Clothes Fright

Steven and I fell deeply in love with Alicia the second she was born, but living with a newborn was certainly an adjustment.  As Steven said as we drove away from the hospital, “I can’t believe they just handed the baby over to us.  We don’t know anything about babies.”  I replied, “Speak for yourself.”   But the truth was that we were both a bit at sea for the first couple of weeks after Alicia’s birth.   

At the time we had Alicia, Steve and I worked at the same law firm.  Before Alicia was born, we dressed up in formal lawyer clothes every morning (this was before "business casual" became de rigueur) and drove to work together (frequently picking up David Gancher along the way).  One week after we brought the baby home, my mom came to help me while Steven went back to work.  Steve felt particularly disoriented, not getting any sleep, spending every minute at home focused on the baby, and now going to work by himself, leaving his heretofore professional wife shuffling around in a nightgown with a baby in her arms.  

  

My mother is European and always elegantly dressed, with jewelry, scarfs and so forth, even when she is being “casual.”  But, years before Alicia was born, my mother had bought a couple of thin, permanent-press, knee-length, snap-up-the-front coats with Peter Pan collars, long-sleeved, sickly-pale yellow with ugly brown and green stripes, to put over her clothes when she was cooking or doing housework.  

So my mom was in the kitchen cooking dinner wearing one of these when Steve got home the first night.  As he came up the stairs to where I was nursing Alicia, I heard him call my name several times in a somewhat panicked voice as he neared the room.   When he got there, he shut the door behind him, lowered his voice and said:   “Jacqueline (pause).   Your mother is downstairs wearing (pause).   The ugliest garment I have ever seen.”   He was weirded out enough by my transformation, but now his always well-dressed mother-in-law had turned herself into a 1950’s Lucy Ricardo look alike too?  It was all too much.   

When I told my mother the next morning, she abandoned the coat in Alicia’s closet (where it remains today), saying:   “Oh, dear, I musn’t frighten my son-in-law.”