My Lore: Shopping With Mom

Five-Inch Inseams and a Lifetime of Love

“I haven’t worked this hard on these legs to cover them up with seven-inch inseams!”

I was furious with the Under Armour outlet in Asheville last weekend. For starters, the only shorts they had in stock were either seven-inch inseam or longer, which should be illegal. They also lacked any of the Project Rock merch I’m such a big fan of.

My mom and I go on a yearly mother-son shopping trip, usually taking every other year between the outlets in Asheville, NC, and those in Sevierville, TN. During last year’s trip in Sevierville, the Under Armour store didn’t have any Project Rock and I griped because the year prior in Asheville yielded a ton of great items from that line, many of which I gladly purchased. Since I struck out in our Tennessee shops, I’d spent an entire year getting more and more excited about scoring those outlet prices on my beloved Project Rock gear during our 2025 trip.

And I struck out again. Now two years in a row. The Rock must really hate me.

While I was certainly on the hunt for some Project Rock gear, some five-inch inseam shorts, a couple henley shirts in various colors, a wide-brimmed hat, and some rustic, dark brown boots, the point of the shopping trip has nothing to do with fashion. No, this yearly pilgrimage to our local-ish outlet malls is more like a ritual where my mother and I symbolically recommit ourselves to our sacred bond. She’s definitely my mother, but she’s also one of my best friends, and I believe she feels the same.

Clothes shopping is one of our favorite things to do individually, so going shopping together is about as good as it gets for both of us. Neither one of us are rushed, neither of us tap out early, we both love short road trips where we can catch up in a candid way, and we both love being silly to the point of annoyance. We’ve been this way my whole life.

I can’t speak for my mom as to why nurturing our relationship is important for her. I mean, I am her son and I’m charming as hell, so it makes sense, but again, I can’t speak for her. For me, however, it’s my way of spending time with – and saying thank you to – someone who in many ways saved my life and made me the man I am today.

It’s hard to explain the full weight of what these trips mean without talking a bit about how my mom became my hero. I wrote about it last year in a letter to my father – a letter that helped me face decades of silence. He and I haven’t spoken in about 30 years, and I realized last year that even though I’ve stuffed my emotions into a tightly packed safe in my soul, crowded by self-esteem and abandonment issues, I’d never actually dealt with them. I managed to get everything out that I wanted to say to him in an eight-page letter that I then mailed to him just before Christmas last year. It maybe didn’t “fix” me, but it was certainly the most therapeutic thing I’d ever done.

In this excerpt from my letter, I am talking about an evening when my stepmother and I got into an uproarious argument which caused me to then run away from my dad’s house that night and, ultimately, forever:

You stood by and did nothing to intervene or protect me. I’d had enough, so I packed my bag, went to the basement and called my Paps. He came to get me, asked no questions and took me home where I was both safe and loved.

A few years prior to this, you and Tammy sat me down at the kitchen table and explained to me that my mother didn’t love me. It was what I can only assume was a rickety attempt to convince me to change my mind about who I wanted to live with — it was around the time when I was old enough in the eyes of the court to make such a decision. Tammy informed me that my mom was bleeding you all dry with her child support “demands” (I’d later learn that the “demands” were meager compared to what other men are faced with, but that’s irrelevant). She said she actually loves her son and that’s why she never asked for child support – she just wanted her kid – insinuating the only logical reason my mom wanted child support was because she didn’t want me, I was merely a way she could get free money.

The night Paps took me home, that same mother had just gotten off a 12-hour day shift and was tired. She needed to go to bed early because she had another day shift the next day, but instead, she had a heartbroken, crying little boy in her living room. She never admitted to this and certainly never acted like it, but she was scared. She was sad for me and was fully uncertain how to move forward – this was a wrench in her plan that she didn’t expect. I knew this and the thought of being a burden on my mom made me hurt even worse.

But she didn’t skip a beat. We figured it out that night, and with my Paps’s help, we had my new living arrangement figured out. She calmed my nerves, telling me over and over how much she loved me. I fell asleep in her arms that night.

Having to live through a divorce is hard on every child that has ever had the misfortune, and I don’t think I’m special for having lived it. Daily, I lived with confusion about why my parents couldn’t be together, not knowing if maybe I was the cause and having to learn to accept not one but two new stepfamilies into my life. Imagine how much of a mind-fuck it was, then, to feel such genuine, kind and unconditional love from a woman who my father – whom I loved very much – and his wife said didn’t love me.

My mom and I don’t really talk about it much – or ever, really – but we don’t need to. Everything we need to say is clearly communicated with every short road trip, in every bag that I carry for us both, and in every food court meal we share together. Whether the backseat of my truck is full of bags when we’re done or if we’re driving back home nearly empty handed (never completely), it’s all the same. Our hearts are filled; our souls are satisfied.

It’s now been about 30 years, but she’s still the loving mother who soldiered on despite having her world turned completely upside-down that fateful night. And even though I’m now about to turn 41, I’m still the little boy who was grateful to receive such unyielding love.

I love you too, Mum. I can’t wait to do it again next year.

Also, in case anyone was wondering, I scored some five-inch inseam shorts at New Balance, a store I initially skipped. Take that, Dwayne.

-jtf