I am not cool.
I'm okay with this. I know it. I own it. After all, I lived through my own junior high years and I know just how supremely uncool I can be. Can a girl with enormous tinted glasses and a bad spiral perm ever truly rebound?
By the way, I think there is a scientific formula that shows that your cool factor is inversely proportional to how hard you try to be cool. It just happens naturally, like being a 5' 10" supermodel. The universe cannot predict these things, and the harder you work toward it, the faster it slips through your nail-bitten fingers.
Which only goes to prove my point--sometimes (most of the time for me) we just luck into being cool. The planets align so rare, as Olivia Newton John would say, and there's magic in the air. And the uncool mom accidentally buys her son the hot new tennis shoes that "everyone" has.
Apparently, "Zigs" by Reebok are the new thing. I know this because someone told me, which is what happens when you are on the fringes of the cool crowd. Those people just know it; I have to be told.
Anyway, I came home with these shoes--primarily because they were all over the stores and I really didn't have many other options--and my son greeted me with more jubilation that I may ever see out of him ever again over a pair of shoes. "Oh Mother!" he proclaimed. "You are the most wonderful mother in the entire world. Please, let me do the laundry for a week for you. Sit down, let me rub your tired feet. Can I make dinner?"
Okay, perhaps I'm exaggerating. But the point is, this was one happy kid, who generally gives me no more than a shrug when I bring home clothes for him. Fashion isn't a word in his vocabulary. Comfort, however, is. If he could wear athletic pants and t-shirts every day so that his clothing just barely touched him, he would be ecstatic.
So, sometimes we just luck into these things. And since my guy is only 9, I have a better shot of it. There's another universal law that says the closer your child creeps toward being a teenager, the dumber things you will do as their parent. Until right about when the kid hits age 17, when I think parents hit the peak of their stupidity. I wasn't a cool teenager, and even I remember this phase that my parents went through. I'm so glad they're over it now.
A wise woman would have gotten out the video camera (a cool one would be able to use her iphone, but obviously, I don't have one) and recorded that moment for posterity. So that when I hit the peak of my own stupidity, I can play it back for my child and remind him that once--ONCE!--I was really cool.
But by then, he'll look back at these shoes and say, "Aw, mom! I can't believe you made me wear those shoes! How embarassing!" Yes, cool mom points are fleeting, especially for one who quotes Olivia Newton John in her blog.
Anyone know where I can get a spiral perm these days?
