I Have A Confession To Make

Sunday is supposed to be "family day", a day to spend with your loved ones, cooking, relaxing and, well, not shopping. Especially if your husband threatens to divorce you if you go out and come back with a Jcrew brown bag (the Madison Collection store discreet white one also counts and the threaten has been recently extended to Saturdays).

But I have a confession to make: I do go shopping on Saturdays and Sundays, only, my husband doesn't know. You have to understand: all the week I'm with my toddler so I can only go as far as my stroller can take me and there aren't many Jcrew stores at stroller-distance (my personal unit of measure of distance). So when I wake up Saturday mornings I'M DYING TO TAKE THE SUBWAY AND GO AS FAR AS I CAN. My husband understands that and he usually babysits for a few hours or even an entire day so that I can get my sanity back (I don't want to go Desperate Housewife but I do loose it a little bit sometimes). He encourages me to go to a movie, or a museum, or to have lunch with a girlfriend. He is a loving husband.
In return I only have to promise that I won't buy anything, which I always do (promise). The thing is: I cannot resist visiting a JCrew store once a week and I always find something to buy, because the price is so good or because I've been looking for it for a long time and here it is or because I just plain love it.

This leaves me with the whole, head-scratching issue of hiding my purchases before I walk through my apartment door. At the beginning it was pretty easy because I had an accomplice who, unwillingly and unknowingly, helped me in my clothes-smuggling business: my doorman. I would hand him the bag and tell him that it contained a Xmas present, so "can you please keep it here and I will pick it up when my husband is not at home"? Of course he would, how nice of me to buy my husband a present. After Xmas I made up a series of birthdays and special occasions and then I only handed him the bag without saying anything because honestly, how many birthdays a household of three (including myself) can possibly have to celebrate in a two-month span? It became clear even to my doorman that I was hiding something from my husband and this started to bother me, so I decided that I had to come up with something else before I got busted.

It's incredible how many things you can shovel into a medium-sized handbag, especially T-shirts and sweaters. Shirts, tops and dresses wrinckle a little bit, but if you're quick enough and you put them on a hanger at the first chance that you have to get them out of the bag unseen, you're OK. It's a little bit complicated with coats, jackets and shoes (flats could be shoveled in the bag too but you have to throw the box away, meaning no returns). Coats aren't really a problem because, first, it's not like I'm buying a new coat every other Saturday and second I don't especially like Jcrew coats, so I've never found myself in the situation of having to hide a coat. And for the jackets I came up with a brilliant idea: I just wear them (alone or under the cot in winter) and walk into the appartment with a big smile (I should add a shopping rule number 6: never wear a jacket when you go shopping) because the chances that my husband notices that I'm wearing a new jacket are close to zero. It's the egg of Columbus, isn't it? It also works with sweaters, that are easy to slip in in the elevator (it helps if you live on a high floor) and you can wear one over another. The only item that I haven't figured out a stratagem for yet are shoes (I've tried, but you can only wear a pair of shoes at a time and even if you could, you're left with the problem of the box). So when I buy shoes, my only resort is my old friend the doorman.

So far so good. My husband thinks that I'm a good girl and I get some rewards for my under-appreciated job as a stay-at-home-caring-mom. Oh, I forgot the most important thing: I always, always, pay cash.