This morning, listening to my voicemail following a week off from work, I  found a message from an irate reader who was deeply ticked off by a Times Union reprint of a melancholic blog post I wrote after the election. Apparently it was too melancholic for her taste. Apparently I am too much of a crybaby and just need to get over it. And apparently she was concerned for my maturation and developmental welfare, because  she instructed me, loudly, to “PUT YOUR BIG-GIRL PANTS ON.” Yes, she said this phrase in all-caps. I’m also certain she hyphenated it, because otherwise she’d be telling me to put my big GIRL pants on, and she must know that I already own plenty of those.

In any case, I found her voicemail altogether amusing and entirely old news, because A) I am indeed a crybaby; B); I have a hard time getting over anything, and by anything I mean anything; and C) I DON’T OWN ANY BIG-GIRL PANTS AND NEVER HAVE, FRIENDS. Never will, either. NEVER EVER EVER.

I have always had a problem with pants. In short: I always owned THE WRONG ONES. This means I always wore THE WRONG ONES. My life is a long, sad narrative of bad trousers, misguided jeans, ill-fitting shorts, ludicrous crop pants and miserable, idiotic slacks.

You want proof? Sorry, I don’t have photos of my 1985 culottes. Or the striped purple elephant pants that I wore in a delusional state through most of high school. Or the mustard-colored highwaters that I wore to work for the longest time until I noticed a large bleach splotch on the crotch and realized, what’s more, THAT THEY WERE BUTT-UGLY.

I do, however, have a photo of the purple paisley harem pants that I wore when I met my late husband’s family in 1990. It was Christmas.  I was madly in love with this Chris guy. I wanted to impress his parents and siblings, and so of course I showed up to meet them all in PURPLE PAISLEY HAREM PANTS. These were not big-girl pants. These were not medium-sized-girl pants. I would argue that they did not classify as tiny-girl pants, because even an infant would rip off her diaper and crap all over the things rather than let her idiot mama dress her that way in public. They were, in short, THE WRONG PANTS.

But being lovely, classy, gracious people, my future in-laws never said a peep about the egregious swaths of billowing polyester that cinched around my ankles and made my short, stubby legs look even shorter and stubbier. Not until I mentioned them years later. And they still didn’t say anything. But by then I had  moved on to yet new frontiers of pants stupidity, including the tragic pair of bell-bottomed jeans that I wore long past their expiration date and — even wronger —  the lamentable orange corduroys with the saggy ass and worn-out knees THAT I STILL OWN AND WEAR TO THIS DAY, occasionally over my blue leopard-print pajama bottoms, although not to work, and did I just admit to that in public?

And I haven’t even gotten to the lilac khakis I’ve been squeezing into the last couple of summers. Ooooh, I love those things. Those are seriously NOT big-girl pants. Nope. I won’t be pulling those on to appease any ticked-off readers, that’s for sure. They’ll never grow up. Neither will I.