A few random moments in the life of a judybat

Or what it's like to be me:

1. Last week I went to The Gap in a desperate attempt to find a pair of pants that fit. I used to go there all the time for work clothes, until about six years ago when I started my own personal boycott after trying on a shirt that was clearly cut for an 11-year-old boy and yet was in the women's section labelled XL. Unfortunately L.L. Bean, Land's End and Eddie Bauer all seem to make pants for people whose proportions resemble my own about as much as a greyhound resembles a bull dog, and I lack imagination when it comes to clothes shopping, so I was out of choices. And I was out of pants, having worn a hole in the left leg of every pair I own, because apparently that's the knee I bend down on whenever I have to help The Boy with anything. So there I am at The Gap with barely an hour before I have to pick the kid up at school, and I tried on every pair of pants they have in my size, including a few in the men's section which could have been my size if I were a completely different person. I am not exaggerating. I tried on every single size 10 in the store. And guess how many I found that fit. ONE! You can check them out the next time you see me, because I'm never taking them off.

2. The other day, The Boy was looking over my shoulder as I was going through some video on the computer we had shot when he was about a year old. I explained to him that the baby on the computer was he when he was small. The Boy looking over my shoulder kept showing The Boy on the computer the Lego towers he was building and wanted to know if he, his earlier self, could come out and play. The Boy seemed o.k. with this post-modern, looking-glass mind game, but I had to sit in a dark quiet room for a while.

3. A while back, I was looking through The Boy's little pack when he came home from school and found a pink triangle made out of popsicle sticks with his name on it. I experienced a split-second moment of panic as I tried to make sense of it - do they talk about gay pride at preschool? Have they singled out The Boy as the son of lesbian parents? Are his teachers trying to tell me something? - then I realized this must have been an art project designed to teach the kids about shapes. The Boy chose his favorite color - pink! - to paint his popsicle sticks, and his teacher wrote his name on it so it would go home with the right kid. This masterpiece now hangs with pride in our dining room window.