On my 7th birthday, I got The Sweater.
Handmade by my grandmother, the bubblegum-colored cardigan was the sort of thing I should have loved. After all, I was going through an extremely girly phase and was wearing more pink than Margot Robbie on a Barbie press tour.
However, the second I opened the box, I knew I would rather DIE than wear The Sweater. The stitched pattern made my eyes ache. The smell, a mix of damp sheep and my grandmother’s bleach-and-hemorrhoid-cream scent, was so strong I could taste it. And my very molecules recoiled from the scratchy, oily feel of the wool. I refused to wear it.
But I had to anyway.
This was the late 1980s. There were no common terms yet for why I was at war with The Sweater. No handy labels to explain the sense of ick so overwhelming it hijacked my ability to move or function. And at seven years old, I couldn’t articulate what was happening to me each time I put The Sweater on.
Instead, I was deemed “ungrateful,” “wasteful,” and “spoiled.”
So I held my nose, slipped it over a comfy shapeless dress my mom made me, and went to school. When recess arrived, I shoved it under a pile of coats shed by overheated students and walked away.
My grandmother added “careless” to her list of words for me.
I have always been in a cold war with clothing. Over the years, I swallowed my revulsion as I put on choir robes, work uniforms, pantyhose, and too-tight maternity clothes. As a human in society, it seemed my fate to suffer through.
Then my children started rebelling against their own clothes. One refused any footwear besides dinosaur slippers. The other screamed so loudly after donning their first pair of jeans I thought they’d been injured.
It finally occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t a me problem.
And it turned out it wasn’t. Thanks to some really fantastic support people in my kids’ lives, I learned about sensory processing disorder, or SPD. SPD is a brain difference that often comes as a side dish with autism and ADHD. It comes in one of three flavors: sensory avoidant, sensory seeking, or a mix of the two.
I am extremely sensory avoidant. When interpreting certain types of sensory information, like noises, textures, and patterns, my brain is dialed up to an 11. Things that might mildly irritate a neurotypical person are interpreted as a full-scale assault by my neurodivergent brain. Like right now, the new jeans I got from Costco might not really be attacking me, but they sure as heck feel like they are.
Funnily enough, my husband and coauthor, Ruymán, also has SPD, though his is a mix that teeters into sensory seeking. So rather than wearing socks all the time like I do (because there are too many things to feel on the floor when walking barefoot), he avoids socks and shoes whenever possible.
As we watched our children struggle with church clothes and compared our clothes-related childhood trauma, we decided we wanted to create a different narrative. So, we wrote I WANT TO DANCE IN PANTS.
It’s written for our children, the children we once were, and other children like us. Kids who spend their whole lives in sweatpants and t-shirts. Kids for whom “feel and fit” will always matter more than fashion or function. Kids who, I hope, will never believe they are “ungrateful” or “spoiled” because their brain doesn’t match their clothes.
Jess Hernandez is from the Pacific Northwest. She’s spent her grown-up life working with kids and books – as a teacher, a children’s librarian, and an author. Her first book, First Day of Unicorn School, was illustrated by Mariano Epelbaum and was a 2023 Kentucky Bluegrass Nominee. Her family holds regular dance parties in their living room, and she busts the occasional move in public, much to the horror of her three children. She has sensory processing disorder, so she has a complicated relationship with clothes. Dresses make her feet cold.
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