bad mall moment

What a mistake. When T'ai went to the mall to get a quick haircut today, I tagged along thinking what the heck.
Was everyone there? Were you all there? I'm guessing you were, but I couldn't have found you if I tried. The crowd was just too massive. Did they add a new holiday? Is there something coming up that I should know about?
At one point I was walking alongside a man and his three-year-old. We were all moving slowly, like so much cattle. The man's wife must have been well ahead of us in the herd. When she started to gain too much ground, the man said to the child, "Shout for Mommy."
"MOMMY!" the kid shouted, with impressive force.
"Louder," ordered the dad.
"MOMMY!!" the kid shouted. This was loud, like you'd shout on a remote Kansas farm when there's a twister coming and the kid and her dog still haven't come home.
"Louder," said the dad.
"MOMMY!!!!!" the kid shrieked. People threw smoothies into the air, The Gap's windows rattled, and every woman who had ever had a child turned her head -- except for Mommy.
"Ach, Jeez," the dad scoffed. "Never mind."
That wasn't the bad mall moment, though it will stick with me for awhile. No, the bad mall moment came when I tried on a couple of sweaters.
Last winter I had the bald head to distract the eye. It's like those perception tests where you tell people to focus on the basketball being tossed around and while they're doing that, half of all viewers fail to see that a gorilla is walking through the scene. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vFAQC7FvKc Last year, my head was the basketball (in more ways than one) and my concave chest was the gorilla that you could easily miss. 
Now all I have is this freaking gorilla suit. 
Sweaters (other than the heavy winter ones) and shirts are cut not just to make room for breasts, but to point a tiny neon arrow toward them. Trying on a simple sweater in the dressing room was both depressing and comical. I don't know how to describe how it looked, but it felt like being caught in the rain in a thin t-shirt, in a bad way. Only without nipples or breasts. Or rain. It just felt like being caught.
Suddenly I was not looking forward to spring, which I think may be a sign of insanity at this point.
I know! I know! No one is looking. That helps the head, but not, well, the ego. Tell a 55-year-old woman "No one looks at you anyway," and, though true, it is not much comfort.
I got kind of choked up on the way home, and talked to newly-shorn T'ai about today's dressing room failure and the likely wardrobe malfunctions in all my tomorrows. He held my hand. 
"That stinks, Mom," he said. And somehow I felt comforted. It turns out that when my heart is comforted, my ego pipes down.
That's a good thing, because the gorilla suit is here to stay, for as long as I am. I just need to figure out how to love it.