Anyhoodle, the other day I received an email from superfantastic reader Rachel:

Dear Miss Plumcake,

I apologize if you covered this before on Manolo for the Big Girls, but I am looking for some nice sleepwear (and I think others who are plus sized and not 21 any more might appreciate). I’m looking for something pretty, made with fabrics found in nature and something I can actually sleep in. Any advice you could give would be much appreciated.

Thank you.
Rachel

From personal experience I got nothin’.

I am what my baby brother used to call a “wuff sweeper.”

Try as I might, I cannot find a nightie, jimjam or other form of nocturnal costuming that doesn’t end up wrapped around my throat or lodged irretrievably in one of my more tender nooks and crannies after just an hour or so of sleep. If I attempt to sleep in anything more substantial than moisturizer, I risk serious self-injury, and frankly that is NOT something I want to explain to emergency responders, especially not in Spanish.

Pretty and nice are subjective as is something you can “actually sleep in”, and “not 21 anymore” covers a lot of ground, so the best I can do is offer my one feeble suggestion and open it up to the crowd.

I have heard good things from people whose taste and style I respect about Eileen West sleepwear.

She does old-fashioned nightgowns and pajamas that might fit the bill.

I don’t find them particularly alluring, but I think some of them could possibly fit the description of pretty if you cast your net wide enough. Also Vermont Country Store seems to offer Eileen West as well as a few other purveyors of olde-tymey sleepwear.

So okay girls, open your pajama drawers and help Rachel out.

Just a quick note: Will the young lady who contacted me  for fashion advice about her friend’s wedding in New York please contact me again via email or Facebook message?

I was halfway through what I will admit is a thoughtful and entertaining response when I realized I had an important and unanswered question. I’ve tried responding through the contacts I have, so if you still want advice, please contact me.

Gin and Tonics,

Miss Plumcake

Mother’s Day in the United States is upon us –it was yesterday here in Mexico– and we’ve been discussing the complex mother/daughter relationship all week.

I know this has been a particularly hard time for some of my readers.

Maybe I’m more sensitive to it myself this year as a close friend lost her mother recently, but for many –myself included– the second Sunday in May is not always filled with the happiest of feelings.

Some of us have lost our mothers through death, and some of us through methods more subtle but possibly just as painful.

I’ve received some emails –the readers have requested anonymity and I’ll respect their wishes, though I’ll never be able to compete with their eloquence– asking for advice on how to deal with mothers who don’t exactly merit the card-and-corsage treatment.

Obviously I’m not a therapist, although I HAVE seen that dishy Gabriel Byrne play one on TV, so I’m not sure how much wisdom I’ll be able to impart, but hey, it’s either that or talking about how I burned my finger this morning (hint: hot glass looks deceptively like cold glass) so let me give it a go:

Sometimes you get dealt a bum hand. You just do. So you rub some dirt in it (by “dirt” I mean therapy, meditation, medication, shoes or a combination of all four) and walk it off. It’s not fun and it’s not pretty, but there it is.

See, as much as we’d like to believe our appearance would be enough to make previously incapable people rise to the occasion, that’s not necessarily how it works. There’s no qualifying exam to getting knocked up and just because your mom or my mom or whoever’s mom managed to get her Ivanka trumped doesn’t mean she’s going to be a good or even loving mother. That’s not something everyone’s capable of; myself, perhaps, included.

I don’t have kids because I don’t think I’d be that great a mother.

I’m a reasonably decent person according to the people I pay to say that, but you know how some people yearn for years about having a baby? Smelling them, washing them, tucking them in at night? The only thing I’ve felt like that about was a pair of green Dior heels, and they didn’t even come in my size.

So I play Auntie Mame and in the evening when I’ve sent those blessed bundles to their respective homes, I say a thankful prayer to Saint NuvaRing and drift off to a gentle, uninterrupted slumber.

But, you know, a woman’s right to control her reproductive destiny hasn’t always been as easy or socially accepted as it is now.

Sometimes women who were never suited to be mothers, who never WANTED to be mothers *poof* became mothers.

Passing a toaster through a light socket doesn’t automatically bestow a woman with magical Donna Reed powers. Some women don’t have the parenting tool in their toolbox and yet they’re still expected to fix that leaky toilet (oh what, like comparing a child to a leaky toilet is the worst analogy I’ve ever made? It’s not even the worst analogy I’ve made in this post.)

And sometimes your mother simply is, to quote the great French Age of Enlightenment thinker François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, “crazier than a sack of ferrets.”*

But fear not my friends, plenty of respectable people have socks on wire hangers for mothers, challenging maternal situations. The key is to remember there is just as much to learn from a bad example as a good (see also: hot glass v. cold glass): It’s just a lot more painful.

Many of my best qualities –not that there are all that many to choose from– were developed as an equal and opposite reaction to those things I saw as a child and said “That’s not gonna be me” including:

• my feminism

• my general disinclination-to-the-point-of-revulsion to willful neediness/helplessness

• my independence

• trust in my own critical processes (my definition of right is not “anything opined by someone with balls”)

• my refusal to believe beauty hinges on a number

• my understanding that approval can be nice but is rarely necessary

• my unwillingness to spend a lifetime as Professional Victim (and distaste for those who do)

…and most of all my unshakable, unerring knowledge of my own worth that has allowed me to walk away from bad relationships, friendships and situations (or, you know, not get into them in the first place) before they sucked me in, took me down and just generally screwed me up.

So, dear readers who eat cold spaghetti out of the container when the rest of the world is at mediocre prix fixe brunch drinking watery mimosas and eating wedge salads even though it hasn’t been 1972 for some time now, I invite you to write your own list.

Don’t dwell on what they did wrong, focus on what you do right. Write it down, keep it in a safe place and revisit it each year.

I invite you to share your lists here, if it helps, and remember…don’t touch hot glass twice!

*He probably didn’t actually say this

With the thin mother, I could see the struggles that come with obliviousness. Their slim bodies act a certain way when fed and watered normally, why shouldn’t it be the same for their daughter’s young form? I can also imagine a mother whose tiny dress size has always been a point of pride being disappointed or embarrassed at their daughter’s less-than-svelte body.

On the other hand, if you’re a chubby kid and big momma is constantly complaining about her fat thighs and bouncing from cabbage soup this to meal replacement shake that in an effort to drop “the weight”, congratulations:  odds are you’re going to be her de facto diet buddy until you finagle your way to an out-of-state college.

Sometimes it’s difficult to have empathy for these characters.

After all, I’m going to venture onto a very sturdy limb and say many if not most big girls who struggle with disordered eating patterns learned it at the feet of their fad dieting mothers. And let’s not even get into the body hate projection, the screwed up approach to self-worth and all the rest of the stuff that’s put our therapists’ kids through private school.

Still, a little compassion is in order.

Our mothers didn’t have the size-acceptance community we do for support. They might not have even known liking themselves just as they are was even an option, much less have a place where they could rage, share and occasionally get some sense lovingly –if virtually– slapped into them.

Besides, their mothers might’ve been pieces of work themselves, this stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum you know and it wasn’t too long ago that most of the western world was on food rations. I know my grandmother very nearly starved during the Great Depression and she kept a lifelong eating disorder and a raging case of fat hate as unfortunate souvenirs.

I’ve got nothing but sympathy –okay, almost nothing but sympathy– for women whose sense of personal value is so tenuous that a swing of the scale can make a difference between love and shame. I can only imagine how difficult it is not to pass it on to their children.

I do believe most mothers truly want the best for their children. For every Joan Crawford doppelganger, there are hundreds of well-intentioned moms who inflicted harm not out of cruelty, but out of their own human brokenness. They did what they thought was best using the tools they had at the time and although I’m sure we could spend ages comparing ridiculous and painful war stories, the best WE can do is forgive our mothers, learn from them and not make the same mistakes.

What do you think? I know it’s a sensitive subject, but I’m particularly interested in hearing how those of you who’ve struggled over size with your mother have forgiven, moved on and developed a new, healthier relationship…or not.

Be mindful when posting your medical information online.

Now obviously when Twistie asked readers to post their strangest diagnoses, she wasn’t mining your information for blackmail fodder to be stored in the bowel-iest bowels of Miss Plumcake’s Volcano Dream Lair until such a time as your creepy skin condition/antiquated disease/atrophied Siamese twin can be monetized for personal gain. And no, that’s not just because Miss Plumcake’s Volcano Dream Lair doesn’t technically exist. Although it totally should.

I’m proud of the unusually tight-knit relationships this kooky blog has engendered over the years, and when you post and comment with the same invisible friends year after year it’s easy to drop your guard. No big deal, except you’re not just having a casual chat here on the island of misfatty toys; you’re publishing, and when you’re on a public blog like this one, there’s no way to unring the Google Cache bell. It’s like herpes and menudo breath: You’re stuck with it for life.

Twistie’s ethical and I’m lazy, but there’s nothing saying nefarious nogoodniks –or worse, your employer’s (or potential employer’s) human resource department– won’t use their Google Fu to track down every scrap of laundry you’ve left draped around the internet’s chandeliers, dirty or otherwise if it’s of benefit to them. Illegal and unethical to be sure, but don’t think it doesn’t happen. And if comment tracking isn’t possible now, who’s to say it won’t be neat new feature in the coming years?

If you’d like me to delete your comments in the name of damage control, shoot me an email and consider it evaporated, just you know, be careful out there. And while we’re at it, you might want to get a cream for that rash.

Posting is going to be a teensy slow this week as Lappy 6000 is finally going into the shop to have her keyboard replaced after last December’s unfortunate scorpion incident.

If you recall,  an unwelcome barb-tailed beastie presented itself in my bed, scaring what can only be medically described as the bejeezus out of me and causing me to knock over a glass of water onto my laptop, an act for which several of my keyboard keys have not yet forgiven  me.

After last week’s terrific conversation about feminism, I just didn’t want to plop us back down to shiny shoes and pretty clothes (although I do love shiny shoes and pretty clothes, and have some very exciting news about jeans for my long-waisted curvy sisters later this week) so I thought I’d open up today’s comments as a sort of catch-all forum for what’s been on your mind.

Recently I’ve been thinking about cravings.

I’m still convalescing from the stupid cholera (I know! That is, as my friend said, some “straight up Oregon Trail bulls**t”) that laid me low almost two weeks ago and although in an act of pure bravery I ate some very thin cauliflower soup yesterday, solid food is probably another day or two away.

Yet I am craving potato chips the way crack addicts crave, well…crack.

I tend to crave salty over sweet anyway, I have low sodium so I guess that makes sense, but potato chips –Grandma Utz’s being the superior variety– are always #1 with a kettle-fried bullet on my list of constant cravings.

Other recurring characters are:

• Seaweed Salad: probably my #3 craving after Coca Cola and potato chips
• Mexican Coca Cola: made with cane sugar, served in a freezing bottle
• Buttered Toast: Buttered before toasting, of course, with a sprinkling of (you guessed it) salt
• Utz’s Cheese Balls: the zenith of cheezy poof achievement
• Mango: I do myself a gastrointestinal disservice at least once a year gorging on delicious ripe mangoes. A dusting of curry is nice, too.

Do you have cravings, constant or otherwise? Put it –or anything else you’ve got on your beautiful mind– in the comments.

I’ll do my best to respond to any comment directed at me, so if you have a question you’d like me to answer specifically, be sure to direct it to @MissPlumcake.

Other than when I’m clothes shopping or that brief moment of anxiety approaching an unusually narrow turnstile or arm chair, I don’t really think about my fat much at all.

For example:

I’m grateful for my Big Girl status now that I live in Mexico because it makes me potentially harder to kidnap.

Before you get all up on my magical-thinking Kool-Aid, I know there’s a whole mess of flawed logic that goes into this, not the least which is kidnapping isn’t a problem in my state.

Still, I imagine potential abductors seeing me –almost certainly bigger than they are in every regard and clearly able to cause some damage, not to mention the difficulty of transporting me– and opting for some smaller victim, at least until the day they can ransom by the kilo.

I’m also grateful for being fat when it comes to dating.

No, seriously.

I read Kate at Eat the Damn Cake’s hackle-raising article  The Chunky/Gorgeous Woman on the Subway and was flooded with borrowed anxiety and personal relief.

At one point Kate, a woman who was once quite thin and is now merely slender with the most adorable hint of belly, butt and boobs pointed out a gorgeous woman on the subway.

Her husband dismissed the woman as “chunky”.

Kate told him:

“It’s just hard. I am a lot heavier now. And the whole world is full of people who say ‘chunky.’ I am chunky. I am chunky and beautiful. And even if you don’t think I’m chunky—I want to be able to be chunky. I want to be able to gain more weight without having to feel ugly. And I don’t want it to be because I have a pretty face.”

Anxiety because I cannot imagine being in a relationship where my partner’s attraction to me would balance so precariously on body size with a relatively small margin of error, and relief because, for the most part, my larger-than-life size kicks those unacceptable applicants from the Get-Inside-My-Jeans pool before they’ve even inflated their floatie wings.

I’m sure Kate’s husband Bear would love and be attracted to her regardless of size, but I know of so many relationships where I’d be willing to bet my life savings (which you know means giving up my dreams of a bionic liver) that a woman’s weight gain of 30 pounds would spell splitsville for the couple.

Meanwhile, it’s been my experience men who are attracted to bigger bodies have a wider appreciation for variation and a swing of 30 pounds in either direction might not even register as long as she still packs an extra scoop in her sundae and her hourglass –provided she had one in the first place– still tells time.

Case in point:

When I went back to Austin in July to tell my stunned friends and family I was selling the Cadillac and moving to live on the beach in Mexico, there was a lot of cake.

There was International Move Stress Cake, Too Sick To Eat Anything Else Cake, Better Eat This Because They Don’t Have Real Texas Sheet Cake in Baja Cake, Goodbye We’ll Miss You Cake, Are You Really Sure You Want To Do This Cake, Vague Racist References to White Slave Trade Cake, New Birth Control Makes Me Want To Eat Everything Cake, Wake Up in the Middle of the Night Wondering If They Really Do Have Donkey Shows in Tijuana* Cake…I think you get the picture.

The upshot was, I gained 30 pounds from July to January.

I knew this wouldn’t bother Hot Latin Boy, my body has done crazy things since we met (and not just in the dirty way, though also totally in the dirty way) but since my vanity knows no limits, I was concerned the small stable of admirers I’d collected during my previous stay wouldn’t find me as attractive.

I still wasn’t going to give ‘em any, but I still wanted them to want it.

And they did, so the Duchess of Neediness-Two-Bourbons was satisfied for another day.

Which isn’t to say my dating history as Professional Fat Girl has been all Ativan-covered roses.

Just like the FDA allows a certain number of grasshopper parts in your peanut butter, any romantic career spanning over a decade has to allow its share of freaks, pervs, fetishists and nogoodniks who spread rumors about you and several members of the Episcopal clergy having  such loud and enthusiastic orgies (clorgies?) at conventions that a bishop had to pass a resolution to make you bite the pillow. Fantastic had it been true –you can’t buy that sort of press– but more than a little worrisome when made up by someone whose five year plan includes the hope of ever seeing you topless.

I’d like to think most healthy relationships allow room for both partners to change both emotionally and physically, and that most of the men who  can’t find beauty in anything but the narrowest of spectrums end up broadening their horizons or weeding themselves out of the DNA buffet, but I know my size has let me dodge that bullet many times and for that…plus the whole kidnapping thing (hey, it’s worked so far)…I am grateful.

*They don’t. It’s a scam invented by enterprising taxi drivers in Tijuana’s red light district to take advantage of drunk tourists. They drive around racking up the fare, pretending they’re looking for the illegal event that is forever on the move, finally dropping the boozy pervs off at a barnyard animal-free strip club/brothel with which the drivers have an arrangement, but not before lightening their wallets considerably.

Work is hard to find here, especially for those who didn’t have access to a high school education, and doubly so for women, many (most?) of whom are responsible for raising at least one if not several children, not necessarily just their own.

Many women here learned how to sew out of necessity.

Farther south on the mainland the embroidery done by Oaxacan women is beautiful, intricate and justifiably spendy but almost any abuela will be able to whip up a simple dress in her kitchen using a treadle machine (they still sell those here).

It turns out a simple dress is exactly what I need.

Were I not completely hopeless when it comes to all needle vs thread endeavors, I bet I could draft the pattern with relative ease.

A fitted sweetheart bustier-style bodice with thick straps –adjustable to either tie as a halter or attach criss-cross at the back via hidden buttons– would give way to a wide set-in waist and blossom out to a very full skirt just below the knee.

Something like these from Dolce & Gabbana’s Spring 2012 rtw show, except you know, not see through or a two-piece. Okay, at least not a two-piece.

Yes, I realize I could get this made in China for practically no money.

Heck I could probably buy it off eBay for less than the materials might cost me, but there’s a wonderful woman I’ve come to know here and when it rains her whole family sleeps huddled together because it’s the only place where the corrugated tin ceiling doesn’t leak.

Much.

She has agreed to make me some dresses, I just have to provide her with the fabric.

I’m not sure whether she’ll want a pattern as well, I assume she does, which is why I’m coming to you.

Will someone, anyone, point me in the direction of a true plus-sized pattern that fits my specs? Heck, will someone point me in the direction of any plus size patterns at all that aren’t unendurably mumsy and frumped out? I know they’ve got to be out there. Vintage reproductions maybe?

Barring that, does anyone have a place they particularly like for apparel-quality fabric? I’m particularly looking for retro or novelty prints. A girl’s got to have a sense of whimsy, right?

I’d be forever in your debt.

I also think it’s reasonable to expect, if not service with a (usually fake) smile, at least service without being treated like you’re a nose-dropping clinging to the most offensive hair of Benito Mussolini’s mustache. Call me old-fashioned.

Maybe she was jealous that a foreign fatty landed such a weapons grade hottie (when the fact is, of course, HE landed ME) and took him out of the dating pool.

Maybe she didn’t like Americans, although it should be noted that I can and do speak borderline lovely Spanish and do my best to counteract the myriad Ugly Americans who’ve retired here and STILL manage to be big racist jerks even while living as a guest in a foreign country.

Maybe her cat died or her feet hurt or I reminded her of her third-grade math teacher who didn’t let her go to the bathroom during a timed multiplication test which resulted in Severe Unpleasantness that she remembers, most often in nightmares, to this day. Uh, just an example.

It doesn’t really matter.

I remember working at the newspaper and there was a woman I just knew as Barbie.

An immaculately-groomed blonde ponytail (expensively reblonded every three weeks) swinging to the middle of her back, perfectly straight school girl bangs, cute girly dresses, stilettos at all times. She was clearly invested in looking like Barbie and even though she was just a little past the age where it looked effortless, Barbie was her aesthetic and Barbie she would be.

For years I vaguely disliked her. She worked in sales, the professional bastion of the former cheer captain, and I had no love for the mostly vapid fembot employees who stayed for three months before bouncing their ponytails to a pharmaceutical rep company, but year after year, Barbie stuck around.

Once I commented on her shoes, which were nicer than the good-enough-for-retail-work Nine Wests she usually pranced through the office. She said they were Isaac Mizrahi, but didn’t know how to pronounce Mizrahi. I found it endearing.

A year or so later on a particularly cold day I asked her where she stored her fur coat in the summer. The lynx had recently come into my life and it would need professional cold storage when May rolled around.

She grabbed the lapel of her mink stroller and announced “It’s carpet!”

With that we were pals. Not friends per se, but chat-in-the-elevator, what-are-you-doing-this-weekend work pals.

I had just assumed that any woman whose personal style icon was Barbara Millicent Roberts: plastic doll, would be so deep into the Fat Hate Rabbit Hole that she wouldn’t want to be in the same room with me, lest thighs that touch in the middle prove contagious.

I’ve never had that problem with men, thinking they automatically disliked me.

The one exception was years ago when a good-looking jock yelled “Hey Fatface!” over and over again from across the street, clearly trying to get my attention. I was incandescent until I realized I knew him from the dog park and he was talking to my Sharpei whose magnificently pendulous jowls earned him that term of endearment weeks before. Oops.

Both the fitness model Bulgarian and Hot Latin Boy have told me about their troubles getting big girls to go out with them because the gals in question thought they were either playing a joke or just being cruel. That’s heartbreaking on a whole mess of levels.

It’s just the girls.

I thought I’d open up a question for the weekend.

Whether you subscribe to a Big Girl Code, do you implicitly expect the opposite treatment from stereotypically attractive slim people? Is it justified or just the specter of middle school/high school/college rearing its ugly head?

Let a girl know and have a great weekend!

I realize this might be more for the size 18 and above than our inbetweenies but ever since the big girl scowled and slumped her way through our service at the Russian museum and restaurant (which, if you’ll recall, was not Russian, a museum nor a restaurant) it’s been tickling the back of my mind.

Of course one grumpy swallow does not a bitchy summer make.

Maybe she’d had a bad day or was just a generally unpleasant person. It can’t possibly be that she didn’t like ME. I’m totally likable until you get to know me. Still, I’ve come to realize I expect a little something extra in the way of friendliness or conversation when a fellow fatty crosses my path.

On one hand I sort of know that’s unreasonable. I don’t expect a thing from my fellow tall or pale girls. On the other, I do slightly expect –and receive– the silent shoe-check of appreciation from other divinely-shod members of society.

I’m always a bit chummier with a big girl, as if we’re both members of some sorority, Alpha Gamma Thigh Chafe or something and I always always go out of my way to be nice to chubby kids.

It’s not that I have an unnatural desire to be Auntie Mame (I totally do) or even that I like children all that much, but because despite personally having a relatively easy time of it at school teasing-wise, I know how much the constant comments from well-meaning –or more appropriately,”well-meaning”– family members can wear on a person’s young Play Doh-like soul.

It can mess a girl up.

I remember the It Gets Better campaign that resonated so deeply with the gay community and wish someone had taken me aside and told me it was even possible to have a rewarding job, loving friend, an enviable sense of self, a million pretty shoes and Get The Guy all while being what is medically referred to as a “fatty fatty two-by-four”.

Not guaranteed, nothing in life is guaranteed except for death and the fact that some guy will bang on your window trying to sell you a lace tablecloth, a giant glittery Betty Boop dressed up as the Virgin of Guadalupe (and if THAT doesn’t illustrate the infamous and widespread Madonna/Whore dichotomy, I don’t know what does), a ceramic turtle AND some churros while you’re waiting to cross the border back into the United States, just possible.

So what do you think? Is it reasonable to expect the club handshake from a big-boned sister or is this just one of many examples of Miss Plumcake spending too much time in the South where almost everyone is a friendly as a demented golden retriever (I’m not saying we’re nicer, but charm counts, especially in concealed weapon states)?