No Country for Fluffy Women

The mall is a beautiful place.  In one location, you can smell body splashes that remind you of summer fruit and/or birthday cake, ride a tiny train, and sample 5 to 7 different variations of the same Asian dish.  It’s also air-conditioned entertainment for my three-year-old, a feature which allows me to keep an eye on the sale prices at the Disney Store (or what we mortals like to call normal prices).  

But when it comes to shopping for clothes, the mall is no longer a place of such joy. In fact, when I was shopping a few days ago, I realized that because of my size, the mall’s roughly sixty women’s apparel stores really break down into only six categories:  

Stores where I shop.

Stores where I can only buy tops and dresses.

Stores where I can only buy tops.

Stores where I can only buy jewelry.

Stores where I don’t get acknowledged by the staff.

Stores that are too dark and smell like that pretty, popular boy from your old high school 

I don’t have exact numbers for each of these stores, but I know for sure that only two or three stores make it into the top category.  That means two or three stores where I can walk in and pull any item in my size.  I can use the other stores to piecemeal my wardrobe, but if I really need to shop my options are limited.

This means that I could say that roughly 95% of the mall’s women’s apparel stores are pretty much closed to me.  That 95% contains stores where I use the window dressing to see what the cool kids are wearing, and then try to copy the color and style in “my stores.”  I roam the mall like a man without a country, or a girl without a place to find khakis.  And I finally find a kindly innkeeper in the plus size store I have started to call home.  Torrid.  

Torrid used to be known as the store where plus size girls could get their skull-covered tee shirts and comic book sweatshirts.   But in recent years it has changed from this niche audience to trendy, young plus size store.  And I am glad for it. (Not that I’m not excited for comic book t-shirts.:))

I think the staff members know that most of their clientele feel rejected, because they talk to you less like sales associates and more like the leaders of a support group.  Recently, the sales girl told me, “If you need to see the next size, don’t feel weird. It’s ok.” 

In this haven for the robust, I feel very comfortable describing why a pair of pants would hit a problem area for me.  Usually, before I get out my complaint, the sales girl finishes my sentence and says “I totally get that; let’s try these.”

And, in a stroke of ground-shaking genius, the fitting rooms are equipped with a fan in the upper corner to combat the “pulling up jeans” sweats.

Although I have found a little corner to call my own in the mall, I still feel like an outsider in general.  I feel like there is store after store telling me that “This is how everyone else is, and then there’s you.  You can have that one store, over there.”   It feels like the high school cafeteria all over again, and I am eating with the teacher.  

If I look at the mannequins, magazines, and TV shows, I can start to feel like there’s a particular look that I need if I want a fulfilling life.  A look I should acquire if I want to have the life of the “pretty people” who are happy, carefree, and without problems.  

I was thinking about this “pretty people” lie, a few days before, in the most unlikely of places, the tram at Busch Gardens. I was looking around and taking stock of the people on the tram.  This random collection of people all had one thing in common: flaws.  This one’s eye twitched sometimes.  That one couldn’t quite grow in facial hair.  Fat, slim, small eyes, big nose, no hair, too much hair.  Everyone kind of had their thing.

There were a few of the “pretty people” peppered through.  But on a tram full of people, most of them were “the normals.” There we were, a collection of oddly shaped lumps of clay.

As I looked around that tram, I thought, all these people can’t be leading a “lesser life,” can they? I bet they love their husbands, their kids.  I bet they’re good employees or kind people.  Some of them are probably smart and others funny.  Their appearance did not give them any less capacity for love or for greatness.  

It’s not the cool kids with the good life, and the rest of us just taking the scraps. We are all just a bunch of people trying to figure life out, each with our own flaws and/or successes.

To be honest, I thought I had outgrown the whole “worrying about the cool kids” stage in my life. Or maybe, I just realized that the so called “outsiders” outnumber the cool kids.  I just hang with my own kind and don’t really have to be bothered by the thought of them anymore.  

I guess, if I was more honest, I should say that I "hoped" I had outgrown the whole “cool kids’ concept.  I hoped that I have transcended that paradigm and have come to think about life in more grown-up ways.  (That was a pretty grown up sentence just then.  I use “transcended” and “paradigm” back to back. Boom.)

But in the mall … well, there I stand looking at the tiny-wasted, beautiful jacket in the window of The Limited, sighing and thinking, “Ugh, will I never look that way?  Why can’t I have that life?” Not cool, Steph. Not cool.

The truth is, when I am at my lowest about my weight, when I am being “rejected mall Steph,” I twiddle myself and everyone around me to a number.  I make the world around me small and two-dimensional, and I craft rules for success that are simple and idiotic.  

I have used this phrase before, but there is just “more” to this whole situation. More to people than their looks, more to me than my “number,” more to life than dressing like the cool kids.  And at thirty something, gosh, I should know better than that.

Several years ago, I posed a like minded question to my bible study group. “What did the Proverbs 31 woman look like?”  “What size do you think she was?”  They thought she would be fit.  I noted that the only part of her physique that the passage mentions is that her arms are strong.  And if anyone has cleaned a house, done laundry, or lifted children, they can see how this happens.  The thing is, she might have been fit, but in the cannon of time, it didn’t matter.  Our “more,” the “everything else,” the capacity to love, or for greatness – these things are what will go down in the history if we are lucky.  These things are what we will be remembered for. They’re what matters.  

So I go to my little corner of the mall.  I listen to the kind words of the sales staff and feel the gentle breeze in the fitting room.   I am still reaching for better health goals.  But it is no longer the cool kids and me.  It is no longer us vs. them. 

It’s just us.