Purple muumuus and a Pruny thumb

Purple silky shine pressed between the index and thumb of my right hand. Soft soggy left thumb pruned by intense salivation. Suck and rub, suck and rub. There was nothing better.

My mother hated that I sucked my thumb. She hated that I carried around a muumuu. And she especially hated when my muumuu would consist of one of her lingerie, ribbon and bowed undergarments.

One morning, at church, after a good long lecture about the “noise-factor” of my thumb-sucking, I produced from my cabbage patch-head purse, a perfectly sized, purple silk thong with a large eighties styled silk, purple bow located on the back, at the top of the crack area of the thong. I was semi-discreet. Sitting four siblings away from her, I held my prized muumuu between my fingers and rubbed. I thought it was beautiful in every sense. It was after all purple, my favorite color.

I restrained with much difficulty, however, my thumb sucking. I did not want to go to hell. Children’s Time came, and my four siblings and I shimmied out of the pew and up front to sit on the gray carpeted ledge with our classically robed minister. I gripped my purple muumuu tightly, fiercely with my right hand. It was slightly balled-up. The minister was an odd looking fellow with thick blue-tinted glasses, and a perfectly round bald spot on the back of his head, the size of a softball. He had a nasal-like voice and would always rub his hands together quickly, like he was cold. It was usually cold in the church. My eldest brother always had the most to say and as a result always sat fairly close to the man clad in pale cream. We would follow our brother. During this particularly long Children’s Time, however, I began to get an itch to rub my secretly palmed muumuu. So I un-balled my hand, shook out the crinkles, held it up high and then brought it down to my lap in order to rub. There was a gasp from the congregation. It was my mother. What are you doing with that? Shrieked my brother. Ew, gross, shrieked my other brother. The minister said nothing. He appeared entertained, perhaps even turned on. My mother had been a hottie. Who knows?

Children’s Time soon ended. My mother marched me out of the church and I received a thrashing in the name of embarrassment. I also received a life-long tormenting by my siblings, who all through the awkward years of elementary school, middle school, high school, and even college will remind me, along with any new outsiders I have with me, of my awkward childhood moment.

I do not feel dirty or ashamed. Instead, I feel a slight heat in my neck and a fond fuzziness in the back of my mind when reminded, for the comfort of a good thumb and a purple muumuu.