This is the face of a person who was shamed by her almost 9 year-old daughter into wearing a rink-issued helmet during "open skate" following said daughter's holiday figure skating recital this past weekend.
Impossibly, I found myself in a "do as I say, not as I do" moment over wearing this ridiculous, other-random-peoples'-sweat-infused helmet, all the while knowing I was completely in the wrong on every level and sending my child the dubious, dangerous message that vanity should take a back seat to safety.
"Do you want to get a twaumatic bwain injuwy?," Paige asked rhetorically, echoing her mother with the last vestiges of a little girl's dropped "r's."
"Who CARES if it doesn't look COOL. Do you think it's COOL to have a TWAUMATIC BWAIN INJUWY?! I'm not skating with you unless you wear a helmet." That was that. Paige was standing firm on safety.
What was I supposed to say? Was this not EXACTLY the attitude toward helmets I had been assiduously cultivating in both my children since they had soft spots on their newborn heads? She had me cornered and we both knew it. So I put on the helmet, thus completing what I spontaneously named in that moment my "DILF-repellent" look.
DILF is the male version of MILF (if you don't know what MILF stands for, all I can say is WTF. But note: Googling it is NSFW. Google all of those acronyms on your spare time, including Old AF because if you don't know what they are, that's what you are, I'm sorry to say).
Moving on.
As you might imagine, there is no shortage of DILFs zooming around at open skate in Juneau. I watched several zip past me with their tall, fit bodies, stubbly faces, and hockey skates, passing barely a backwards glance at me in my Costco Old Lady from Queens coat of unparalleled comfort, and a helmet that made me look like I was playing either a mushroom in a grade school play about healthy eating, or a penis in a middle-school sex-ed assembly.
In other words, not my best look.
And this was indignity piled atop indignity, might I add. Not two hours earlier, I'd found myself standing helplessly around a locker room with a cluster of better-prepared skate moms, most of whom seemed instinctively to know their way around a garland and a tiara, and all of whom had the presence of mind to pack their child a lunch in a nice little lunch box while I was at the vending machine scrounging for quarters at the bottom of my old lady "purse" just to buy mine a bag of Grandma Utz's shitty pretzels. The silver lining is that I felt validated in my "one tutu-sport only" rule.
So standing around looking like an asshole is TOTES my jam, as is skating forwards (the only direction I know how to skate) while looking like an asshole. Basically looking like an asshole is something I am super good at, it turns out.
