underwear do's and don'ts

Scene: just before dinner time, outside with my in-laws. It is HOT here, despite our being in Northern Michigan! All my shorts are dirty (and I mean wet, sandy, and crunchy, not just dirty from having been worn a few times), and I am unsuccessfully trying to roll up a pair of longer Capri pants that I have so I can at least breathe during dinner. “I wish I had some shorts to wear,” I sigh.

P helpfully suggests, “Why don’t you wear boxers? You can wear some of mine.”

I seriously consider this for a second before realizing how strange that will look, eating with my in-laws, outside, wearing boxers. “To dinner?” I ask. He thinks for a second. “Well, over your panties, of course.”

At this point one of my SILs and I break out laughing.

On warm nights actually, this is my pajama ensemble of choice—boxers over underwear, and a T-shirt a few sizes too big. P knows this, which is of course why he suggests this. But there is, I think, something about the word “panties” that makes such an outfit seem much more intimate that it looks. My grandmother used this word a lot when my cousins were little… for all I know she used it when my brother and I were little, too. She used it not just for underwear, but to infantilize both the word “pants” and the inhabitant of said pants, whether that inhabitant were male or female. “Gotta put those PANT-ies ON!” she would say with a little jostle of her fists.

One of baby-j’s favorite books right now is by Todd Parr: Underwear Do's and Don’ts (regardless of the strange punctuation). The first line? “Do have lots of different kinds of underwear. Don’t wear it all at once.”