The Girl in Pink Velour

When I saw the bright pink velour sleeve peaking out between a hundred other tops at Queenie’s Consignment, I caught my breath. I pried the hanger out and fell decades back through time… because the top came with a perfectly soft pair of matching pink velour pants. 

Forty-two years have gone by since 7 year old me wore what looked to be very the same shade of velour from head to toe at my Smurfs themed birthday party. 

That 7 year old girl didn’t know the meaning of self-doubt. She wore her hair in two braids or double pony-tails every day, with satin ribbons and plastic animal barrettes snapping flyaway wisps into place. She didn’t think about boys at all, not in that sense, but only as friends who might play make-believe or hunt for banana slugs with her at the bus stop. When she looked in the mirror, all she saw was herself; her crooked pre-braces teeth didn’t even receive a second thought. She loved the Smurfs, Clifford the Big Red Dog and Strawberry Shortcake, Mr. Rogers and her corner of the Pacific North West, where it rained all the time on the edges of the Olympic National Park. The drooping bows of a Weeping Willow in her backyard hid her secret fort. She was Peter Pan, Tinkerbell, Wendy and the Lost Boys, while her mom played Captain Hook and the Crocodile. She had a wild cat named Panther with no tail who would bring gifts of dead mice to leave on their doorstep. She had a view of the Pacific Ocean hundreds of yards below and beyond the bluff, where she could see the ferry ships coming and going to and from Victoria, British Columbia. Insecurities didn’t exist in those days. Fear of not being enough… pretty enough, smart enough, popular enough hadn’t yet entered her mind. She wore her beloved pink velour sweatshirt with the matching skirt at her 7th birthday party, one of her last birthdays living in Washington state.  It was 1984 and soon her family would leave the Pacific North West and she’d leave this chapter of her childhood behind.

Georgia wasn’t to blame for the dwindling of her truest, most assured self, who loved what she loved and wore her hair how she wanted and played pretend with abandon. But starting over at a new school, making new friends and feeling like an outsider in a foreign land, she started to examine herself a little more closely, judge herself more harshly. Not right away; the self-doubt slowly crept in with the natural coming of age and the insecurities of adolescence that come for us all. 

It’s been 42 years since that move from one corner of the country to the other, 42 years since that birthday party with the Smurfette frosted cake. And gradually these days I find that I’m coming back around again. I’m coming back around to her, to me. I’m returning slowly to being fully and truly my most real self, without doubt and fear of what others think of me. I’m coming back around to the time before the world wreaked havoc on my esteem. I am 49. And I am still the girl in braids who had a pet pinecone I named Piney, who rolled the edges of my sleeping bag into a nest so I could be a bird and sleep in the trees, and who still loves to play and create and dance and sing; who still loves to make believe and make magic. And who will always live for a pink velour matching set.