A better shade of yellow

I spend a lot of time online shopping for things that I will never actually buy. It’s a weird therapeutic addiction, I guess. Usually I do this for trips, but sometimes I spend countless wasted hours poring over clothes sites. Wednesday night was no different.

A favorite for this sadistic behavior is modcloth.com. I have spent entirely too much time selecting dresses, jewelry, and accessories that I have never actually purchased. One night, Parr and I literally spent hours gchatting our favorite items from the site from our respective coasts. A goal is to one day actually buy something from there, but a fear is that the “it” item will fit horribly or look all wrong and it will ruin the fun of loving the site and all their wonderful clothes.

While I was searching through tonight, I stumbled upon this cute coat in their sale section:

The price was fairly reasonable and I thought this would be a smart addition to my wardrobe. But then a nagging voice came to my head.

It was my mother, date unknown, but it was a time when she told me that yellows did not work well with my olive skin and I had to be careful when wearing the color. I’m not sure if this particular shade falls under the “OK” shade or not, but being one of the only pieces of truly motherly advice that I have left, I promptly decided to nix the dreams of this coat.

I’ve found that I’ve been doing this more and more recently: holding on to these little pieces of wisdom that my mom dropped for me along the way and applying them to my day-to-day life as much as possible. In some ways, it helps me feel like my relationship with my mom remains intact–I feel like I still have all of her here to function in the capacity that a mother is supposed to function.

This is something that is difficult for a lot of friends to understand, especially friends whose mothers shower them with bits of wisdom and advice relentlessly. But truth be told, I think this is one of the things I absolutely miss the most about my mom since she got sick. There have been so many times that I just wished I could call her and ask her opinion about… well, anything. A recipe. An outfit. Something I was thinking of doing. I probably especially miss the “nurse” aspect of my mom. She was so matter-of-fact in her diagnoses or treatment regimen that I always felt certain what she told me was the right thing to alleviate my ailment. I remember how completely alone I felt the first time I realized that she was no longer able to expel the same explicit advice on these matters when I had gotten sick. It was a pretty helpless and sad moment indeed.

I am certainly grateful for the friends and family who have stepped up to help determine a good substitute for eggs in the recipe I’m making, the best way to combat a nasty cold and cough, and what shade of yellow looks best against my skin, but I still can’t help wondering whether or not my mother would agree.