I never had much use for pink.
I was always a tomboy, and didn’t play much with dolls. For most of my life, my favorite color was blue. My high school’s colors were two shades of blue, “Columbia” and “Navy.”
Yale’s color was its own special blue, on doors and flags and utility closets. And since my eyes are blue, whenever I bought anything, from two-piece suits to jeans, blue was usually my choice… at least until I moved to New York City, and discovered that the real “power color” was black.
During all those years, if you had asked me about the color pink, I would have said, “No thanks.” Pink was for nurseries, and tea parties, and Barbie dolls, and it bored me to tears.
I can’t say when the tide began to turn, but the first crack in the dam might have appeared when I got married. I kept telling everyone – the caterer, the florist, my mother – I wanted blue.
For the table cloths, the ribbons, and the bridesmaid’s dresses. Except… whenever I tried to narrow down the choices, it always seemed to be a pink swatch clutched in my hand at the end of the day. Well, more of a raspberry sherbet, I told myself, not really pink at all. Quite lovely, as it turned out.
Still, I stuck to sensible blue for my sofa, for my linens, and my overall decorating scheme.
I might have dallied a bit with pink while I was expecting, but the miracles of modern medicine told us we were having a boy, both times. And I soon found out how taboo the color pink could be.
One winter day, with my firstborn, absolutely every piece of baby clothing was filthy except one – a pink outfit I had shoved to the very back of the drawer. It was better than letting him get chilly, right?
And it’s not like we were going to make it out of the house anyway, so no one would ever know. But when he did something cute, was I not supposed to take a picture?
Almost twenty years later, I am still living it down. All anyone says is, “Why is he wearing pink?”
People complain, sometimes, about a “pink ghetto,” but it sure felt the other way around to me, back then in the baby clothes store, as I looked out on a rainbow of colors from my safe little corner of red, green, and blue.
“Why do the girls get three-quarters of the store?” I wanted to know.
“Because that’s who people buy accessories for.” And it was true.
Try though I might, the pile of completely unnecessary items I came home with (matching little booties and socks for someone who can’t even sit up yet?) couldn’t hold a candle to what people bought for baby girls.
Even if I wanted to experiment, I learned better. I remember a pair of rain boots I bought in a garage sale. They looked red to me, but my boys insisted “Those are pink!” and left them high and dry, with muddy footprints all around them.
At long last, the taboo-ness of pink became useful the day I took my boys to the toy store. It was as if the aisles of pure pink actually glowed – Barbie dolls, My Little Pony and all the rest. But at least it meant there was that much less of the store to fight about with my children.
“No, you don’t need a riding mower Big Wheels – put it back!”
As my boys grew older, they ran riot throughout the house. When they helped themselves to anything not nailed down in the kitchen, I didn’t mind; but the bathroom was another story.
I discovered that the only way to make sure no one bothered my hand towel, my cup, or my toothbrush was to make sure mine were pink. So even though I still deplored the color, I began to seek it out. Pink had become my refuge – even, a friend.
I continued the trick as they got older: mommy’s car keys were the ones with pink masking tape all over them. Ugh! Pink! Leave them alone!
But my trick only worked for so long. Eventually, there came a day when there was something even more powerful than the color pink …and that was a teenaged girl, wearing it, who needed to be picked up and taken to dinner. Oh, well. A color can only do so much.
