The Tinted Sky

Blue Jeans

I didn't want to go to Manhattan with my mother that day. She was going in to buy a dress for her baby shower. Honestly, I couldn't stand anything baby related. As my mother got bigger and bigger she grew farther and farther away from me. She no longer spent much time with me, leaving me for the first time in my life very lonely and bored. I thought at first she was just busy, but when they told me she was having a baby I realized she was finally getting what she wanted. A child that was biologically hers.

My parents had never kept it a secret that I was adopted. They didn't want me to find out later on and hate them and who I was. So I grew up with the whole you didn't grow in mommy's stomach but you grew in her heart story. It had never really bothered me, because I honestly didn't understand the difference. I knew my parents had tried to have children for years before I came along, and that's why my father had the salt and pepper beard that most kid's dads didn't yet have. And why my mother had the wrinkles on her forehead and beside her mouth, she called them smile lines but she definitely never smiled enough to actually have those. When she found out she was pregnant at 45 the doctors said it was a medical miracle and she couldn't have been happier. So happy that she completely forgot about me, literally. Twice we had gone to the store and she had left me there alone, wandering the aisles calling for her, and going up to strange uniformed men quietly whispering whether they could please help me find my mother.

She dragged me out of bed, and left hurriedly to go and get dressed herself. There was a time she would've picked out the clothes for me carefully matching the dress with the accessories and shoes, but now she couldn't seem to be bothered. I stomped on my soft purple carpet to my closet and searched for something to wear. I decided on a frilly blue dress, that my mother had gotten me from an expensive vintage store. I still at the time wasn't exactly sure what vintage meant, I knew it had to do with old clothes, but I wasn't sure how exactly a pair of shorts that had fit me last year but now was a little to tight in the crotch area, was different from this pretty blue dress. I slipped on my shoes and a matching blue headband with the same white frills the dress had sewn into it. My hair was easily brushed because my mother had taught me to always braid it the night before to avoid those terrible knots where it looks like your hair has been knitted together.

I looked in the mirror and frowned slightly. I had begun to slowly hate how my mother dressed me so young. I was 11, definitely old enough to own a pair of jeans, all the girls in my school wore jeans to school with cute little t-shirts that had funny little sayings on them. I always looked like an overdressed baby doll. My mother wrote a note to the gym teacher saying I couldn't play in gym class on account of my asthma and so even on those days I wore frilly pink dresses with buckled shoes and bows in my hair. I had asked my mother for a pair of blue jeans for my birthday a few months ago and she made a distasteful frown that wrinkled up her forehead and revealed her true age.

"Why would you ever want to wear those? Don't you like the pretty little dresses mommy buys you?" I shrugged and looked away to hide the fact that I was pouting. I would much rather have a pair of blue jeans and some t-shirts then all the frilly, posh, baby dresses I have in my closet.