I Removed the Shoulder Pads From My Mom's Jackets - But Blamed It On My Sister

Shoulder pads were invented in the 1930's and I grew up in the 1990's. But my mom was a really petite woman. She was less than 5 feet tall and naturally had a very thin figure. She also never spent money on herself, especially clothes, so she was still rocking the 80's style of beefed up shoulder pads on all of her work suits and even on her casual t-shirts. I was just a kid and I thought they looked pretty goofy.

I wasn't a good barometer for style though and my mom used to dress me in sequined disco shirts and baggy Old Navy Jeans with a crazy pik'd out hairdo.

We were a nuclear style family. My parents were still married and I had two older sisters. The least conventional part of my family was that my dad was retired already at the age of 47 because of persistent back problems after serving in the Navy. So my mom was the primary breadwinner and she also always did everything at home.

I enjoyed wearing her clothes because they were like an oversized dress on my child sized frame, but I found her shoulder pads to be incredibly itchy and uncomfortable. I used to shift them around and my mom joked that I would "never need them" because I already had pretty broad shoulders for a kid.

The thing is, my mom Never bought herself new clothes. She would go to Sears, try on a bunch of new clothes that she liked, fawn over the stuff that fit her well, and then she'd put it all back on the rack and we'd go home.

She was such a giving mother though. She would buy us t-shirts for holidays. Such as on Valentine's Day she got me a shirt that said "Be Mine, Or Else." But she wouldn't buy herself anything in order to save enough for us kids. I was too selfish to see that.

One day, I gathered a bunch of her shirts together that were my favorite. I was home from school before my sister's bus dropped her off and before my mom got home from work. My dad was taking a nap in his bedroom.

I took a pair of shears and cut all of the shoulder pads out of the shirts that had them. I must have felt it was a little bit wrong at the time, because I put them in a freezer bag and hid them under my sister's bunk bed. Afterwards, I did a little fashion show in front of the mirror to inspect my handiwork. There was still no one home.

When I knew it was close to the time my sister would get home, I folded up all of my mom's clothes and put them back in the dresser drawers where I found them. I was used to doing stuff like that because I was a kid and I wasn't allowed to touch most of my family member's things . . . for good reason.

When my mom got home, we had dinner like usual and she tucked me into bed and held me until I fell asleep. It took several days, until the weekend, for her to discover what I did. She was putting on a shirt for us to go out to the mall and soon noticed how I mutilated her favorite shirts.

When confronted about it, I lied and blamed my older sister. I even "had proof'" and showed her the ziplock bag of discarded shoulder pads under her bed. My mom didn't say anything, but she was clearly devastated. She just took the bag from my lying hands and shut herself in her room that afternoon.

We didn't talk about it at all after that. My mom had a saying where we "make up and don't go to bed angry. You never know when it's the last time." So she never held anything against us kids. Over the next few weeks, she sewed the shoulder pads into the repairable shirts and left the rest for me to wear around the house.

It's been almost two decades since then and I still think about what I did and how I handled it. I went through my mom's clothes to donate, many of them still the same style from the 80's and 90's and I saw the shirts I once cut the pads from. I tried the shirts on, of course and my mom had it right all those years ago. They fit me perfectly.