What’s wrong with being sexist…uhhh, I mean sexy?
Living the life of a temporary single parent has it’s many challenges. At the root of all those challenges is lack of time. There are so many things that I would like to do with and for my kids right now that I just don’t have enough hours in the day to accomplish.
Since my kids were little my wife has always made my kids costumes around Halloween time. I say “Halloween time” because we don’t actually celebrate the holiday, but our church always provides a great way for the kids to dress up and have fun. Call me a overly-cautious, but I am trying to teach my kids to not be afraid, to be strong but not violent and to not allow extreme violence and the “dark side of the world” to be become a source of entertainment, and this particular day contradicts these values I am trying instill- but I digress. She is quite creative and they always look great. The problem is I don’t share this talent, but, of course, that doesn’t mean my sons will agree to skip the festivities. So I did what alot of people do and went out in search of a polyester-based alter-egos for the two of them at our local retail establishments.
We ended up at Party City after fruitless visits to Target and JoAnn Fabric. My kids did find some inexpensive getups, but as I was looking up at the giant wall o’ costumes to choose from (you can view a picture of what they have and they will bring it out from the warehouse in the back), the choices for ladies all had the same thing in common: on any other day other than Halloween if you wear this costume in public you could possibly be mistaken for a stripper running an errand on your lunch break, so pressed for time you didn’t have time to throw on a robe or trenchcoat. Do most ladies want to dress this way that night? I know they many want to look good (and sexy), but I doubt that the average woman would look like the models showing these outfits off in the display photos.
Now many guys may be thinking that this is not something to complain about, but think of it this way. What if the only costumes available to us were ALL shirt-less. Can you imagine the average 30+ aged man showing up at the office as lifegaurd or a Roman gladiator? Of would if the choice was a doctor, but a shirt-less doctor. Or, you can be a baseball player, but a shirt-less baseball player. Or how about a shirt-less Darth Vader? You get the point. Makes you want start doing more crunches. So getting back to my lack of time issue, if I were a single mother without time to make a costume for myself I would have very few options.
January 28, 2008 at 4:32 pm
So, this single mother with little time on her hands grabbed an orange long sleeved shirt from Target, some black felt, safety pins, and scissors. I did spurge on some green hair spray but I think it would be good enough without that.
Quick cut out of triangles and toothy smile from the black felt, pinning in place on front of shirt and I became a Jack-o-lantern.
[With my son having been given a Jack Sparrow pirate costume, when walking together we could be considered a “pair of jacks!”