To Look at Trees as Things to Climb

a contemplative weekend of shopping

me accidentally shopping in the PINK section of Victoria’s Secret

Saturday, June 7, 2025, 4 PM EST

I keep “forgetting” ;-) to take my phone off DND. My friend George texted me “I am smoking again” around 8 AM and I don’t see it until now, waiting at a red light, about to bang a left and buy a pack myself. I’m having a bad day in this stupid body. My sense of rebellion is duller than a spoon.

(Sidebar: my mom smoked “three light cigarettes a day” during her pregnancy with me, and demanded a full-flavor pack and a case of beer the moment she left the hospital. Really gotta get her on Substack.)

I screech into the Wawa parking lot at the last second, almost rear-ended by a souped-up Civic. Some pale skinhead looking freak in all leather drops his trash in the can, notices the recycling bin right next to it, and quietly fishes his Pepsi bottle out to give it a second life. Awww, I think, he kind of scares me.

The Mom Guilt airbags deploy, pinning me to the leather seat of my white Mazda CX-5. My Mom Car! All that I touch becomes Mom Something now. Surely, Mom Cigarettes are less cancerous than the rest. I Google “do cigarettes pass through breast milk” (they do) and promptly leave.

I am heading to my secret thrift store that I’ve gatekept from everyone but two worthy, vintage-obsessed girlfriends: my Lebanese muse with her waist-length hair and sharp, metallic nails and Simone Rocha Crocs; and my muse from Ukraine who was a stripper at a nice club before we met at Comcast. I spotted her neck tattoo and God-given Instagram filter of a face from across the room, glittering among her drab finance teammates (Madewell girls, Penn State guys). She messaged me “we should do lunch” and the rest is history.

So yeah, I’m heading to my treasure trove where $700 Dries Van Noten trousers with the NET-A-PORTER tags still attached cost $7 because hormonally speaking, I am in the trenches. First brush with postpartum depression since week one. You could slap me across the face and it wouldn’t sting like fluctuating estrogen. My life’s purpose, fattened up in the newborn love bubble of maternity leave, is curiously starving. Emaciated. My husband insisted I get out of the house. Out I went and here I am.

If you want a good sense of New Jersey, just about any stretch of White Horse Pike will do. I pass dispensaries and pawn shops and tanning salons and discount rental car lots full of beat-up Camrys until I reach the summit: Tony Soprano’s Pizza. I can’t speak to the quality of their pizza (yet) but you can visit ilovetonysopranos.com, their website designed by OMG Marketing, for proof of existence. I imagine asking the shop’s (presumably) chubby, hairy, Italian-American owner (presumably) named Sal about the name, and he just shrugs and says “makes ya look twice, don’t it?”

I pull up to the thrift. Swerve around 100 potholes. Aimlessness sets in, the sad truth that I wear nothing but nursing bras and yoga pants these days and I really don’t need anything and wherever I go, there I am, etc. But the point of thrifting is to keep the dream alive that one day, you’ll find the one thing that changes your life. Probably a leather jacket.

“Hey mommy, how’s the baby?” asks my favorite cashier, an older Jamaican lady. I show her photos. A 5’1” depop urchin, face tatted from hairline to chin, fingers a pair of Dickies, talks some shit to his friend. And as I’m wandering about, trying to remember what I’m doing here in the first place, a nondescript middle-aged blonde meets me in every aisle. Gray tshirt, blue jeans, thick glasses. Face etched with a generational American sadness, years of grabbing cigarettes from Wawa, hitting those tanning salons. She is so normal as to be strange. I cannot escape her. My heart is heavy with years I’ve yet to live.

Nearby, a baby cries, and my chest tightens. A fellow new mom recently told me she finds comfort in knowing “there are no original postpartum experiences.” I spend $11 on two shirts that I don’t care about and head home.

Sunday, June 8, 2025, 2 PM EST

It takes a certain type of person to describe a solo mall trip as “unsupervised.” Of course, I could have ordered my husband’s Father’s Day gift online. It is a perfectly online thing to get. But I wanna stock up on lip liners in shades of pinky nude without being reminded that I “already own them” and “Dia, we have a child now.”

At the Cherry Hill Mall, I circle a thousand parking lots searching for a spot, exchanging glares with other wives buying AirPods for their husbands. White SUVs, slicked-back buns. I am thinking about girlhood because I am now a mother to a girl. And I am thinking about what it means to be an adult woman who remembers how to play. To look at trees as things to climb. There’s no place in the world where I feel less serious than the mall, depression literally yesterday’s news. I squeeze into a parking spot. The bell rings for recess.

I’m in Bath & Body Works looking for a mini-sized Strawberry Pound Cake hand lotion. At my last manicure, my mini-sized angel nail tech massaged my hands with Strawberry Pound Cake over her baby pink Care Bears placemat, her phone propped against the acrylic divider in a Hello Kitty case, a strawberry Sonny Angel crawling up the back. The OPI dip powder jar was adorned with tiny pink bows and rhinestones and labeled “[REDACTED]’S BUBBLE BATH.” She’s 25 which feels like the last age a girl can call herself a girl in certain company. Though I sense [Redacted] will be a girl forever.

There are moms in Bath & Body Works helping middle school-aged daughters decide what they’d like to smell like this summer, now that school’s out. “Isn’t this so pretty?” they ask. I wonder what my daughter will find pretty, if that’s even a word she’ll use to describe stuff; they’ll have a whole new language by then. Maybe summer will be her favorite season and maybe she’ll need braces and maybe she’ll memorize every dog breed in existence.

I haven’t worn a regular bra in probably six months. Probably haven’t bought one since the Obama administration. So I visit the other girl store: Victoria’s Secret. Lucky me, it’s the semi-annual sale. A big 50% OFF BRAS sign sticks up from a carousel of bins where people are digging for their lives. 36D. Cheetah print. Push-up. Purple lace like that Tate McRae song. I’m pleased to learn absolutely nothing about bra technology has changed since I last did this.

When I hit the fitting room, I realize I’ve been shopping in the PINK section of the store the entire time. I look at what I thought were plain bras and see PINK embroidered along the band. I proceed with trying them on because I have nothing to lose here. This is the youngest I’ll ever be. My Mom Boobs look like two basset hounds in the mirror.

Leaving the mall, I make the grave mistake of stopping at the Starbucks in Macys. You have to get Starbucks at the mall YOU JUST HAVE TO. Absurd line. I’ll wait. In front of me are—you guessed it—two middle school-aged girls! They’re both wearing baggy sweatpants and white Crocs. The pretty one is paying for the awkward one, and when the cashier applies her gift card that she probably got for her 13th birthday, she still owes like, six bucks. Her beautiful little face is frozen in panic.

“You can take the second drink off,” she mumbles—her drink. She still gets her friend’s because her spirit hasn’t yet been wrung out by the ugly hands of the world.

“You woulda had enough if your FRIEND’S ORDER wasn’t FOURTEEN DOLLARS,” says the cashier. What an instigator!

The awkward one urges her selfless pal to go ahead and cancel her order. “No big deal!” It’s her gift card, anyway.

The three of them quietly weigh the options and some coins are dug out of a Lululemon crossbody and it all seems to work out. Two blue drinks with too much sugar are ordered under the name Lily. It took all of me not to step in and pay. To relieve them of the banal, forgettable pain of this moment. To tell them I have a daughter who I hope is half as generous as you guys someday. Pathetic. They definitely left to go watch TikTok and shoplift from Sephora. At least I hope they did.

On the way home, I think about the blonde lady from the thrift store. I wonder if she got a leather jacket.