Day 83-96: Women's clothing

Perhaps I should call this "The Great Clean-Out of Ought Seven." In which I decide to tackle the disaster that is my clothing storage situaion.

The first day i tackled this project I really thought I could get it done in a day, at most two. I merely intended to sort through my wardrobe and get rid of stuff I don't wear; how hard could it be and how long could *that* take?

Well, it turns out to be much harder than expected, and to take seven times as long as I thought. First of all, there is nothing a young child hates more than to see his mother engrossed in an activity, any activity, from the sublime (reading a fantastic, can't-bear-to-put-it-down novel) to the tedious (sorting clothes). They will do anything, and I do mean anything, to turn mama's attention back where it belongs: firmly focused on the little cherubim. Suffice it to say I was generally able to sort, organize and triage one shelf's worth of clothing at a time, and having begun a shelf I was lucky to even finish it in one session.

Since I have five cupboards with three shelves each plus one cupboard with six slide-out trays this exercise could have potentially taken 21 days to complete, but I got lucky during one afternoon when Cole took a freakishly long nap and Jack was at school. That day I managed to knock out five shelves in one session. It felt goooo-oood. I really wanted to tell people about it, perfect strangers even, but then there was no one I could think of who would recognize this for the significant accomplishment that it is, and so I kept silent.

Some days it was easy to decide what to keep and what to discard, and some it was not. I think a lot of that has to do with frame of mind; on devil-may-care days I may have tossed some things that I will ultimately regret giving away. There were a few days when almost nothing I came across seemed worth keeping, and a day or two when everything seemed too good to give up. Considering that most of my clothing was purchased at thrift stores and that I have owned much of it for a decade or longer, that second scenario is seriously unlikely.

Crappy, ill-fitting, out of style wardrobe or not, it was serious work to look at each item and decide its fate -- a process that was sometimes ridiculously difficult. Call it the tyranny of the potentially useful: for example, the grey tank top over which I agonized for a good five minutes. I had not worn in seven years, maybe even longer. But I could envision a time when i *might* wear it, and that is why it was so hard to toss it in the donation bin. Multiply that grey tank top by at least 100 other potential occasion-worthy wardrobe items and you start to get a picture of how I spent the last two weeks: standing in my bedroom, staring at my clothes.

I decided to collapse the process into one blog entry because, honestly, how much is there to say about day to day discarding of old turtlenecks? Although, on reflection, some of my own decisions surprised me: the giant, dowdy khaki shorts stayed, the hip pencil-leg J. Crew cords went. Is it a sign of maturity that I recognize comfort as being more important than style, or is this the gateway to elastic waist pants and orthopedic shoes?

In the end, I did get rid of about a third of my wardrobe. Some conclusions: I am no longer a size 4 and will never be again. I own waaaaay too much black clothing. But the ultimate question remains: How can I own so many pairs of jeans and yet not one of them makes my ass look good?