Outside the Baby Bubble

Dirty Little Secrets

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As the city of Hartford still scratches its municipal head in search of a place to put all its snow and I haven’t been to work since Thursday, I decided to whip out my list of things to do, which has been a work in progress since the birth of my first child in 2006. One of those items was a trip to a place that has been as elusive to me as Studio 54 to a social misfit standing staring longingly at its gates in 1978. Suddenly, those gates were about to fling wide open, lull me in with a seductive wink and beckon me through.

I can’t even remember the last time I stepped foot in Victoria’s Secret. I believe it was somewhere between my second baby and thirty-fifth birthday, but somewhere down the line the Victoria’s Secret labels on my lingerie morphed into Hanes Her Way. And I’d just as soon keep it that way, if it weren’t for a pesky little midlife crisis, the image of my six-year-old dancing around with my granny panties on his head, and a certain gift card that has been popping up in my purse since 2006.

I think the biggest enigma of all is that for seven years I’ve been carrying it around and haven’t lost it. Every time I’ve fished around my purse in a panicked search for a lost credit card, driver’s license or set of keys, you can guarantee I’d come up with that gift card from Victoria’s Secret instead.

And so today, out of some whim, I pulled into the parking lot, took a deep breath in front of the doors at its Simsbury, Connecticut location and pushed.

Immediately I was bedazzled by pink. Every shade on the spectrum of pink was covered, from rose to fuchsia, cast in stripes, Valentine’s Day hearts and leopard print, and if nothing else, the word PINK was emblazoned across the front. All-too-perfect, runway-robotic women threatened to leap out of their posters and smother me in long hair, implants and cortisone. A creepy old man pretending to buy perfume for his wife leered at me from behind a rack of lingerie. And then pounced my very own personal Victoria’s Secret retailer, a squiggle of a girl decorated with more lace and frills than the store itself.

“Hi! I’m Sienna, and I’ll be taking care of you today.” She practically sang it, and I instantly felt like I was in some satirically erotic musical. “Shall I show you our newest from our Dream Angels collection?”

I decided to lay all my cards out right on the table. “I’ll be forty next month,” I said. “I don’t think I’m allowed to wear anything that says ‘Dream Angel’ on it, even if it’s underneath my clothes.”

“Oh, my. forty?! And here I was thinking you were younger than me!”

A banner announcing “I’m working on commission” danced over her head, and dollar signs flashed in her pupils.

“We’re having a sale on panties today,” was her next pitch.

I stifled my laughter. “This isn’t necessary. I don’t wear panties.”

She stared, confused, much like the way you’re doing right now.

Allow me to explain. Sometime after getting carded at a package store conjures exhilaration instead of annoyance, a woman’s “panties” transcend into “underwear.” Life being the cycle that it is, sometime after her first senior discount, those underwear then become “big girl underpants.” Eventually she’s right back where she started, and those big girl underpants transform into a bag of Depends.

If Sienna was really listening to my explanation, she promptly disregarded it. “We have some gorgeous matching bra and panty sets this way,” she said, and this time I couldn’t stifle my laugher.

She stopped dead in her tracks. “You don’t want to match your bras to your panties?” She looked like she just stumbled across a crime scene of the goriest and most heinous kind.

“I’ll be celebrating my tenth wedding anniversary this summer,” I said. “Why in God’s name would I want to do a thing like that?”

“I see. Why don’t I just give you some space? Please let me know if you need anything.” And with that, she pounced on her next customer. Speaking along the lines of panties, surely hers were now in a bunch.

And as I rifled through mounds of lacy, ruffled and rhinestone-studded thongs, hipsters and bikini briefs, I overheard a conversation between a retailer and what I gathered to be the customer the people at Victoria’s Secret is most accustomed to.

She was what we here in Simsbury like to call a “Simsbunny”—middle-aged minivan driving kind of soccer mom armed with her husband’s credit card. Her freshly manicured nails were so long she could barely unsnap her Gucci purse.

“You know, you’re just one pair of panties away from a box of truffles,” the retailer seduced after tallying up her purchase.

“Truffles?” exclaimed the Simsbunny. “If I eat any more of those, I won’t even fit into my panties!”

A dual chorus of fake laughter for ten full nauseating seconds.

“We’re having a sale, right where that woman is standing.” The retailer pointed straight at me. “Why don’t you find a pair to match your new bra?”

“I shouldn’t,” the Simsbunny said. “But I can’t resist. I mean, who doesn’t like truffles? Am I right?” More fake laughter, and this time for twice as long.

“Bitch, why don’t you go to CVS next door and just buy a box of truffles?” I suggested from across the store.

OK, I didn’t say it. Instead, I gathered my selection, placed it on the register and waited.

Right on cue, the cashier looked from me to my merchandise, than back at me again. “You didn’t want to take advantage of any of our sale on matching bra and panty sets?” she inquired.

“No, not today.”

“You know, you’re just one set away from a box of truffles,” she persisted.

“That’s alright,” I said. “I’m not a fan of truffles.”

Again, bewildered confusion as she daintily placed my purchase in a pretty pink-striped bag with a pink bow on its pink handle and sent me on my way.

All this time I thought Victoria was the one with all the mystery. But it was really me, a truffle-hating panty-scoffing bra and underwear-clashing 100% cotton-worshipper with all the dirty little secrets.

My one saving grace: one of the items in my bag may or may not have “Dream Angel” inscribed somewhere on it. I’d tell you for certain, but I can’t give away everything.

Insomnia is sanity’s worst enemy

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There is no greater loneliness when everyone in the Eastern time zone halfway to the Pacific is sleeping, while I’m at my computer, listening to the quiet hum of the baby monitors, the occasional gurgle of the humidifier and dogs snoring at my feet.  Facebook is a ghost town at 2 a.m., so human contact of any kind isn’t an option.  I wrote for hours on end until …my bleary eyes were seeing double.  I read a chapter how to tiptoe around men’s egos in “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus.”  I planned a unit of lessons on converting the metric system to customary units of measure.  I began to clean the house, but quickly thought the better of it.

The DVR flicked on to record the most recent episode of “Go Diego Go.”  The mind works itself to the brink of overkill after hours, and for a long time I pondered what sort of child would be watching Diego in the middle of the night.  It made me think of my own children, and I tried to imagine the kind of life they would have without Twinkies.  I wondered if, once teenagers, they’d roll their eyes at me when I reminisced about Hostess cupcakes, the same way I did when my father went on and on about his phonograph and vinyl record collection.  From there I thought of my own teenage years, the age of innocence, when the economy was still intact, child stars still had their futures ahead of them, and one could listen to Great White without thinking of a nightclub consumed by flames.

In the battle against insomnia, we try to quiet the nonsensical, over-analytical thoughts that roll like some box office bomb in our heads, exacerbating life’s little problems to tragedies of global proportions.  And so in an effort to quell the cogs in my brain, I spread out my yoga mat and flicked on Soundscapes, a soothing collection of ethereal instrumental music designed for inducing one into a relaxed and meditative state. Such haunting melodies also make for the perfect background music for a murder scene, but to think about that would be counterproductive.

Typically, Soundscapes is accompanied by picturesque scenes of ocean waves lapping against shorelines, eagles gliding over mountain tops, or bison lapping water from trickling streams.  But on this particular night, the scenery was entirely different. Soundscapes now runs advertisements instead.

“Protect yourself from auto repairs!” I read as I practiced my Proud Warrior and Downward Dog.  “If you owe more than $10,000 in taxes, be connected with a tax resolution specialist!”  “Get your hair back in as little as four weeks!”  “Erase the dark circles under your eyes!”  “Have you or a loved one been injured by contraceptives?”

At the end of it all, I crawled onto the couch and thought about Twinkies, my unbalanced checkbook, how I forgot to thaw out tomorrow’s chicken, the dark circles under my eyes, taxes, and hazardous contraceptives.  I watched the clock until the first of three children crept downstairs, hungry for breakfast, morning chit-chat and the latest episode of “Go Diego Go.”

One of the sad and inevitable truths as you approach forty: pulling all-nighters isn’t nearly as fun as it used to be.