Work, Shirt
On March 12th, I assigned myself a uniform: my blue denim shirt. I needed something that was just right for the temperature inside the house in early spring. I needed something to signal daytime and the work of getting through one day of this or one thousand. I needed this one thing to be decided for the duration.
The blue denim shirt makes me feel like, I don’t know, I mean business? It’s denim, but it’s a collared shirt, so it’s a very particular kind of business. It’s a Rosie the Riveter shirt, if Rosie shopped at TJ Maxx.
Rosie’s business in her blue denim shirt was building airplanes to defeat Nazis. My business in my blue shirt now is subpar Montessori teacher rodeo clown hype woman. My business is Kindergarten app passwords snacks snacks snacks, screams, questions I can’t answer, little sad lonely sobs, my business is knock knock jokes is this ok am I doing today right and I don’t know when it will end or if you can go swimming or see nanna soon.
My business is sending probably-unhinged sounding emails to other women in their homes to see if any of them want to sell my book about an isolated, grieving family; either everyone will want to read that book in a year or two or no one will. My business is my incredible luck and privilege and fear.
This shirt is supposed to have little buttons that keep the sleeves rolled up, but they’re always flopping down. The blue denim shirt covers the top part of my Pixar-mom-ass a little bit, but not all the way, then it would be a shirt-dress situation, and no one needs that confusion about is-this-a-dress-or-is-it-a-shirt?
I feel solidarity when I see other women I admire at home in their blue denim shirts. Meghan Markle was wearing one, reading to Archie with her hair pulled back; Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Connie Schultz wore one in her social media pictures of her opening a box of her debut novel.
I like picking t-shirts to wear under the blue denim shirt from events and things that happened before, like women presidential candidates and art festivals, like band t-shirts with tour dates on the back. Imagine, tour dates.
On April 24th my husband asked nicely how I was doing, regarding the same blue denim shirt every day situation. He looked at me with the same casual yet concerned gaze he gave me the July I was nine months pregnant and wore an orange and white striped dress every single day. I actually had a hand-me-down box of clothes that had accumulated four orange and white striped dresses from four different pregnant ladies, but I had not told him about this funny coincidence, so to him they all looked the same, and I looked crazy.
On March 12th I had hyped up something to my daughters I called home camp and the girls had packed bags to take downstairs from their rooms and filled them with a Z-bars, apples, their own crayons, and a pencil. By April 24th I knew more about when to give in to despair, when to fend it off before it could take over with another hour or four of snuggles and a screen and a treat. We still do worksheets sometimes.
I said on April 24th to my husband that I’d chosen the blue denim shirt on March 12th and it wasn’t a coincidence, reminded him that Barack Obama ate the same thing for lunch every day on purpose to avoid decision fatigue, and said no I wasn’t ok but luckily I had the new Dixie Chicks album to look forward to in a week, so I was focusing on that.
Imagine, caring about the decisions you make so much that you conserve your decision-making-capacity. The Dixie Chicks album got postponed indefinitely.
My husband wears the same thing to work every day too: scrubs and a super tight mask. He means business too. I hang my blue shirt up at the end of the day and swap it for a stained gray hoodie like I’m Mr. Rogers when he leaves his little house and takes off the cardigan and Keds again. But I don’t leave.
Imagine, leaving.
Katie Runde has recent or forthcoming work in Storyscape, Pithead Chapel, Hobart, and Memoir Mixtapes. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and lives in Iowa City. Find her on Twitter @khrunde.