A Matter of Opinion

When someone asks my opinion, I give it to them. Hey, I sometimes give my unsolicited opinion, too. But I will tell you what I honestly think, and if you don’t want to know, you should not have asked. 

Recently, my parents were headed out of town to a wedding, when my mother decided she had nothing to wear. So she went shopping and found a dress that she could not decide if she liked. The next day, I went with her to the mall to check out the dress. It was fine. It was a lovely black dress. I thought out loud, “You have a  bunch of black dresses… why do you need another one?” and proceeded to hand her a couple of other dresses to try on.

She tried dress after dress, at my urging. When she got to the blue one, I told her that was the one and she should just buy it so we could go. It was clearly the best choice. (It was not only that I wanted to go get coffee and had exhausted the does it make me look fat debate.) It was flattering, a good color for her and fit nicely.  But there was a problem with the perfect blue dress: it wasn’t black. It had beads and sparkly things and was a (gasp!) bright color.

After the “what shoes do I wear with this?” (silver) and “what purse do I carry?” (Why do you need a purse? You are staying in the same hotel as the wedding… what could you possibly need to tote around with you?) there was another half hour of trying-to-decide-if-the-dress-works.

Alas, in the end, she bought the blue dress. She complained and said she should have purchased the black one (Then why did you ask my opinion?), but she had a sparkly new dress for the wedding. While I would have loved to have a photo of her to accompany this post, you should know that if I whipped out my camera in the store, I am pretty sure it would have been tossed across the room, all while I was being yelled at. Sorry.