The toddler made me do it

I love purses. I love purses and wallets and handbags and shoulder bags of all varieties and I have an embarrassing quantity of them and am always looking to buy more. I will spend an absurd sum on a simply smashing handbag. When I was still teaching English I allowed myself to be talked into a Monday morning teaching schedule that was sooo not what we agreed to when I was hired; to compensate for my extreme grumpiness over this turn of events I decided that I would spend my "Monday money" on purses. I almost always found something to spend it on. I have a shelf full of purses. I tend to use the same three over and over, but I like knowing that I have just the right purse for the occaison. Several of them were impractical when I bought them and have become absurdly impractical since Small Boy was born; I have one bag I can't even fit a cell-phone in. And although nothing that requires my attention has ever happened to Small Boy when I go out with my girlfriends, I simply cannot leave the house without a cell-phone.

My personal style, such as it ever was, has taken a serious hit since Small Boy was born. Nothing fits, I'm between sizes everywhere I go, clothes in Switzerland cost a king's ransom, and it's awfully hard to shop with the Small Boy. Ever since my knee surgery I've taken to wearing flats, which makes all those too-long jeans that drag on the ground and which I hate look even worse. But a purse always fits, and a purse is always comfortable. Because the rest of my look has been, um, downgraded, my bags are all the more dear to me. I have one of these and several purses and a wallet by him (and I've got my eye on a new one right now); even my practical Timbuk2 messenger bag has a personal flair to it, covered as it is with old black-and-whites of cyclists. I have a military green canvass bag adorned with a wild pink bird and a to-die-for orange leather shoulder bag that R bought me one Christmas after I drooled over it in the shop window seventeen dozen times. My clothes may be ordinary, but that there handing over my shoulder, that has something. It might not be style, necessarily, but it's personality at least.

I have been able to keep using my little purses and slim shoulder bags because I'm lazy and use the stroller a lot and can throw all the assorted things that come with Small Boy - and he requires a surprising array of things every time we go out - into the under carriage of the stroller. The sippy cup full of water and the three types of emergency snacks; the tissues and extra spoon; the travel diaper bag; the cars oh lord the cars and firetrucks and ambulances; the notebook and colored pencils; in the summer add the sunscreen and primitive first-aid kit and it adds up to a lot of stuff every time we leave the apartment. Stuff that I have always been able to toss in the undercarriage of the stroller, leaving me free to have my wallet, keys and cellphone in my stylish purse.

These days are coming to an end. Small Boy wants to walk. And it's appropriate and good that he wants to walk, and if I were more focused on him and less focused on doing it the way that's easiest for me he would have been walking more often and longer distances already by now, but there's all this stuff you see. Stuff that has to go somewhere and that fits so well in the undercarriage. But Small Boy wants to walk, and it's not especially fun pushing with one hand the stroller that winds up empty because he wants to walk (one of the arrows in his small quiver of words is WALK!) while trying with the other to keep him under a modicum of control. We are approaching the end of the stroller days, I fear, at least for shorter outings, but we are not approaching the end of the Small Boy needs a million accessories days.

There's only one solution: a packpack. I bought the cutest one I could find, but let's face it, it's still a backpack. And so after years of adorbale purses and simply smashing handbags, I have become that which I always swore I never would: an American in Europe with a backpack.