A sigh is not just a sigh....

......to paraphrase that old song.

I went to SteinMart today... my first time there in I can't remember how long. I went shopping for, of all things, pajamas-- for myself. Summer ones, not heavy enough to be too warm, but not so light that I'm freezing in the air-conditioning. You can always tell when summer has begun in this house..... I tip-toe to the thermostat to make it warmer in here, and my husband strides up to the same thermostat to make it colder. (And never the twain shall meet.)

Of course, SteinMart was having all sorts of sales, so after I found two sets of summer pajamas for myself, I browsed through the capri's and summer slacks. Found two nice ones.... one white, and one black. Not a stitch of embroidery, not a fancy pocket on the back or beading along the hem. Just plain capri's. (My sister would approve.) Also found a nice sleeveless black and tan top, with a matching sweater... couldn't pass that up for the sale price, even though I have more than enough black clothes in my closet. My Aunt Dolly's love for black tops and skirts and dresses has been passed down to me. I just think black can be either the most casual or the most elegant color to wear.

Now we get to the sighs..... While I was in the dressing room at SteinMart, looking in the mirror at how some of the clothes were fitting, I let out a couple of deep sighs without even realizing I was doing that until I heard myself. By the third sigh, I was able to keep my sighing to myself so my little cubicle of the dressing room was quiet. I can't say the same for the other dozen cubicles. Every few minutes, for as long as I was in the dressing room, I heard an audible sigh coming from one of the women in the other cubicles.

I know what that sigh means. It doesn't mean that the clothes fit perfectly and we're all happy with what we're seeing in the mirror. That type of deep sigh in a dressing room means just one thing: a woman is looking in the mirror and seeing everything that she dislikes about her body, her shape, her posture, her skin, the clothes, everything. Mirrors in dressing rooms are like fun-house mirrors..... one week, you look just fine; the next week, you look like your mother.

As for the sizing of clothes..... I don't know what this cosmic joke is meant to prove, but a size 8 just isn't a size 8 anymore. And what happened to my size 6? It went away when I stopped exercising for two hours every day. Another cosmic joke.

While I was looking at myself in the mirror at SteinMart, I made myself feel better by thinking about two celebrities who were on television recently--- Marie Osmond and Valerie Bertinelli. Both were stick-thin when they were on prime-time TV every week. But that was years ago, in the 1970s and 1980s. They've both gotten older now, and they've both had children. And both of them, I'm sure, have given out their own fair-share of deep sighs when they look into the mirrors of dressing rooms.

So there I was today, looking at myself in size 8 capri's, and telling myself that Marie Osmond is probably a size 18, and Valerie is most likely wearing size 16 these days. So why should I feel badly because the size 8 that I fit into perfectly last year seems to be a little tighter this year? And why did I cringe when I tried on the size 10 and found that it was too big in the waist but fit just right on my thighs?

Why? Because I didn't want to start wearing double-digit sizes again. I was thrilled to wear a size 6 for so long, and I was reasonably happy with the size 8 when I realized that I just don't want to exercise for two hours every day to keep wearing a size 6.

However, my Aunt Dolly will be 95 years old next month. She's still a size 6. She doesn't exercise for two hours every day, but she has a three-story house and she walks up and down those steps countless times a day. She has her own built-in stairmaster and calorie-burner.

Maybe that's the problem with my clothes. There are no stairs in this blessed house.