Ah luxury. It’s interesting how the definition changes.

Once upon a time, luxury for me meant a new Hermès or a call to my gal at Barneys in New York to get my hands on the latest and most exclusive Le Labo or Serge Lutens export.

Now luxury is toilet paper with anything resembling structural integrity.

Then vs. Now

Yet even in those heady days, I was still just a Career Girl in the newspaper industry.

What the dead tree biz lacked in job security it made up for in low wages, and my attempt to indulge in champagne tastes on a cava budget was not exactly effortless. Each glittering bottle of rarefied perfume, each instantly recognizable square orange box, represented weeks or months of sacrifices –most small, some large– in other parts of my life.

I call it my Luxury Tithe, a phrase I first heard from my friend Amy, author of the brilliant and sadly dormant Style Spy, as she diligently squirreled away a portion of her pay each week to save for a pair of Miu Miu sandals or a trip to her beloved Paris.

The eminently tithe-worthy Alexander McQueen Seasonal Satchel, click picture for link

I’m happier in Scotland than on the Seine and Miu Miu sandals rarely fit my feet (not that it matters since I refuse to support Miuccia Prada anyway after her fatty-firing opera stunt) but aside from the ideas of paying cash and not living beyond your means as just good sense, I had two reasons to start my own luxury tithe.

First, I knew my dream job –the real one, not the designated thigh oiler for Real Madrid (although if anyone’s hiring…)– has even less money in it than the newspaper industry, and believe me, very few things have less money in it than the newspaper industry.

I knew someday the reasonably well-paid party would end, and when it did I wanted to be able to walk away with an accessories wardrobe to last a lifetime and not a penny of credit card debt, which is exactly what I did.

Second, I wanted to learn the joys of living a discriminating life.

It’s painfully simple, but if something’s not extremely good, I don’t want it. I’d rather go without than have my fill of mediocrity or worse. It’s probably why I’ve lost so much weight in Mexico (well, you know, that and the cholera): Mangoes, fish and veggies are good here; pastry, meat and sweets are not, at least not to a palate that prefers butter to lard and thick ribeyes to thin strips of carne asada.

Television isn’t very good in America (it’s worse in Mexico) so I happily gave it a miss and the money I saved by not paying to have Real Housewives of a Culturally Declining Nation piped into Château Gâteau bought me a Paris-only bell jar of the shiveringly dry yet animalic Bois et Musc  (which smells exactly like my lynx coat after a post-prandial walk in the woods) and fuchsia Dolce and Gabbana heels in suede so buttery I want to spread it on toast.

Let’s turn this into a Big Question.

Right now my Luxury Tithe –pathetic as it may be– is dedicated to funding an exploratory trip to Buenos Aires to see whether the so-called Paris of Latin America is destined to be the next stop on the Miss Plumcake Expatriate World Tour.

Today Miss Plumcake wants to know whether you have a Luxury Tithe. If so, what’s the desired result? If not, what’s your preferred method of acquiring what you want?

Ah Tuesday, or as I like to call it “Oh-No-Is-That-the-Garbage-Truck-Quick-Where-Are-My-Pants-Is-This-a-Bad-Lemon-or-a-Good-Kiwi-Never-Mind-Let’s-GO!”

Yesterday I spent much of the day at the American Consulate waiting for Hot Latin Boy to renew his tourist visa.

As such, I spent four hours people watching and wondering what sort of decision-making process would start out “What should I wear to my very important potentially life-changing government interview” and arrive at “shredded thigh jeans, shooties ordered from the back of Modern Streetwalker and a hickey the size of Gorbachev’s port wine stain.”

Baffling.

Anyway, it’s been a while, but since it’s time to resurrect the featurette and see What Miss Plumcake is…

Continue Reading…

Happy Monday gang! Or at least I’m calling it a happy Monday, mostly because I accidentally saw this program last night where some woman met a very unpleasant end at the hands of her friend’s Xanaxed-out chimpanzee and I managed not to have horrifying nightmares, so I call it a win, though it just goes to show you shouldn’t have chimps…or friends. Xanax is okay though.

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

Whether you’re a mother, a mutha, or a daughter, let’s celebrate the beautiful circle of life. Rock on with your bad selves!

Ah, Mom’s famous… well, it might be almost anything from Duck a l’orange to ‘call to the Chinese take out.’

Most people assume that part of being a mother is being a really great cook. Funny thing, though, mothers are really just like people sometimes, and each individual one may be better at one thing than another. Some of them really aren’t good cooks. Some don’t have the time. Some don’t have the talent. Some can make fabulous meals out of nothing, and some still couldn’t produce something vaguely edible even if an army of professional chefs stood at her elbow instructing her. Still others are fine within a specific range, but not so good when they venture beyond the borders of what their mothers taught them.

My mother? Well, she was one of those women who have a real gift. The kitchen was her realm and all the foodstuffs within bowed to her will gladly. Sure, she had the occasional disaster, like that Thanksgiving when the cranberry jelly never really jelled. And her pie crust, well, let’s just say that from the time I made my first one, she never bothered to try making one for herself again. If she needed pie crust, she called me in.

But aside from those little wrinkles, yeah, I grew up with a mom whose cooking really rocked.

Still, there are particular dishes that I remember more fondly than others. Her potato salad spoiled me rotten. It involved vinegar in the potatoes, a top layer of sour cream, and decorative slices of hard boiled egg. It was bracing, yet decadent all at once. And at Thanksgiving she made this amazingly delicious cranberry sherbet that was served as a palate cleanser with the meal.

I only wish I had the recipes.

But more than her cooking, I remember spending time with her in the kitchen. From early childhood, I would post myself on a stool at the counter and chat with her while she cooked. Later, she taught me the basics of making a good meal. Sometimes we even worked in tandem. Hanging with Mom in the kitchen is quite possibly my favorite way to remember her.

What about your moms? Great cook or lousy? Did she teach you to cook? Was she an object lesson? Did you teach her? Any particular dishes – brilliant or terrifying – you want to tell us about?

One of the challenges of having a Big Girl blog that discusses everything from domestic abuse to self-tanner abuse instead of sticking to a niche within a niche (fashion, fat activism) is it’s almost impossible to put my fingers in my ears and go “lalalala” when a certain percentage of my adoring public (just let me tell myself you’re adoring, okay? Sometimes it’s the only thing other than the bars on the windows keeping me from self-defenestration) is having a rough time, even if it’s not exclusively the domain of the Lane Bryant enthusiast.

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

I’ve often wondered whether it’s more difficult to be the overweight daughter of a naturally slim mother or one who is prone to plumpness.

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.