One of the few monogrammed things I've ever owned I got as a teenager. It was an overnight bag my grandma got selling Avon. It was orange pleather and I thought it was great. I used it a long time, even after marriage, which made liars out of my initials. Despite all those years of close contact, I was immune to the disease known as Monogram Fever. Monogram Fever is rampant in the south. So much so one could believe it's carried by mosquitoes. Like Malaria in Africa. Southern women are bonkers for labeling EVERYTHING with their initials. Or their kid's initials. Or a combination of their initials and their husband's. Aside from the one comfy chair he needs to roost in for football season, most southern husband's have no opinion on decor. This frees the Mrs. to put her mark on everything they own. And she does this like a nervous Cocker Spaniel with a bladder infection. Nothing is safe. Clothes, bags, shoes, sheets, towels, chairs, lampshades, headboards, dog collars, notebooks. Even the car gets lettered in plastic decals. I've recently seen these things span the entire back window of a suburban.
When I was a kid I wore Garanimals. Inexpensive clothes with the ingenious animal picture tags to help kids dress themselves. My mother loved this brand. Without it we were likely to go out the door looking like colorblind derelicts. Match the hippo to the hippo the giraffe to the giraffe. Easy.
Now kids have a closet full of clothes labeled with their initials. For girls, smocked dresses used to be the main deal, but the disease has become a superbug and moved on to contaminate even the average T shirt. Boys, God bless them, are subject to this humiliation until Dad puts his foot down or the boy's friends pelt him with rocks and call him a pussy. Some mothers just can't let it end. They take it to the limit and then drive it a little further, making Johnny wear his big white bibbed short set with the side buttons until he's emasculated and confused. Christmas cards are all the evidence needed to back this up. Even if he's not wearing them on a regular basis anymore, mom will make him for the Christmas photo. Even Dad can't save him from this one. This is the most important photo of the year. The annual illusion of family perfection sent out to the masses. The kids have no choice. Open the envelope and there they are. All labeled and organized like bottles in the spice rack.
I understand the beauty of the lettering on a few select things. Cursive curls with a pretty thread on a linen hand towel I can appreciate. It's just gotten out of control. A woman I know, from a long line of seriously southern women, recently built a new house. The house is huge and everything is white. Apparently white is the perfect backdrop for embroidering every surface with a monogram. You cannot look anywhere without seeing it. Seriously. What is the point? In my head I hear the seagulls in Finding Nemo. "Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine".
Another woman, of the same Dixiefied upbringing, monogrammed the belongings of her first daughter down to the fabric sleeve she stored the blue bulb nasal aspirator in. When the second child came along there was no way she could give her a name with different initials. She had invested way too much in getting the kid's trademark sewn, stamped or carved into every piece of related paraphernalia. But by the time child number 3 came along, a lot of the stuff was worn out. She found herself unshackled to the alphabet and adventurously gave the kid a name with a different first initial than her siblings. A few days after the birth certificate was signed she received her first gift. A layette gown complete with the monogram. To her horror she had given the child a label of ABC. This would never do. All the kid's belonging's would look generic and simple. Overcome with self reproach, she changed the kid's name. I know you think I'm making this up. I ain't.
What eventually happens to all this labeled stuff? You can't give the hand me downs to anybody else's kid. The folks who pick up these leftovers at Good Will probably put them right back, opting for something unbranded with the prior owner's logo.
There is an irony to the whole monogram phenomenon. The women I know who love monogramming everything that can't run away also despise tattoos. Or at least they say they do. They have been raised to understand them as trashy. They raise their children to understand them the same. Seems to me this would be confusing and contradictory to a kid who grows up in an environment where nothing is safe from the mark of ownership. Could it be they secretly desire the freedom to mark themselves, to seal themselves with something that says 'I am my own'? Maybe monogramming everything is an evolutionary coping mechanism. Stifled by conservative southern norms, they mark everything else instead.
Perhaps under their one thousand thread count sheets (stitched with his initial, her initial and their initial) they dream of having a dragon on their back or a fairy over their right shoulder. And if they got a tramp stamp with their monogram, would mom even have an argument?
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