But I love, love, LOVE striped clothes. I have two kinds of shirts in my closets. Shirts with stripes and shirts with one solid color. When I find a style I like, I buy every single color. If I find a style with stripes, I buy every single color of stripes. My closet looks like I ran into the closest Old Navy, grabbed all I could from the table nearest the door, and somehow got all the way home with it all without getting arrested.* The other half, Jay's half, full of dress shirts and golf polos, looks like The Mens Wearhouse and Tiger Woods met and exploded. He likes simplicity. He yearns for the days gone by when clothes could be chosen, not by matching colors or styles, but by matching the Garanimal on each item. Yes, my husband
*Note to any potential Old Navy employees and/or officers of the law who may be reading this: I (probably) did *not* do this. I bought all of my stuff for realsies.
Some women find their opinions, ideas, thoughts, tastes, choices become strangely different when they are pregnant and/or have children. I, however, found things to be EXACTLY the same. Granted, the clothes I was buying were much, much too small for my fat pregnant ass, but I bought every single onesie, shirt, shorts, socks in stripes. If I walked by a rack of baby clothes and something on it was striped, into my basket it went and home to hang in the child's closet it lived out its happy striped life. Each one of my kids were dressed from infancy through toddlerhood in stripes.
As they started getting older, however, the number of striped clothes didn't decrease, but the actual wearing of such items by the ingrates did. Left in the back of the closet were my personally selected striped clothes, already forgotten and replaced with Nike t-shirts and newly developed taste in all things gray (little Ryan), funny (little Justin), and orange, preferably dirty (little Branden). As they or Jay would clean out closets, discarding my beloved stripes into the Goodwill bag, many times I'd make a final Hail Mary by digging them out and then putting them back in the FRONT of the closet. I was hoping the instant visual would give it better appeal, but there was also that teensy part of me that even hoped maybe the fear of having something discarded from his child-sized closet yet hauntingly showing back up would scare him enough to wear it, even if only due to outright fear. Alas, no one was scared by creepy back-from-the-dead clothes, nor was Jay confused or surprised by my action. Turns out he would ALSO do a recheck to find what he knew I'd taken out of the Goodwill bag and put back so that he could get them back and put them back AGAIN into the Goodwill bag. This is usually when he also made that hurried trip TO Goodwill to make sure there would be no more takes backsies.
So my kids are all older and I no longer pick their clothes, but I realize now nurture still beats nature. My oldest son, graduated from high school, now 18 and officially an adult, spent 2-1/2 weeks in AZ with my parents. When he returned to show off the many things he bought while there, I almost broke down and cried when I saw EVERY. SINGLE. SHIRT. WAS. STRIPED! At least one child was paying attention, and I couldn't be more proud. A leopard may change his spots, but a child of mine never, ever ditches the stripes.
