We Want You To Get Some Help

I've been trying to drum up the courage to talk to a family member about a problem.  I've actually been watching Intervention a lot to get ideas on what exactly to say (okay, not really).  Something has to be done.  My mother has to stop buying me pants on clearance.

Back-story time... (imagine a whooshing noise so you know we're doing a side-shift back-story now).  We're having a garage sale tomorrow.  And I decided to go through my side of the closet and purge out any clothes that I'm not going to wear.  Some of them are just too big (woohoo!), some of them are just too old, some of them are out of style, and some of them I've never even tried on.  And I don't mind the purge.  It makes me feel more organized, and it makes me feel good about weight loss.  But I realized something as I placed them in the box.  Of the clothes I've never worn, 15 of them were pairs of dress pants.  Most of them still had the tags on them.  And they were all from my mother.  That's right, fifteen pairs of pants!

(Okay, now imagine a whooshing noise back to the story at hand.)

When my mom goes to department stores, she finds the clearance section.  And I'm not knocking that because it's my favorite section too.  But more often than not, there is a pair of pants in that section for about 4 dollars.  And inevitably, she has a coupon that reduces that price even further.  And I'm not knocking coupons either, because I love coupons.  So the next time she sees me, she says, "Oh hey, I found some pants at Ross that might fit you.  They were on sale."  Then she hands me a pair of pants that I instantly know I'll never wear (wrong size, weird color, fuzzy material, whatever) and they have at least 6 layers of sales stickers on them.

So to be polite, I accept them.  Then I put them in the closet and ignore them.  I realize now that this acceptance was a mistake.  I have become an enabler (that's actually a line from the letter I'm writing her for the intervention).  She knows that I'll take them.  And she assumes that every once in a while, one of them fits.  But I have to take a stand.  She has an addiction.  And I can't sit idly by while she continues down this dangerous path of habitual pant buying!