“Oh. My. God! Do you remember these?!” My older sister exclaimed, holding up a blue pair of dungarees from the GAP. They had been the only things we had both worn when we were younger; mine were red, and hers were blue.
We sat there giggling and reminiscing for a while, and then went back to digging through our mum’s trunk which was full of our old clothes. Every single piece of clothing we found brought memories, both good and bad rushing back.
There was the purple flower girl dresses we had worn to our uncle’s wedding; the dungarees; our baby blankets; and some hideous brown shoes that mum had forced me to wear to school. When I saw them I nearly cried! I had hated those shoes so much that I would purposefully try to scuff them up so she would buy me new shoes, but it had never worked.
Whilst we sat there searching for more laughs, I began thinking about how children were dressing nowadays.
There had been several occasions where I had been in shops and seen things like ‘Jeggings’ in sizes made for children, and thought to myself ‘I would NEVER let my daughter wear those!’ Some of the clothes being produced for children nowadays were so inappropriate; it was like their designers had never heard of paedophiles!
It seemed like we were going back to the era when children were classed as ‘mini-adults’, and you couldn’t tell the difference between them and an adult.
As a child, I didn’t remember ever wearing a pair of leggings, or an extremely short skirt. I could only remember revealing clothing when we went to the beach or were on holiday. There was no need for it at other times.
At the bottom of the trunk laid one last item; a humongous blue coat that I had worn to school and been called ‘The Big Blue Whale’ for about 6 weeks. It was during my last year of primary school, back in the days when I was still a fatty. Those had been the worst 6 weeks of my life EVER.
Eventually they had stopped, and found someone else to ridicule but it still hurt. It was what had spurred me on to lose all my ‘puppy fat’ by the time I had reached thirteen.
The bullies nearly fell over when they saw me.
