Rained Out

It's weird how priorities change. I used to be a big makeup person, like, I wouldn't leave the house without it. I refused to even wear regular T-shirts with the round, high necklines because I thought they were baggy and unflattering. And I never wore a regular old ponytail, even on my casual hair days.
Well. How the mighty are fallen. Here I am, two years later, in my big 'ole T-shirt and baggy sweats, with my rain plastered hair in a tight ponytail, my face pale and colorless, and my prim schoolmarm glasses resting on my unpowdered nose. I don't have on so much as mascara. And here's the kicker: lots people saw me like this, and I only felt the tiniest bit self conscious!
Let me explain. Jim and I went to the Michigan game today- my first time at the Big House- and literally about ten minutes into the first quarter, it began pouring rain, the kind with big fat drops that startle you with their heaviness. I was not looking super anyways, since my contacts have been driving me crazy lately and I was already wearing the schoolmarm glasses. Plus my hair was in the ponytail, because after the baby, my number one priority is sleep, not getting up in time to style my hair. But I had on cute jeans, and was wearing some makeup. I was not wholly disgusting yet.
Then came the rain, splattering my glasses and sending my mascara in rivulets down my cheeks, which were already splotchy with the remains of my blush and concealer. My glasses got so soaked I had to take them off, so I got to climb the bleachers, blind as a bat, behind thousands of people as we made our way oh so slowly out of the stadium.
You will recall that I was wearing jeans. Well, now I was wearing wet jeans. Not just damp- my clothes were so soaked you would have thought I had been the volunteer at one of those dunking booths. Jim was in a similiar situation. So after the half hour it took to emerge from the stadium, we had to stand in line another half hour to get into the M Den and purchase entirely new outfits for each of us (because there was no way I was riding home with soaked denim plastered to my chubby thighs.) Nothing like enjoying only an eighth of the game, then getting to purchase lots of overpriced team logo apparrel that you don't really want!
Then came the treat of making the seemingly endless trek back to our car, still in our soaked clothes since the line for the restrooms at the stadium was miles long. I can sum up that walk in one word: chafing. Oh wait, three more words: wet tennis shoes.
Finally, about a hundred yards from our car, we found a private area behind a building, shrouded in tall shrubbery, where we could wriggle free of our disgusting drenched clothes and change into our fresh Michigan sweatpants and T-shirts. That was another fun experience, standing guard for each other as we stripped down in the middle of Ann Arbor. It felt like it took about five minutes to peel off those stupid jeans.
Anyways. It was not the fun outing I had anticipated. And I just felt so gross, you know? I probably looked like a drowned rat wearing spectacles. But I didn't really think about it that much. I just wanted to be dry and comfortable again- who cared about reapplying makeup or fixing my hopeless hair?
That may have been the first time in my life since I was sixteen years old that I was thinking about comfort over beauty while in public. A real milestone, in a way. Perhaps I have finally become an adult! Who knows, I may even venture to the grocery store without lipstick one of these days.