I’ll be blunt and embarrassingly honest.
For years, even when I was thin, my thighs rubbed together and chafed when I wore dresses. Chafing is painful, and healing inner thigh chafing is difficult.
This happens to me because of the anatomy of my pelvis and thigh bones. I hate it.
So I would wear pantyhose, which were horribly uncomfortable and almost always got a run within a few minutes after I put them on, and by the end of a day or maybe a week, ended up in tatters. So I had to spend more money on pantyhose–grrr.
Tights were not much better. When I was in my 20s back in the 70s, it was difficult to find tights. We take the Internet for granted today, but back then, looking for clothing that wasn’t mass-produced meant going to the library and looking through various catalogs and then placing a long-distance ($$) phone call to a company somewhere in New England, and placing an order during that call, with no idea whether the size would actually fit or not.
Also, in the Midwest, dresses/skirts and flimsy tights were FREEZING! We walked to school, and even though it was only a few blocks (not 12 miles uphill both ways), it was still very cold.
One other problem I had with dresses is my huge feet–I wore Size 10 in 6th grade, and it was really hard for me to find shoes that looked “pretty” with dresses and skirts. I missed out on the “saddle shoes” era–I was a teen in the “Penny Loafer” era, and girl loafers didn’t fit me, so I had to buy boy loafers. A lot of bullies made fun of my “clodhopper shoes,” as they called them. As for finding boots–I could never wear the “shoe boots” that were in style back then, so I was very glad when “Snowmobile Boots” became fashionable in my Junior/Senior years of high school and throughout college.
Now that I am older, my feet are a size 12, and one of the feet is somewhat deformed due surgery to repair a long-broken posterior tibialis tendon, so even the size 12s don’t fit that foot well. “Pretty” shoes are out of the question. I wear men’s tennis shoes all the time. They don’t look good with dresses. I don’t like this and if I could change anything about my body, it would be my huge, ungainly feet.
So when our Dean of Girls at my Junior High School announced that from this day forward, girls could wear slacks to school–hundreds of us girls waiting in the hallway for her announcement CHEERED, and from that day forward, I never wore a dress or skirt to school again. I wore them to church (until everyone started wearing slacks to church), and to special occasions like recitals. But that’s it.
(continued next post)
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
Ballet flats= graceful lady. My beloved cowboy boots= tromping around with the confidence of a western outlaw.
