New Year’s Eve, circa 1992–95. House party at my friend Rosie’s. Kids are invited to come, and they play back and forth between Rosie’s daughter’s room and the rooms where the adults are.
I am dressed for New Year’s Eve. Black miniskirt. Stockings. Boots. Some kind of sexy or fancy or festive top. It’s a good party.
At some point, Arthur, who is a little younger than the other kids, wants to go to sleep and needs to be settled into bed. He’s somewhere between two and five years old.
So I tuck him in and lay down with him and sing him a little lullaby and stroke his sweet little forehead until he falls asleep. Which is, face it, kinda boring, and my mind wanders, and I sort of see myself from the outside and I think “This is never an image anyone sees. This is a banned image. I’d like to paint a picture of this.” Of a mom in a miniskirt and boots cuddling a baby to sleep.
It’s perfectly ordinary, really. We don’t actually throw away our hot clothes or our impulse to wear them when we give birth. And I’m not talking about the porn version of a sexy mom, which I won’t even name because then I’ll get hits I don’t want, I’m talking about a human mom with a human sex drive and a human urge to dress up.
It’s a banned image. You can’t see it. Maybe the porn of mom-being-hot, but not the ordinary beauty of hotty-being-mom. If that image was permitted, everything would be different. Everything.
Happy New Year.
