Shoegate: my sneakers for your jeggings

There are as many of us over-40s shopping in Topshop as the under-20s.

There are as many of us over-40s shopping in Topshop as the under-20s.

Published Nov 5, 2015

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London - Sometimes when I look at my four-year-old’s tiny hands, I wonder how on earth they will ever be the same size as mine. I can’t imagine her little toes one day filling grown-up shoes.

When she runs around naked after her bath each night, I marvel at her miniature bottom in all its rosy cuteness and simply won’t believe it’ll ever be clad in anything other than doll-sized tights with a teddy bear printed on the behind.

Frankly, we’ve got soft toys with bigger buttocks than Mabel, she is so petite.

Then I go downstairs where an adult-sized version of Mabel, aged 13, is roaming the kitchen, brazenly striding around wearing clothes that it takes me a few seconds to recognise as my own.

When did this happen? How did she get so tall? Where did that time between Mabel size and teenager go?

Was I so distracted by the arrival of three new small people that I failed to notice how swiftly the first one sprouted?

Everyone with older children told me this would happen, but as a new mom I didn’t believe them. Who knew kids grew at the speed of sunflowers?

What no one warned me about, however, was SMS: Small Mom Syndrome.

You seasoned matriarchs really should have tipped me off - and advised me to start sewing name tags into my clothes the moment my daughters hit their pre-teen years. Every day something else disappears. It started with tights, progressed to sweatshirts and now involves my shoes.

This is because I am only 5 ft 2 in. Or, as my husband said when he bought all the chocolate to hand out on Halloween last week: “These Mars Bars are fun-size, like you.”

My eldest is already an inch up on me and the 11-year-old can look me in the eye. We all have size seven feet.

I suffer from SMS big time. Any handbag of mine that goes across the body (as is the current trend) is snaffled. A cool brown leather rucksack, which I bought from Marks & Spencer because it looked like a designer one I was lusting after, had its first outing on a school trip, and I have yet to locate my hardly worn black Converse trainers.

I’m perplexed by this downright cheekiness, but when I tackled Shoegate, they acted with indignant outrage. “Are you accusing us of stealing?” number two asked, clearly buying time to remember where she’d left my trainers.

What is most confusing, though, is this: in their rapid race to establish independence and cut the maternal cord, they usually feel obliged to denounce anything I like as terminally embarrassing and uncool. Yet they now do this while wearing my new Superdry hoodie or my only clean pair of grey socks.

Maybe we are the first generation of mothers to properly face this fashion challenge. After all, we’re the moms who live in the shadow of “50 being the new 30” or whatever it is the ad men say. (Every time I open the newspaper Liz Hurley pops up looking better in a bikini than women half her age, and there are as many of us over-40s shopping in Topshop as the under-20s.)

We’re the modern moms who want to look and feel younger just as our teenage daughters - predictably - want to look and feel older.

Somewhere in the middle there is this new style crossover, especially if you are a big-footed shortie like me.

But if you have observed teenage girls in the wild, you will know arguing with them is pointless.

They take themselves too seriously to countenance any logical observations about their behaviour, and become irrationally cross when you try to set ground rules.

So they’ve left me no choice. I am not a patient woman, and I have started to take fabric hostages. There will be an exchange of goods, like prisoners, at the weekend: in return for my trainers, I will hand back the ripped black “jeggings” (whatever they are); if I don’t see that rucksack, I will keep the sweatshirt with “Bite Me” written on it.

I suggested that the smallest Candy girl might act as an impartial go-between, but the eldest has correctly pointed out that Mabel has already started to accumulate an impressive secret cupboard of other people’s goodies. Her motto is: “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is Mabel’s!”

* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.

Daily Mail

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