At Lily’s high school soccer game yesterday, I sat in the bleachers in my sunglasses and hat—a new hat, shaped like a baseball cap but made out of straw.
I do not look good in a hat, I know this. Hats squeeze my head into an alarmingly narrow look, upsetting my children. But the sun was dazzlingly bright, so blinding I could barely see the game. And I thought this new approach, this compromise between a straw hat and a baseball cap, might work. On the far side of the field, sophomore Lily sat on the bench with her team-mates. My phone buzzed, announcing a text message. I opened the phone and found a message from… Lily!
It said: “Mother! Take off that hat RIGHT NOW.”
Without a word, I handed the phone to the mother sitting nearest me, and she passed it to the next mother, and, all the way down the row, mothers of teenage daughters merrily laughed and sympathized.
The sun went behind a cloud. I took off the hat.
Melissa- This reminds me of my 14 yr old son’s response when my husband, returning home from a trip to Morocco, emerged from customs wearing an amused grin and a long, black robe with a pointy hood, called a “jalaba.” Mesfin was able to laugh about his dad’s quirky outfit as we loaded up my husband’s luggage and headed for home, but 30 minutes later when the transmission on our van died and we were forced to pull over to the side of the Interstate the first words out of his mouth were: “You’re going to take off that outfit before you get out to look under the van, right dad?” 🙂
We’re embarrassing to our teenagers on a good day. But your husband WAS kind of pushing the envelope.