Shopping

If shopping were an Olympic event, my mom would bring home the Gold every time!  She would be the Michael Phelps of shopping!

 

Yet another gene I did not inherit, thank goodness!  I hate shopping so much that I buy two of everything and keep stocked with necessities.  When I start on the last of whatever, I put it on my Wal-Mart list.  When I finally run out of something is when I break down and actually shop, again buying two of everything, so I can get away with only three or four trips a year.  The only store I go to regularly is the grocery store, and only because I can’t stockpile milk.

 

I buy clothes and shoes maybe three times a year at the same neighborhood stores.  Sales and clearances and coupons and discounts mean nothing to me.  If I am forced to buy something, I will not go out of my way to get it cheaper somewhere else, I will buy it and get out of the store.  I don’t care that much.  And if I can possibly order it online and have it sent conveniently to my office, I’m all over that!

 

My mother spends the majority of her free time shopping.  We can’t go out to eat without having to stop somewhere to shop, whether Wal-Mart, the grocery store, the nursery, the hardware store, it doesn’t matter, anywhere she can shop.  If mom wants it, she buys it.  It’s almost impossible to buy my mother a gift, she already has anything she wants.

 

She decorates her office for every holiday.  For Halloween, she’s got a cackling, springing motion-detecting witch on the door, and all of the candy bowls are trick, spider webs hanging, doodads and gadgets and smoke and crap everywhere.  For every holiday, she goes all out on this stuff.

 

This is how a day of shopping at the mall with my mom goes:  We start in one of the major stores, she’s got an eye like an eagle, she sees a jacket from three aisles away, swoops in and snatches her size, holds it up to herself, looks at it again, puts it down, picks up another two racks away, holds it up to herself, looks at it, puts it down, six or seven items like this with her darting several racks over to pick up just what she wants to see.

 

I, meanwhile, am walking around pointing out the tacky and atrocious, which has become my job through the years.  I think I do it pretty well.

Then suddenly mom takes off, out of the store into the mall, into a smaller shop, three or four quick snatches, holding up, looking again, putting down, moving on, like a hummingbird, if she slows down she’ll die.

 

Off again, into another store, a half dozen cycles of snatch, hold, look, down, and we’re off again.  She will make the rounds of the mall this way, back to the original store, all without buying anything.

 

Back in the original store, she will grab two items and pay for them, always having a coupon or discount card or some such thing.  Out into the mall and into the third store, where she’ll buy one item.  Back into the mall to the sixth, eighth, ninth, eleventh, sixteenth and seventeenth stores to purchase, all with a discount of some sort she has stashed in her purse.

 

She rarely tries things on until she gets home.  She’ll be back at the mall again before the week is out, she’ll exchange it then, and of course begin another shopping cycle.

 

By the time we leave, she’s raring to move on to another mall.  I’m limping and exhausted and loaded down with bags, and the only thing I bought was a bath sponge.  She must energize me with food at this point, give my tootsies a chance to rest for a nanosecond, and then we start again.  It’s h*ll on earth, I swear!!

 

My mother works for a University, so she dresses in a skirt and suit jacket, heels, hose, makeup, the whole nine.  At home, she pretty much stays that way, too.  You might find her in jeans maybe once or twice a month.

 

I, on the other hand, am all about comfort.  I work in an office where clients rarely show up, so we dress in capris, sundresses, sandals, jeans on Fridays.  And at home, I’m the same, all about comfort.  I’ve been trying to drill into my mother that cotton is the “fabric of my life.”

 

On those many, many shopping trips I’m not forced into, mom buys me clothes, clothes she would wear, silk blouses, pin-stripe suit jacket and pants, polyester dresses.  Eeeek!  They hang in my closet until the next time I clean it out and donate them, with the tags still on.  I’ve told her I’m not going to wear them, she tells me to hang them in my closet, “just in case.”  Just in case what?  Does she think I’m going to wake up one morning with an allergy to cotton?  Dream on, mom!

 

I have a feeling after she reads this, I’m going to be forced into another Olympic training day.  Knowing how much I detest shopping, I can’t help but think it’s my mom’s own little way to make me pay for the brat I used to be.

 

I’m all paid up now, promise!  What do you mean, not even close??