I have a feeling that you know this about me already, but I would like to take this opportunity to admit to you that I am a total poser.

Oh, I pretend I’m cool. I attempt the trends. I fake the funk. But it’s not really there.

You see, I’m living my life in one big gray area. I want to look my age (mid-twenties, holla!) but I also want to look like a responsible mother. And from the extensive research and home studies I have performed, it seems that responsible mothers mostly look like they don’t get enough sleep. Well, I don’t get enough sleep, so I can dig that. But I do want to go to the grocery store wearing something other than yesterday’s snot-stained workout capris. Is that so wrong?

I remember a few months after Babs was born, I hesitantly ventured out to the mall to try to soak up some civilization. My eyes were hungry for people who didn’t grind my nipples to shreds and shoot poop up the back of their shirts. There was nothing there I wanted to buy, so I just wandered through the crowds trying to figure out how the rest of these people managed to look so awake. As I groggily trudged along, my feet came to a stop in front of the grand and terrifying Abercrombie and Fitch. Posed in the display windows were sleek, headless mannequins luring in the customers with their provocatively arched backs and jutted hips. Behind them rose giant black and white posters that pictured ruggedly handsome (and mostly naked) young men climbing on a yacht. My attention was immediately drawn to the tiny scraps of clothing that the yacht boys and plastic women were wearing. Everything- the shirts, blouses, miniskirts, all of it- was scrunched up and wrinkled like the laundry that had been sitting back home in my dryer for over a week. I felt a small bud of hope rise up in my chest. This, this, I could do. I could do wrinkly. The two worlds that I lived between, the world of cute and sexy twentysomethings and the world of tired but happy young mothers, had merged in one beautiful new style trend.

So here I am, four years later, standing barefoot at the kitchen counter with my A-line denim skirt and shamelessly wrinkled up blouse that I dug out from the bottom of my clean laundry pile this morning. I have no idea if wrinkled is even “in” anymore, but I don’t care. I’m sticking with this style for a long time, I can tell you that much, and I am going to choose to believe that I am seriously current and hottt. Word.