Admittedly, I’m not the most observant person in the world, so it’s anybody’s guess how long my 10-year-old walked around looking like a fashion victim. But one day I took a good look at the outfit he was wearing and realized that both the pants and shirt fell a good two inches above where they were supposed to.
Not wanting to subject him to peer ridicule ahead of his scheduled introduction in a couple of years, I asked him to go upstairs and change into something that fit better. He came back downstairs in a different outfit with the same problem: both articles of clothing were simply too small.
So I went up to his closet myself to appraise his wardrobe and came up short, so to speak, of anything remotely suitable. Note to self: buy clothes for the boy.
It took a couple of days to work up the courage to undertake this particular assignment. Not only because it would require a substantial outlay of money to replace his entire wardrobe, but because he has an increasingly rare condition: he’s thin.
Fortunately for him in the long-run, he’s a mini-me of my father: tall and slender with an athlete’s build (don’t even get me started on why some genes skip generations, while others—like the inability to program anything digital—do not).
Unfortunately for me now, his waist is, like, two inches around, and any pants that fit his inseam are too big in the waist. This means I can’t go shopping without Jesse there to try everything on, and anyone who’s tried to shop with a fifth grade boy knows why it took days to work up the courage to do so—even with my husband along for moral support.
Since Jess practically lives in track pants, I tried to hunt down some suitable contenders. I’ve discovered that track pants are to middle school kids what little black dresses are to women: dress them up, dress them down—they take you from daytime to evening with ease. In Jesse’s case, trackies easily transition from math class to a sweaty soccer field.
You would think track pants would be ideal for his build, right? Not so much. The elastic is rarely tight enough to avoid exposing his Fruit of the Looms. On the hanger, the fact that these pants aren’t going to fit isn’t apparent to the untrained eye. My husband thought he’d found some trackies that might work and, despite my protests to the contrary, asked Jesse to try them on. Needless to say, both boys came back from the dressing room defeated, and I resigned myself to continuing the hunt.
Two hours later, a pair of trackies that fit was located. Shouts of joy could be heard far and near, and I bought three pairs of them.
Next up were jeans. Again, what’s so difficult about jeans, you might wonder? Weren’t belts invented for the purpose of keeping pants up? First, Jesse isn’t crazy about belts—maybe because he’s had to wear them since he was three. Secondly, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what a pair of too-loose jeans look like when they’ve been tightly belted, but it isn’t pretty—and it definitely isn’t cool.
The solution to this problem is a fairly new invention: jeans with internal adjustable waists. If you aren’t familiar with them, on the inside of the waist is an elastic panel that can be adjusted, using buttons, to make the pants fit tighter or looser. It’s brilliant, but it’s also used mostly by companies like Gap. Which means I have to buy my son $40 jeans that he’s going to wear for approximately two months.
These are the growing pains your pediatrician doesn’t tell you about. But on the bright side, I only have—what?—10 more years of outfitting him? And maybe, with the help of multiple daily desserts, he’ll gain some weight along the way and make the process easier for his mother. TPW