I’ve been hanging out on the Women with ADHD Ning, and recently one of the members mentioned that she’d never really fit in with “the girls”. Several more of members chimed in about how they’d never felt “feminine”. It seems that a lot of women with ADD are just no good with the girly stuff.
It’s not surprising, really. A femme has to be organized. She needs to get her hair cut regularly, and she needs to leave time to style it every morning, and then she needs to do her make-up. She needs to shop for coordinated, fashionable, flattering outfits, which can mean buying more bras than I’ve ever seen in one place to go with different necklines and silhouettes. Then she has to get up in the morning early enough to put all of this together. If you have ADD, you’re lucky to be heading off to work with matching shoes. We need to keep it simple just to stay sane.
For instance, take my wardrobe (please!). Clothes are one of the areas of my life that I streamline for time-management purposes. I don’t spend a ton of time shopping or dressing. To this end, my couture consists of five t-shirts and a single pair of jeans that are all way too big. But what the heck, I have a belt, which means my pants stay up. It’s all good.
Most of the time, this works pretty well for me … except that I’m going to France next month, and people there dress up a little more, and I don’t want to stick out like the Ugly American. On a more practical level, I need some clothes that dry quickly, and my giant pair of jeans is not that.
And that means it’s time to shop for Pants. The dreaded, dreaded pants.
Allow me to digress into an anecdote. I used to work for a major outdoor retailer. Many of the women who shopped with us were marathoners, triathletes, and century cyclists. What I’m getting at here is that they are not your stereotypical chubby Americans. They are not marshmallows. They are athletes in prime physical condition.
And yet, every single woman who shopped at the store where I worked would come out of the dressing room with a dozen pairs of pants. “I’m really sorry”, she’d say as she handed them to me. “I don’t want to make you restock all these, it’s just that none of them fit. I’m sorry. I must be a mutant or something”.
At the time, I was a good sixty pounds overweight, and pants shopping was a nightmare. I assumed that it was because I was fat; for some reason, a lot of stores — my employer included — seem to assume that fat people don’t exercise or go outdoors. By their standards, I was the mutant. Right?
But if that were true, why were all these fit, athletic women struggling to fit into pants?
The answer is that Pants are Evil.
Pants, you see, don’t fit any woman, at all ever. At least, not until her spirit has been broken by trying on the 30th pair in four hours, and even then, only if she’s lucky. It has nothing to do with how fat or thin a woman is. It has to do with the fact that she’s a woman who dares to shop for Pants.
Back then, I was a size 20. When I started working at that store, nothing we sold off the rack fit me (I had to go to the website for extended sizes, and even then it was a maybe). Shopping for pants was a miserable, horrible experience that made me feel like a short, fat blob of blobbiness. I was sure that if I could get into shape, lose some weight, everything would be different.
Now that I’ve gotten into shape, shopping for pants is a miserable, horrible experience that makes me feel like a short, fat blob of blobbiness. I’m a size 8, or 10, or 12, depending on who’s asking. There’s actually one retailer’s size chart where I’m an 8 in the hips, a 10 in the waist, and a 12 in the bust — except of course that size 12 shirts haven’t fit me in six months. Except that one time, when it did. And I recently had to return a size 8 I ordered because it was too big. Of course, it should go without saying that whatever pants I get are 5 inches too long.
Talking to those athletic women who came out of our fitting rooms with armsfull of pants should’ve given me a clue.
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