I'm barely through the door home from work before I'm peeling off my tights, juggling the day's mail while I wriggle free of my bra without taking my blouse off. Following the trail of restrictive underthings discarded down the hall you'll find me, crouched at my computer desk with all available buttons unbuttoned and ties loosed, absently tugging bobby pins from my hair while I check my email. The very opposite of a woman circa 1954: for all I might covet her clothes, my husband is lucky to find me in anything other than pajamas by the time he arrives home from work.
In the parking lot of the grocery store the other day I embarrassed myself utterly when I realized that I was tugging the hem of my shirt free from my skirt, balancing reusable grocery bags and abandoning decency, trading discomfort for tactless and slovenly. My first mistake had clearly been in thinking I could go out in public after a day in the office, when even lounging is strenuous enough to require a drastic rethinking of the day's outfit.
Why do I want to write about an impulse to undress that has almost nothing to do with sex and/or feeling sexy? I feel like my mother; I remember her in the mornings before my brother and I left for school with her ponytail more Pebbles than parental, in the afternoons and evenings when we came home and she did, too, from a day serving heavy German food and heavier beers, when she seemed to race out of her uniform in favor of almost nothing else. I remember being uncomfortable with how free she was with her body - as a teenage girl one's body is the enemy, hell, mine often still is - but I never thought her behavior strange, assuming everyone's mother walked around the house naked. I can't have had the only one, as my husband can't abide my stockinged legs for memories of his mother dressing for an evening out.
My mother was my age when I was eight and scolding her for a recklessly low cut blouse. I can see now how she might've wanted to give the girls a little room to breath.
