siblings.

.Just yesterday, I was plundering in my mom’s clothes (I do this every single time I come home…in her clothes) and I put on a pair of her pants and a sweater (also because my mom keeps it a frigid 60-degrees in their house, hello ‘pause <3). But as I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought about those clothes. How hers have never really fit all the way, but just barely. My mom and I are SO similar, yet so different. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I saw my mom, I saw her in my eyes, in my smile, in my Boulware-wide hips. Her clothes have always fit me…sort of…but I’ve always required a little extra alteration…to make them my own, just to make them fit.

My parents never wanted or asked us kids, to follow in their footsteps. In fact, they were pretty adamant about each of us developing the critical thinking skills, integrity, and discernment necessary to forge our own paths. I think there’s a misconception that happens as we aim to go our own way, that it means we don’t appreciate or value the ways our parents chose to go. There’s an exchange of judgment and criticism that takes place when “different” somehow gets translated as “better than”. I know I’ve been guilty of it. I remember when we first adopted Amelia, and my sister had her son Levi at the same time…both of us, daughters now mothers, and we had our own ideas of the kind of parents we wanted to be. The ripping of those seams, the alterations and changes we were making to that part of the “outfits” were not very gentle, or gracious…they were quite literally dripping with judgment. We were going to talk to our kids differently, discipline them differently, dress them differently, etc.

Depending on our childhood experiences and how we relate to our parents, we seem to develop this sense of “oh, when I’m an adult/parent I’m not going to do it like them” as we lay responsibility and blame, even. As I’ve become a mother and have lived and experienced the world in my own ways, I’ve realized my own impact on Amelia throughout each stage of her 11-yr life so far…for good or bad…and I know the weight of my continued impact as she journeys through preteen, teenagerdom, and beyond. In realizing my own impact, I’ve come to have more and more grace for my parents and the decisions they made…unraveling the judgment I once held for those decisions and repairing that “sleeve”.

My version of these adulthood “clothes” sometimes seems as if they are so altered beyond recognition…post marriage (x2)...post divorce…post moving hundreds of miles away from SC to NYC…post career change…post political and religious shifts, etc. My version of adulthood…of womanhood…was handed down from my mom, and despite SO many of my attempts to alter or change and “be different” than her growing up, I realize now that she is and was my foundation. It’s in these moments…When I come home and spend time with them, even physically putting on my mom’s clothes that I recognize and realize the OG is still there underneath. I see the version of adulthood they wear and the one that I now wear; I see more similarities than differences (despite my best efforts 🙂). Seeing those similarities reminds me of where I’ve come from, what I’ve come through, and how grateful and how proud I am to wear these clothes.